Dreams (31 page)

I tried to figure out what it was. Something by Gustav Holst or maybe Ralph Vaughn Williams. They were buddies anyhow. Two kings of what is sometimes uncharitably referred to as picture postcard music. At least it wasn't
The Planets.
Not that I despised that piece, it was just too damned popular. How many times did I need to hear it?

But this, I realized, was the third movement of Holst's
Beni Mora.
Yes. The Algerian street music. The quotation from the famous, anonymous street musician who played variations on the same four-note sequence for—which musicologist do you trust?—two hours, four hours, six hours. Old Gustav ran through a legendary 163 changes on the tune, and listening to it could either put you into a hypnotic trance or send you screaming from the room.

I was lying on a bed and I could hear my own breathing. I looked up and there were faces around me. I think I felt some pain in my body but it was so far distant that I hardly noticed it. Somebody was whispering and somebody was crying and the room, which had been brilliantly lighted at first, was slowly growing dark even as the pain in my body was growing more and more distant.

Breathing was an effort and after a while I decided that it wasn't worth the trouble and I stopped. The room grew still darker. The faces around me grew faint. Something white rose from the direction of my body, of the pain which had now ceased altogether, and then the light disappeared altogether.

I was standing at the mouth of a tunnel. I tried to look back, to see from whence I'd come, but I couldn't do it. I started walking forward into the tunnel. It was cool and pleasant in there, or at least not in the least unpleasant, and I could hear the four notes of the Holst composition, the full orchestration behind the wooden Arab flute, repeating those four notes over and over, yet not repeating. Instead, there was variation in the notes every time the musician played them.

For a moment I thought of Ed Guenther and his gift, of the work I'd done for him at Silicon Labs, of Miranda Nguyen, the woman who worked with Ed Guenther and the astonishing ideas she had offered in the past. She'd been working with electronic analogs of DNA codes. It wasn't my field but I knew enough to remember the four basic molecules that combined and recombined endlessly to create all of evolution.

What if the four factors of DNA and the four notes of Gustav Holst's 1910 composition and the four elements of Greek philosophy were all the same?

I walked through the tunnel for what seemed like a few seconds or maybe several billion years and then I realized that I was approaching the end of the tunnel. The light up ahead was a single glowing point. Maybe it was my old friend Little Pointy.

Little Pointy.

I loved Little Pointy.

I started to run and the brilliant point of light became a bigger speck and then a glowing disk the size of a BB, then a dime, then the moon and then I was there.

People clustered around me. I thought I recognized their faces but whenever I tried to focus in on one I lost track of what I was doing. They were all talking at once and I couldn't understand a word. Everybody seemed to be smiling, pleased to see me, but it was all so confusing.

Then I felt something cold and wet in my hand and I looked down and it was Louisa May Alcott, nuzzling my hand and looking at me, her bushy tale swaying happily from side to side and I started to cry again and I heard those four notes, those damned four notes from Gustav Holst's Algerian street musician and I was getting pulled head first out of there, out of wherever there was. My head was spinning and my ears were ringing and I was sitting in an easy chair in front of Ed Guenther's gift TV set wearing 3D glasses and trying to get damned Gustav Holst and his damned Algerian flautist out of my head.

Something that wasn't a voice asked, "Did you like that, Webster?"

I said, "Fuck you, Pointy, what the hell was that all about?"

"Would this be a good time for a word from our sponsor?" Pointy asked.

I said, "Get the hell out of my head."

Pointy said, "A lot of people have had that experience or one a lot like it. Some have even come back to tell the story."

"Yeah. Including me."

"Including you, Webster. I'm not saying that's what your future holds, although if it is, you'll live to a ripe old age and died a peaceful death. Does the prospect appeal?"

"Where's my brandy?" I realized that I didn't have to look at the TV set with those 3D glasses. Looking around the room, I could pretty well see everything. I located my snifter—actually, Martha's snifter—and took a sip. It helped me get back into the real world.

Pointy said, "Of course there are a lot of other ideas of what happens. You really ought to try a few." He paused. I think he was waiting for me to say something but I didn't. I could hear a siren in the distance, a fire engine racing to douse the flames in somebody's kitchen or maybe a police cruiser in hot pursuit of a car full of fleeing felons.

Somehow none of that seemed to matter very much.

I could hear a clock ticking. Pretty soon nobody will know what you're talking about when you use that expression. All the clocks in the world will be digital. They won't even whir any more. They'll just flash,
12:01, 12:02, 12:03 . . .

"Some people think that the next world isn't such a nice place at all. Everybody except the chosen few wind up getting toasted, and I don't mean in a good way."

"Right. Everybody's out of step but Johnny."

"Just for your information, here comes a little taste of what they have planned for everybody else."

I shook my head, started to demur, but before I could tell my new friend, Thanks but no thanks, I was off and riding again. All to the tune of those damnable four notes of Gustav Holst's.

You ever wonder what Hell is like? I don't mean the cartoons of little red guys with horns and tails and pitchforks. Those are more amusing than frightening. And deep thinkers who say there's no physical torment in Hades, it's just separation from the presence of God that makes the damned regret their sins. Maybe we do each make our own Hells. Mine was pretty literal.

One day I was out for a walk near the opera house and suddenly found myself writhing on the sidewalk. I felt as if something had hit me—
wham!
—but it hit me all over, all at once. Fortunately I was wearing clean clothes and looking respectable, so nobody took me for a drunk with the DT's or a hebephrenic having a psychotic episode. Somebody called a cop, who called an ambulance, and pretty soon I was lying in a hospital bed with a morphine drip in one arm.

Turned out my pancreas had blown up on me. In case you're unfamiliar with this unglamorous organ, it's the body's own chemical laboratory. It specializes in manufacturing digestive juices and shipping them off to the stomach where they get to do their job.

Once in a while, though, it can go nuts, start exceeding its production quota by something like 10,000 percent, and spewing nasty gunk all over your innards. I don't mean to be excessively graphic about this, but what happens, in effect, is that your body starts digesting itself from the inside out.

That hurts.

Okay. That's what Hell was like, only instead of just coming from my belly, the pain was coming from all over. Physical pain, moral pain, emotional pain, intellectual pain, you name it. More pain at any moment than anyone could ever tolerate, except that it doesn't last for a moment, it lasts forever.

Got me?

Gustav Holst's picture postcard music, namely that Algerian street minstrel with his four-note repertoire, rescued me from Hell.

I sat there looking for Little Pointy because I wanted to wrap my fingers around his nonexistent neck and throttle the son of a bitch.

Not that I really believe in Hell. If there is a God and he really loves us one and all, as the preachers are always saying, I don't see how God could consign anyone He or She or It or They love to that kind of torment. Especially forever.

Something was coming out of the TV set. Not a point of light. Not now. I don't know what had become of Pointy, if he ever even existed except in my mind, but something was, how to put this,
oozing
from the screen.

It puddled up on the carpet, lapped over the edges of my shoes, and started to take some kind of shape.

Eventually it was a tall, slim, blonde woman. Her hair cascaded down her back in ringlets. Her face held a kind of ethereal beauty that transcends mere movie star good looks. She wore a translucent white robe that hung to the floor.

"You are the Princess Zoralda," I told her, "and you have come from the Planet Uxalot where all beings live in perpetual harmony and joy to invite me aboard your UFO and take me home with you."

"Oh, piss off," said Princess Zoralda, morphing back into my old pal Little Pointy. "Thought you'd bite on that one."

"Did you really? Come on, pal!

"No, really. You'd be surprised how many people believe in Princess Zoralda from the planet Uxalot. Surely you remember the Heaven's Gate bunch, The Two, the wackos who decided there was an alien spacecraft hidden behind that comet? Put on new Nikes and sweatpants and went up to the mommy ship on wings of cyanide. Who knows, maybe they were right."

I said, "I don't think so."

Pointy said, "Me neither. But you can never tell."

We kind of looked at each other for a while, as much as a point of light can look at anyone. Then Pointy said, "You ready for another one?"

I took a sip of my brandy and said, "Sure. So far you haven't showed me anything that appeals very much."

Pointy said, "You ain't seen nothin' yet, baby." He dropped the needle on the LP (yeah, yeah, never mind) and that weird four-note flute piece started up again. I had enough time to put my brandy snifter down before I was snatched out of my easy chair and wafted off into another afterlife adventure. I remember hoping that this one would be pleasanter than Hell had been, and more credible than the Princess Zoralda from the planet Uxalot.

Maybe it was. Or maybe not. I'm not really sure.

See, I don't think I'm a Christian. Born and raised in Northern California in the latter half of the Twentieth Century, I was exposed to plenty of religion, from people peddling magazines door-to-door to wild-eyed zealots preaching in the park to pulpit-pounding pastors of megachurches hyping their glassy-eyed zealot followers to gather up their Uzis and their families and get ready to march off to fight in the final battle between Jehovah and Satan and by the way don't forget to leave something in the collection plate as you go out the door.

The more of that stuff I had pounded into me the less of it I believe. I'm sure that Jewish hippy had some good ideas about living the good life but I don't go for the miracles and the resurrection and all of that.

Well, but water into wine was a good trick. Not sure how the Christian teetotalers deal with that, but never mind, never mind.

Pointy took me by the hand and whisked me into the TV again and I blinked in amazement at my surroundings and at my companion.

"I say, old man, are you all right?"

"Eh?" All I could think of to reply, I'll admit not exactly a clever line, but still, "Eh? What's that?"

"Why, my poor old fellow. You must have dozed off over your port and cakes. I fear you've been working too hard. Do you think you need some time off, Sloat?"

Sloat. Well, he knew who I was. And I knew who he was, but that only made me feel more puzzled. "Sorry, Holmes. But never mind, never mind. What were you saying about . . ." I let my voice trail away, hoping that he would pick up the thread just there, for in truth I had not the foggiest notion what he was talking about.

"I was just comparing the official document so kindly loaned to us by Inspector Gregson with the street version reported to us by our friends the Irregulars."

"Ah, yes," I put in. "And with regard to what do these differing stories relate?"

Holmes turned on his heel and gave me one of his appraising looks. "I refer to the disappearance of Her Majesty's personal pet, the basset hound Rollo, from the royal kennels at Balmoral." His brow wrinkled with concern. "Surely you have not forgotten this morning's conversation with my brother Mycroft and Her Majesty's personal equerry at the Diogenes Club."

"No, no, Holmes, of course not." I went to the window and peered out into fog-shrouded, gas-lit Baker Street. A hansom cab rolled past, the sound of its wheels clattering over the cobblestones and the hooves of the creature pulling it clopping steadily in the London night.

I turned back to face my companion. My mind was racing. Had I fallen asleep? Was this all a dream? Or—no, now I remembered. I was sampling different images of the afterlife. I suppose some people would enjoy reincarnation as fictional characters. It might be fun to share those adventures with the Great Detective, stalking across the moors of Scotland, confronting madmen and enemy agents and the master criminal, the most dangerous man in London, Professor Moriarty.

Of course there was the question of Dr. Watson. Maybe somewhere in Ed Guenther's disk there was a Sherlock Holmes track, a piece of write-your-own-adventure, role playing game software, that let the user take part in a case.

Or maybe this was all coming out of my own subconscious. I'd been a Sherlock Holmes fan as a kid. My Dad had a huge book with the complete Sherlock Holmes stories in it, all the short stories and novels. I must have been eight years old when I came down with scarlet fever. There was a real scare in our town, kids getting sent home from school, doctors coming to their houses. Doctors still came to their patients' houses in those days.

I had to stay home for weeks. I read the whole book from start to finish. I was beside myself when I came to the end of 'The Adventure of Shoscombe Old Place' until my Dad said I could just go back to the beginning of 'A Study in Scarlet' and read the whole book again.