Текст книги "City at the end of time"
Автор книги: Грег Бир
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Текущая страница: 8 (всего у книги 33 страниц)
The two bring up their own twists of rock, dim red eyes buried in the gnarls, brighter now against the blue. These must be—
The sum-runners jerk inward, lock on, and fit into the sculpted piece, which completes and fills their own puzzle twists. They have traveled across billions of years, then tumbled through a dying universe to find their way back.
But two holes remain unfilled.
Daniel walks past the gory, crystallized remains of Glaucous and Whitlow, and does not know what happened here—or whether it is still happening. He is interested now in what the cats have set upon, just a short distance away. He follows a trail of bloody paw prints steaming on the green, glassy ice. The armillary is cinching in, the bands tightening and whirling faster. A kind of snowy fog covers his feet, his knees, and then his shoulders. The ice is crazing—rising up in chunks. He pushes through, fingers warmed by the sum-runners.
The cats are at the center, that much he thinks must be true—and for a brief instant, with a fanning of his hands, he looks down to find them hissing and scratching and biting. The cats are killing a small squirming thing in a pit. The process is slow. The thing keeps shaping itself anew, but it can’t escape. Sizzling, steaming pieces of chewed-over theophany skitter across the ice, drawing etched curls of virtual particle-trails.
The light is failing. Daniel can hardly see. Inside, Fred is wondering how anything can exist at all. They are inside a diminishing spore of space-time, reality pushing its final push against nothingness—that which cannot be seen, thought of, spoken of.
Not this, not that, not anything.
“We’re here because we willit, and always have,” Daniel says, and that’s that. The unpleasant shrill vibration in his head abruptly stops. The brown, twisted thing has been destroyed—shredded.
If the spore shrinks to nothing, then the death of the Typhon—Daniel is sure that’s what is down there in the tiny blur of a pit, covered with hissing cats—will mean nothing. It will not be recorded. It will not be reconciled.
The Typhon may randomly return, unexpected, illogical, but just as real as before. Cats push away, many with missing paws and limbs, distorted heads, burned fur, empty eyes. This deed has cost them dearly.
Daniel steps back as well. All this is very familiar—though not always with cats. The stone is tugging him away from the pit, the cats, the remains of the failed, would-be god. Seconds tick with each swipe and whoosh of the shrinking armillary. He reaches into his pocket. He always does this. He always passes along what he is given, to save everything that must be saved, and that ends his chances of uniting with the being he loves more than the entire world—the one he has traveled all this way to be with.
Who—or what. That was always our question, no? What could we ever be to each other?
I crossed the Chaos. The rebel city was dying—surrounded by the Typhon, betrayed by the City Prince. Despite everything, I joined her. And I did what I had to do. We agreed. I had to go back to the beginning with a piece of the Babel, the final piece—and at the Librarian’s insistence, a second, a backup against further betrayal, in case another piece was lost—
And so I flew back with the last sum-runners, and found by brute force a path into the earliest intelligences of the young cosmos.
The only shepherd who never dreams.
The bad shepherd.
Jack is there beside him, hand on his shoulder.
“Do you know what this is?” Jack asks. “I sure as hell don’t.”
“It’s a mess, that’s what it is,” Daniel says. “Take these.” And gives him the two stones. “I’m done, this time around.”
CHAPTER 123
Tiadba is in the warm embrace of someone she has never known, never met, and yet about whom she knows a great deal. How she was found in pieces around the dying cosmos, and brought by the Shen to a single place, where a brilliant thinker assembled her into a sentient form, which somehow chose to be female.
She has met the Pilgrim sent to retrieve her would-be father, and has spoken with him—and made a key decision, to become flesh and journey back to Earth. And there—
The fear and bitterness have gone—but the grief remains.
The young breed squirms in this embrace, uncomfortable, restless. Someone she knows is approaching. She only half sees what lies around her. Other eyes see from another position—and then Tiadba’s skin erupts with piercing shafts of brilliant blue.
The entire volume around her becomes a sphere of glorious, blinding blue. Her visitor is very near.
Her visitor sees—
Jebrassy!
CHAPTER 124
The armillary accelerates inward at an astonishing rate. But within instants of the end, of infinite compression, squeezing down to zero and then echoing to less than zero, and vibrating that way until all is pulverized—the metric has suddenly expanded.
Something huge is stirring.
The armillary is now miles wide, spinning much more slowly.
The lake of crushed, turbulent ice rises and cascades out in melting waves to fill this new volume. The Chalk Princess has gone—passed away forever with the Typhon. The armillary is no longer a prison.
It is the shell of an egg.
Within, as if a breath is being held, there is waiting.
Another presence—missing or held down for ages—returns in stunned bewilderment to find herself surrounded by some of the very breeds she ordained to be made, long ago. They have found her, as they were designed to do. They have snared and brought others with them—kindred shapes of primordial matter.
As they were designed to do.
There is reunion. Her father’s goal is almost attained.
One thing remains.
She holds the tiny female breed in her naked lap like a mother and child. The breed writhes in a halo of brilliant blue, some of which leaps out in long arcs to pierce the fog, the mist.
“Have you seen the Pilgrim?” Ishanaxade again asks the breed, who barely hears.
CHAPTER 125
Daniel has never seen anything so beautiful.
He has fought and clawed through countless adversities and fates, and countless bodies, to return to this beginning point. He carries the small rounded piece of green stuff that Mnemosyne left for him in Bidewell’s empty room, an impossible time and distance behind him now. Back then the muse gave him a catalytic remembrance, a trigger of transformation, as if in the future they would meet and know each other again.
What shall he do?
The glowing female pushes through the fog and his knees go weak.
All are here. Who are you?
The face is so lovely—the shape, compelling and impossible, alien and comforting at once; so many shapes, so many limbs, so much power. Something very old, long suppressed, a condensation no more or less mysterious than the time-worn piece in his left hand, rises up in him. Daniel tries to speak.
I am Sangmer.
You?
Then,
Where have you gone, Pilgrim? Husband? And what have you brought with you?
Daniel holds up his right hand, empty.
You have delivered them?
He nods.
Then it is done. A quorum of shepherds has arrived.
That time-tumbled ovoid in his other hand is like a hardened and constricted piece of the lake that churns and quakes beneath them. Like the pieces that the Shen gathered from all the galaxies they visited, after the Brightness and the end of creation.
A lost piece of Mnemosyne. It will quicken Ishanaxade and return her to what she must become. He can withhold it, deny it, and claim the woman he sought across the Chaos. Or he can present it and lose her forever.
CHAPTER 126
Ishanaxade looks down upon his sad, ancient body, surrounded and filled by so much pain, travel-worn, cruel, determined to finish his task and return—whatever the cost.
What have we done?she asks him.
What we always do. What we promise to do. Rebirth.
He holds out his left hand.
Ishanaxade unfolds his fingers and takes the fragment. It is not glass, of course. It is a piece of the mother of all thought, of those who see and think, including Daniel—and Sangmer. It is reconciling, which allows memory, and shapes the creation of the Sleeper, when he chooses not to sleep. If I take this—I will become what I was. What will we be to each other then?
The body of Daniel is pitiful with fear. Already the lake is rising through the base of the glowing triangle, through her blur of feet and glowing legs.
Every few rounds, out of all infinity, we will meet,he tells her. For me, that has to be enough.The armillary expands again. They cannot see its boundaries.
CHAPTER 127
Ginny and Jack feel the nightmares pass away. They know that no one will forget them unless it should be so. They see Jebrassy and Tiadba nearby—and together they make four points within the storm as ancient matter reacquaints, according to old rules that come into play only within the Sleeper’s spinning fortress—and just for this moment.
Tiadba and Jebrassy have joined in so many ways, Ginny and Jack are confused—and envious. Jack and Ginny collect Daniel’s two sum-runners. Daniel is not with them—they do not know where he is.
“Should we?” Jack asks, and holds up the stones and the polyhedron.
“Bidewell would say we should,” Ginny says. “So much pain and effort.”
Jack juggles the remaining pieces, smiling at Ginny. He is thinking of the last words of the Keeper. “I’m not asking Bidewell. I’m asking you.”
“Don’t be arrogant,” she says.
“That’s what I am,” Jack says.
“I do notfind it charming.”
“The old gods watch. They’ll forgive us—won’t they?”
“I’m not so sure…”
Jack continues to juggle. His smile is infinitely sweet and distracting. “You choose,” he says.
CHAPTER 12
The nurse weighed Jack and guided him to the doctor’s cubicle, a small gray and pink space. She took his pulse with expert fingers, then wrapped his wiry arm in an inflatable cuff and pumped it up to measure his blood pressure.
A few minutes later the doctor entered and closed the door. Miriam Sangloss was in her early forties, slender and strong-jawed, with short brown hair. She wore a white lab coat and a gray wool skirt that fell below her knees. Black socks with pumpkin-colored clocks and sensible black running shoes completed her wardrobe. On her left hand, he noticed, she wore a garnet ring, at least two carats. She flashed a knowing flicker of a smile and looked him over with sharply focused brown eyes. “How’s our rat man today?” she asked. He wondered how she knew—perhaps Ellen had told her.
“Fine. Losing bits of my day,” he said. He hated to admit to being sick. Being sick meant he was losing his touch. Soon he would become slow and wrinkled and stooped-shouldered and no one would want to watch him perform. “Going blank,” he added.
“For how long?” Sangloss asked.
“How long am I blacking out?”
“How long have you been losing bits of your day?”
“Two months.”
“And you’re how old—twenty-five, twenty-six?” She turned the page of the chart on her clipboard. He wondered how she had put together so many notes.
“Twenty-four,” Jack said.
“Much too old. Stop it right now.”
“Too old for what?”
Look at you. Handsome as a young devil. Strong and agile. Fit. You don’t get sick. You live life on your own terms. You always will—we expect that of you. So what’sreally wrong with you?
He could almost see Dr. Sangloss’s lips moving, telling him that, but she hadn’t spoken aloud, of course. It was all contained in the long look she gave him. Over a brief sigh, she bent her gaze to the tablet and said, “Tell me what you experience.”
“It’s probably nothing. I drop out for a few minutes or as long as an hour. Two or three times a day. Sometimes I’m fine for a week, but then it happens again. Last week I rode my bike on autopilot all afternoon. Ended up near the loading docks.”
“No bumps or bruises?”
Jack shook his head.
“Any recent trauma, lapses of judgment, odd behavior—hallucinations?”
Again, no.
“You’re sure?”
He looked at a poster on the far wall—a medical artist’s rendering of a male head in profile, cut in half, framed and mounted beside a corkboard. The poster reminded him of learning how to swallow and disgorge Ping-Pong balls and small oranges. “A kind of dream. A place. A mood.”
“Any smells or tastes or sounds before or after these episodes?”
“No. Well—sometimes. Bad tastes.”
“Mostly just the lingering sensation of a forgotten dream. Is that it?”
“I don’t know.” To her skeptical gaze, “Really.”
“No drugs? Marijuana?”
He solemnly denied this. “Cuts back on my timing.”
“Right.” She inspected his left hand, spread the fingers, stared curiously at the calluses. “Any family history of epilepsy? Narcolepsy? Schizophrenia?”
“No. I don’t think so. I don’t know much about my mother’s side of the family. She died when I was twelve.”
“Did your father smoke like a chimney?”
“No. He was large—fat, really. He wanted to be a stand-up comedian.” Jack gave her a squint. Sangloss waved that aside. “We should do a follow-up. No insurance, correct?”
“Zero.”
“Street entertainer’s union? Teamsters?”
Jack smiled.
“Maybe we can get you a pro bono appointment at Harborview. Would you show up if, if I arranged that?”
He looked uncertain. “What, like a biopsy?”
“MRI. Brain scan. Petit mal epilepsy usually occurs in children, drops off at puberty. Kids can have dozens of small seizures each day, sometimes hundreds, but rarely lasting more than a few seconds. That diagnosis doesn’t quite fit, does it? Narcolepsy—possible, but that doesn’t fit, either. Has anyone seen you black out?”
“I just did, in the waiting room. I kept turning pages. Nobody seemed to notice.” He pointed to the chair, where the Weeklypoked out of his jacket pocket.
“Ah.” She shined a small bright light into each of his eyes. “Phone number?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Your phone number, for the appointment.”
He gave her Burke’s phone number. Dr. Sangloss wrote it down on his chart. “I’ll ask Dr. Lindblom to get you into Harborview. Do this—for my sake, if not for yours, okay?”
Jack nodded solemnly, but his eyes were elusive.
Sangloss brandished a tongue depressor. “Open wide,” she said. When he could not talk, merely issue round vowels, she said, “I saw you downtown three weeks ago. Does anyone complain when you juggle rats?”
“Awm,” Jack said. She lifted the wooden stick. He poked his mouth square between two fingers, then released it, letting it flop loose, and smiled. “Some. They pet the rats. I show them how I handle them.”
“What else do you juggle? That’s alive, I mean.”
“I used to juggle a kitten.”
“Really? Why did you stop?”
“Got big. I gave him to a friend. Not many cats like to be juggled—that one was special. And I had a snake, once. Snakes are tricky.”
“I bet.” Sangloss made more notes.
Jack clamped his jaw. “What’s wrong with me?”
“Nothing obvious,” she said. “Keep a little notebook handy. Record each episode—frequency, sensations, aura, whatever you can remember. They’ll ask at Harborview.”
“All right.”
“And stop tossing your rats, okay? Until we figure this out.”
Dr. Sangloss finished her clinic hours, said good-bye to the receptionist and the nurses, then locked the doors, turned down the heat, checked the taps in the bathrooms and the lab, briefly inventoried all the locks and security cameras in the pharmacy, and stood for a moment, looking around the front office. The clinic served many different kinds of patient. Not all were responsible. The office was quiet, the street outside the half-shuttered window deserted. A light wind sent a whistling note through a crack somewhere. An old, drafty building.
She walked down the hall to her small rear office, where she filed a few folders and unlocked the lower desk drawer. As she plucked out her cell phone, she felt a chill—strange, since the old furnace had just finished its final blast of heat for the evening.
Almost strange enough to make her open the book that Conan Arthur Bidewell had given her, with instructions never to read it, or even to carry it in her hands for very long. Bidewell was an odd man but a compelling one—and he paid the clinic’s bills.
Five years’ worth.
Tonight was the fourth anniversary of their first meeting at the green warehouse down in Sodo. Green warehouse, green leather binding on her small old book, half hidden by textbooks and journals on a metal shelf.
She stared at its short, cracked leather spine, imprinted only with a number on the nub– 1298. A number, or a date.
What would she learn if she didread it?
Dr. Sangloss jerked loose from the book’s spell and punched in a number on her phone. A woman answered. “Ellen? Miriam. I’ve examined your young man. No doubts. You have his address, don’t you?…Not implying a thing, dear. I’m sure we’ll all feel motherly. Say hello to the Witches. I don’t think I’ll make it tonight. Might spook the poor fellow. Let me know what they think.”
CHAPTER 13
Wallingford
The living room windows were covered in plastic. Someone—perhaps the real owner, years before—had tried to remodel and given up. Lath and plaster had been pulled out, old paper-wrapped wiring lay in bent, ragged coils. The roof leaked and water warped the wooden floor, seeping down to flood the basement.
The house had been deserted long enough for a homeless beggar to find his way in and set himself up in crude comfort—no heat, no power, nothing but running water left on for the gardeners who no longer came. The beggar had added a few sticks of furniture and a mattress, probably snuck in with exhausting effort during the night.
When he could stand up without retching—for the first time in days—Daniel searched the house all over again.
And this time…
In a hole just behind the upstairs bathroom sink, he found a carton tied with string. He cut the string and poured out the contents. A battered wallet flopped on the cracked tile floor, driver’s license visible behind a yellowed plastic window. The photo confirmed that this body had once belonged to a man named Charles Granger, age 32 at the time the license was issued. Another shake tossed out sheets of typing paper, a black marker, and a blunted pencil.
A small, dense gray box, taped to the bottom, fell out last—and he knew this was what he’d been looking for all along.
His sum-runner. The sometime stone.
The box was the same, with the same sigil carved in bas-relief on the lid: a circular design with interlinked bands or hoops wrapped around a cross. How likely was that? Another connection between Daniel and Charles Granger. He did not try to open it—not yet. With a low whistle, he put it in his pocket, then flipped through the papers. Random scrawls, odd symbols—terrible handwriting, yet familiar, in its way.
Too close. Very spooky.
Where was Granger now, the previous occupant of this heap of a body—lost, pushed aside, bumped out of the nest? Just another victim. And what about all those other strands, all the world-lines he must have crossed—the myriad densely bundled fates between Daniel Patrick Iremonk and here?
No Daniel in this strand. Only someone living in his aunt’s old house, someone who writes things down in odd symbols—
The closest I could find.
Just notme. Why?
The box was the crucial connection. Had Charles Granger been a jaunter as well? Charles Granger is at the end of his rope. The box knows. It brought you here.
He riffled the papers, stuffed them back into the carton, then closed it up again. Outside, the wind picked up.
Daniel stood, joints popping and cracking. Something wasn’t right. Something wasn’t finished. He had found the box– a box—but Daniel Iremonk had never kept his sum-runner in a cardboard carton—too obvious.
He had hidden it behind the brick fireplace.
Daniel felt along the bricks and found a loose one near the baseboard. He scraped it back and forth, pulled it out, knelt down with a grimace, and reached into the opening. And found a secondbox.
As if working through instinct, he placed both boxes side by side. They were identical in appearance. He puzzled them open. The stones lay in their velvet-cushioned interiors, sharing the same orientation. He removed them and held them in his hands, inspecting their distant red eyes. They refused to twist—and refused to fit together. Two identical pieces of a puzzle. He returned the duplicate stone to its box, closed it, and dropped it into the cardboard carton, then covered it with Charles Granger’s papers.
Best to keep no more than one on his person, and hide the other—as a backup.
The sounds of traffic on the arterial that ran past the northern corner of the old house—a regular hum and wet swoosh—should have been soothing, like freshets down a watercourse. But Daniel could not find peace. He could not sleep. He lay twitching in the torn sleeping bag on the wooden floor in the middle of the rear bedroom. Little electric flashes raced through him, as if his heart were being tickled by the frayed end of a low-voltage cable. Things kept popping up in memory—impossible things he could never have personally witnessed. Each little jolt came with its own bill of lading, a sense of personal loss that left him weaker and more confused.
Even before he arrived here, Daniel had often felt as if he were a knot tying up all the loose rope-ends of time. Far too much responsibility.
Time does not rush along as a point; it smears out like the passage of a brush a minute or an hour or a week wide, sometimes a month—a brush made of fate-laden fibers, painting different pictures for different people.
Knowing this gave Daniel an advantage—he could feelhis way across the width of an hour, a week, a month. Anticipate something unpleasant? Make a left turn instead of a right, find a door opened instead of closed, elude bad fortune—and if something came up that seemed unavoidable, jaunt to a very close but slightly skewed, just slightly improved world—a strand without that particular impediment. That had been his method, until now.
He had made his way from fate to fortune to fate, closing his eyes and squeezinghimself loose…always joining up with alternate versions of himself, so little different that no one could tell there had been a change—a strange cuckoo landing in nests no doubt occupied by other cuckoos. Daniel never spent very long in one strand. He had started his killing early on—sacrificing others to enhance his fortune—desperate, as if he needed many more chances to get where he needed to be and do what he needed to do. It might have been those betrayals—those metaphysical murders—that had brought him low and thrust him into the middle of the Nasty Silent Party—that diseased, broken strand, surrounded by so many other rotting worlds.
An infinite supply of fortune had passed through his hands, and now, apparently, he had sucked the wellspring dry. He sometimes wondered if he had killed the entire universe. But no. There were worse things than Daniel Patrick Iremonk out there, waiting to get in. Perhaps the puzzle boxes had been there all along, unguarded—and Granger had found them, but didn’t know what they were or what they carried.
Poor kind of shepherd.
A pile of bottles had grown in a corner of the kitchen—Night Train, Colt 45, Wild Irish Rose. Even on Daniel’s home strand, those same brands and bottles had lined the shelves in corner markets, leering landmarks of the constancy of human pain and sin. Cheap booze, common to all strands…
His mind raced as much as this mind could race, a sluggish pile of gray matter poisoned by years of alcohol, drugs, and disease. The nipping, coiling snake in his gut. Daniel jerked up from the mattress, batting at his arms. His skin was convinced it was infested with tiny bugs. Punishment for sin? Bugs in your skin.
He walked into the living room and pulled aside the brown paper taped to the window. Outside, the dark streets were relieved by streetlights, each illuminating a blurred ellipse on the sidewalks and grass. A car drove past– shushand whooshof wet pavement—its headlights intensely blue. For two days now, barely able to move, he had been reading—pulling newspapers and magazines out of recycling bins under the kitchen sink, trying to find out how much time he had—how much time they all had in this world before the signs multiplied, the cryptids started proliferating, the books spilled over with nonsense—and the dust and mildew began taking hold.
Brer Rabbit ran so fast
Skip right out o’ his skin,
Had ter push ’nother rabbit out—
And climb—
Back—
In.
He let the shade drop and pulled up a lone dining room chair in the middle of the floor. The chair legs scraped on the uneven boards like the cry of a hoarse old woman.
What else was different about this world? Besides the desperate minus of Daniel Patrick Iremonk…
You tell me what’s different, Brer Rabbit.
Whar you fum?
Daniel’s home had also been called Seattle.
Classic Seattle. Wetter and grayer than this one, if that was possible—less populated, not nearly as much concentrated wealth. A friendlier city—more face-to-face communication, neighborhoods sticking together—kids didn’t spend endless hours glued to computer screens, locked in artificial worlds—more grounded; a world he remembered as more suitable, more right, yet he had never fit in. Always looking for a way out, an excuse to leave, and finally he had found both, to his infinite and probably short-lived regret.
Right out o’ yo’ skin.
Finally, in his teens, he had put that name to what he was doing: jaunting. Crossing the strands of varied fates—traveling in the fifth dimension for advantage. Playing Monopoly without moving around all the squares: squiggling around the game board, or digging down throughstacked boards. The rich got richer because they were rich, but the poor got poorer because they had to stick to the rules, they could not burrow through the game like a Monopoly mole, or jump sideways—like a rabbit. Now, dat rabbit, some rabbit,
Brer Rabbit, my, how he could jump!
Also in his teens, he had decided it was time to study up on what he was actually doing, and that eventually led him across the freeway to an old Carnegie library on the corner of Fiftieth and Roosevelt—still there. In the soft glow of great hanging saucer lamps of bronze and milky glass, listening to rain patter against the high windows, Daniel had studied popular science books by Gamow, Weinberg, and Hawking, and finally came across P.C.W. Davies, who had taught him about special relativity, singularities, and universal constants.
A man named Hugh Everett had created the Many Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, and two Davids—Bohm and Deutsch, very different in their thinking—had taught him about the possibility of multiverses. Daniel had then conceived of branching realities, four-dimensional cosmoses arranged side by side, in a way, across a fifth dimension…a thick rope of world-strands. John Cramer, a professor at the University of Washington, had speculated about retrocausality—particles reaching back to reconcile their present with the past—which Daniel could feel happening inside his gray box—though he had no idea what it meant.
As he got older and acquired a little savvy (you couldn’t jump backward and stay young, and you certainly couldn’t jump forward—just “sideways,” “up,” or “down”), he imagined himself a kind of athlete. How oftencould he jump—and how far, with how much sense of direction or accuracy?
How could he improve his situation the most?
Where would he finally land, measured on the Money-Love spectrum?
That got him into a frustrating tangle. Trying to end up with more money, he soon learned that improved circumstance required more personal effort, not less—and his base personality was not good at keepinglots of money.
And so he tried improving his life at the expense of another’s—predatory jumping. (And wasn’t that where his talent had been all along? He had seen it so often—Daniel doing better, Joe Blow not so good, whereas Joe Blow had been doing okay before the jump—but he could never proveit, not with any rigor—and maybe he didn’t want to know for sure.)
Daniel was never deliberately cruel. He didn’t enjoy hurting people. He was just a man with a nervous tic for fortune—but no knack for ultimate design, no fashion sense for fate. Maybe I’m a lot more screwed up than poor, sick, scrawny Charles Granger. After all, I pushed him out. Right out o’ his skin.
He would need to make another move soon—and how could he do that? He didn’t even know how he’d ended up in Granger, except that they shared versions of the same house, proximal to the same stones.
Standing on the corner, staring at drivers—even in his worst times, those last days when the shadows began closing in—he had never been so isolated. He had to start reaching out, checking the pulse and mood of real people with real emotions.
The night was lonely—scary lonely. Being alone seemed less attractive than it had ever been before—because now Daniel was certain of two things.
This world was nearing its end. And this body was dying.
CHAPTER 14
Capitol Hill
Ellen Crowe had company when Jack returned. The clink of wineglasses and female voices in the dining room revealed that Ellen’s book group was in session. They called themselves the Witches of Eastlake. He looked at the invitation on the card. He had forgotten it was tonight. Jack opened the garage door as quietly as possible and was up on the stepladder bringing down the cage when Ellen called from the rear porch. “Hey, stranger. Don’t be shy. Are you hungry?”
Jack walked back. His rats sniffed the air, fragrant with cooking. “I don’t think your friends would like me barging in,” he said.
“It’s my house,” Ellen said.
He gave her a weak smile. He washungry—he had not eaten since breakfast, and Ellen was a fine cook.
Jack sat on a stool in the kitchen as Ellen pulled a tray of game hens from the ornate black and chrome gas oven. The roasted birds smelled delicious. The rats clustered at the front of their cage, noses twitching.
She forked one of the birds onto a plate on the counter. Mushroom stuffing, Jack noted. “We’ve already eaten. Help yourself to salad. There’s wine in the fridge.”
“Am I going to sing for my supper?” he asked.
“Anything but that,” Ellen said.
Shoving a napkin into the collar of his black T-shirt and floofing it out like an ascot, he struck a pose with upraised knife and fork. Baggy pants held up by red suspenders, hair wild and black and face thin,
