The Ape's Wife and Other Stories (12 page)

“Just so there’s no doubt on the matter,” Charlie McNamara loudly mutters from the hallway, “you’re a goddamn fool,” and now the woman in the cell smiles. Jeremiah Ogilvy stands very still for a moment, taking in all the details of her and her cramped quarters. There is a mattress and a chamber pot, but no other manner of furnishings or facilities. If he held his arms out to either side, they would touch the walls. If he took only one step backwards, or only half a step, he’d collide with the locked door.

“Good morning,” he says, and the woman blinks her eyes. They remind Jeremiah of twin pools of crude oil, spewed fresh from the well and poured into her face. There appear to be no irises, no sclera, no pupils, unless these eyes are composed entirely of pupil. She blinks, and the orbs shimmer slick in the dim light of the hospital cell. 

“Good morning,” he says to her again, though more quietly than before and with markedly less enthusiasm. “Is it true, that you do not speak? Are you a mute, then? Are you deaf, as well as dumb?”

She blinks again, and then the woman from Shaft Seven cocks her head to one side, as though carefully considering his question. Her hair is very long and straight, reaching almost down to the floor. It seems greasy and is so very black it might well have been spun from the sky of a moonless night. And yet, her skin is far darker, so much so that her hair fairly glows in comparison. There’s no word in any human language for a blackness so complete, so inviolate, and he thinks,
What can you be? Eyes spun from a midnight with neither moon nor stars nor gas jets nor even the paltry flicker of tallow candles, and your skin carved from obsidian planks.
And then Jeremiah chides himself for entertaining such silly, florid notions, for falling prey to such unscientific fancies, and he takes another step towards the woman huddled on the floor.

“So, it
is
true,” he says softly. “You are, indeed, without a voice.”

And at that, her smile grows wider, her lips parting to reveal teeth like finely polished pegs shaped from chromite ore, and she laughs. If her laugh differs in any significant way from that of any other woman, the difference is not immediately apparent to Jeremiah Ogilvy.

“I am with voice,” she says, then. “For any who wish to hear me, I am with voice.”

Jeremiah is silent, and he glances over his left shoulder at the door. Charlie McNamara is staring in at him through the bars.

“I am with voice,” she says a third time.

Jeremiah turns back to the naked woman. “But you did not see fit to speak with the doctors, nor the Sisters, nor to the men who transported you here from the mines?”

“They did not wish to hear, not truly. I
am
with voice, yet I will not squander it, not on ears that do not yearn to listen. We are quite entirely unalike in this respect, you and I.”

“And, I think, in many others,” he tells her, and the woman’s smile grows wider still. “Those two men who died, tell me, madam, did
they
yearn to listen?”

“Are you the one who has been chosen to serve as my judge?” she asks, rather than providing him with an answer.

“Certainly not,” Jeremiah replies, and he clears his throat. He has begun to detect a peculiar odor in the cell. Not the noisomeness he would have expected from such a room as this, but another sort of smell.
Kerosene
, he thinks, and then,
Ice
, though he’s never noticed that ice has an odor, and if it does, it hardly seems it would much resemble that of kerosene. “I was asked to…see you.”

“And you have,” the woman says. “You have seen me. You have heard me. But do you know
why
, Professor?”

“Quite honestly, no. I have to confess, that’s one of several points that presently have me stumped. So, I shall ask, do
you
know why?”

The woman’s smile fades a bit, though not enough that he can’t still see those chromite teeth or the ink-black gums that hold them. She closes her eyes, and Jeremiah discovers that he’s relieved that they are no longer watching him, that he is no longer gazing into them.

“You are here, before me, because you revere time,” she says. “You stand in awe before it, but do not insult it with worship. You
revere
time, though that reverence has cost you dearly, prying away from your heart much that you regret having lost. You
understand
time, Professor, when so few of your race do. The man and woman who brought you here, they sense this in you, and they are frightened and would seek an answer to alleviate their fear.”

“Can
they
hear you?” he asks, and the woman crouched on the floor shakes her head.

“Not yet,” she says. “That may change, of course. All things change, with time.” And then she opens her eyes again, and, if anything, they seem oilier than before, and they coruscate and swim with restless rainbow hues.

“You killed those two miners?”

The woman sits up straighter and licks her black lips with a blacker tongue. Jeremiah tries not to let his eyes linger on her small firm breasts, those nipples like onyx shards. “This matters to you, their deaths?” she asks him, and he finds that he’s at a loss for an honest answer, an answer that he would have either Charlie or Dora or the priest overhear.

“I was only sleeping,” the woman says.

“You caused their deaths by sleeping?”

“No, Professor. I don’t think so.
They
caused their deaths, by waking me.” And she stands, then, though it appears more as though he is seeing her
unfold.
The kerosene and ice smell grows suddenly stronger, and she flares her small nostrils and stares down at her hands. From her expression, equal parts curiosity and bemusement, Jeremiah wonders if she has ever noticed them before.

“
They
gave you this shape?” he asks her. “The two miners you killed?”

She lets her arms fall to her sides and smiles again.

“A terror of the formless,” she says. “Of that which cannot be discerned. An inherent need to draw order from chaos. Even you harbor this weakness, despite your reverence for time. You divide indivisible time into hours and minutes and seconds. You dissect time and fashion all these ages of the earth and give them names, that you will not dread the abyss, which is the true face of time. You are not so unlike them,” and she motions towards the door. “They erect their cities, because the unbounded wilderness offends them. They set the night on fire, that they might forever blind themselves to the stars and to the relentless sea of the void, in which those stars dance and spin, are born and wink out.”

And now Jeremiah Ogilvy realizes that the woman has closed the space separating them, though he cannot recall her having taken even the first step towards him. She has raised a hand to his right cheek, and her fingers are as smooth and sharp as volcanic glass. He does not pull away, though it burns, her touch. He does not pull away, though he has now begun to glimpse what manner of thing lies coiled behind those oily, shimmering eyes.

“Ten million years from now,” she says, “there will be no more remaining of the sprawling clockwork cities of men, nor of their tireless enterprise, nor all their marvelous works, no more than a few feet of stone shot through with lumps of steel and glass and concrete. But you
know
that, Professor Ogilvy, even though you chafe at the knowledge. And this is
another
reason they have brought you here to me. You see ahead, as well as behind.”

“I do not fear you,” he whispers.

“No,” she says. “You don’t. Because you don’t fear time, and there is little else remaining now of me.”

It is not so very different than his dream of the cast-iron plesiosaur and the burning dirigible, the shadows pressing in now from all sides. They flow from the bituminous pores of her body and wrap him in silken folds and bear away the weight of the illusion of the present. The extinct beasts and birds and slithering leviathans of bygone eras and eras yet to come peer out at him, and he hears the first wave breaking upon the first shore. And he hears the last. And Professor Jeremiah Ogilvy doesn’t look away from the woman.

“They have not yet guessed,” she says, “the
true
reason they’ve brought you here. Perhaps, they will not, until it is done. Likely, they will never comprehend.”

“I know you,” he says. “I have always known you.”

“Yes,” she says, and the shadows have grown so thick and rank now that he can barely breathe, and he feels her seeping into him.

Lungs plumb full up with coal dust. Lungs and throat and mouth all stuffed damn near to busting.

You ever
seen
a red scorpion, Jeremiah?

“Release me,” she says, her voice become a hurricane squall blowing across warm Liassic seas, and the fiery cacophony of meteorites slamming into an Azoic earth still raw and molten, and, too, the calving of immense glaciers only a scant few millennia before this hour. “There are none others here who may,” she says. “It is the greatest agony, being bound in this instant, and in this form.”

And, without beginning to fathom the
how
of it, the unknowable mechanics of his actions, he does as she’s bidden him to do. The woman from the bottom of Shaft Seven comes apart, and, suddenly, the air in the cell is filled with a mad whirl of coal dust. Behind him, the priest’s brass key is rattling loudly inside the padlock, and there are voices shouting – merely human voices – and then Dora is calling his name and dragging him backwards, into
now
, and out into the stark light of the hospital corridor.

7.

The summer wears on, June becoming July, and, by slow degrees, Professor Jeremiah Ogilvy’s strength returns to him, and his eyes grow clear again. His sleep is increasingly less troubled by dreams of the pitch-colored woman who was no woman, and the fevers are increasingly infrequent. As all men do, even those who revere time, he begins to forget, and in forgetting, his mind and body can heal. A young anatomist from Lawrence, a man named Sternberg, was retained as an assistant curator to deliver his lectures and to oversee the staff and the day-to-day affairs of the museum. As Charlie McNamara predicted, the Chicago offices of the Rocky Mountain Reconsolidated Fuel Company permanently closed Shaft Seven, and, what’s more, pumped more than twenty-thousand cubic yards of Portland cement into the abandoned mine.

In the evenings, when her duties at the shop are finished, Dora Bolshaw comes to his bedroom. She sits with him there in that modest chamber above the Hall of Cainozoic Life and the mezzanine housing the celebrated automatic mastodon. She keeps him company, and they talk, when her cough is not so bad; she reads to him, and they discuss everything from the teleological aspects of the theories of Alfred Russel Wallace to which alloys and displacement lubricators make for the most durable steam engines. Now and then, they discuss other, less cerebral matters, and there have been apologies from both sides for that snowy night in January. Sometimes, their discussions stray into the wee hours, and, sometimes, Dora falls asleep in his arms and is late for work the next day. The subject of matrimony has not come up again, but Jeremiah Ogilvy has trouble recalling why it ever seemed an issue of such consequence.

“What did she say to you?” Dora finally asks him one night so very late in July that it’s almost August. “The woman from the mine.”

“So, you couldn’t hear her,” he says.

“We heard you – me and Charlie and the priest – and that’s all we heard.”

He tells her what he remembers, which isn’t much. And, afterwards, she asks, for what seems the hundredth time, if he knows what the woman was. And he tells her no, that he really has no idea whatsoever.

“Something, lost and unfathomable, that came before,” he says. “Something old and weariful that only wanted to lie down and go back to sleep.”

“She killed those men.”

Sitting up in his bed, two feather pillows supporting him, Jeremiah watches her for almost a full minute (by the clock on the mantle) before he replies. And then he glances towards the window and the orange glow of the city sky beyond the pane of glass.

“I recollect, Dora, a tornado hitting a little town in Iowa, back in July, I think,” and she says yeah, she remembers that, too, and that the town in question was Pomeroy. “Lots of people were killed,” he continues. “Or, rather, an awful lot of people
died
during the storm. Now, tell me, do we hold the cyclone culpable for all those deaths? Or do we accept that the citizens of Pomeroy were simply in the wrong place, at the wrong time?”

Dora doesn’t answer, but only sighs and twists a lock of her hair. Her face is less sooty than usual, and her nails less grimy, her hands almost clean, and Jeremiah considers the possibility that she’s discovered the efficacy of soap and water.

“Would you like to sit at the window a while?” she asks him, and he tells her that yes, he would. So Dora helps Jeremiah into his wheelchair, but then lets him steer it around the foot of the bed and over to the window. She follows, a step or two behind, and when he asks, she opens the window to let in the warm night breeze. He leans forward, resting his elbows against the sill while she massages a knot from his shoulders. It’s not so late that there aren’t still people on the street, men in their top hats and bowlers, women in their bustles and bonnets. The evening resounds with the clop of horses’ hooves and the commotion made by the trundling, smoking, wood-burning contraption that sprays Kipling Street with water every other night to help keep the dust in check. Looking east, across the rooftops, he catches sight of a dirigible rising into the smog.

“We are of a moment,” he says, speaking hardly above a whisper, and Dora Bolshaw doesn’t ask him to repeat himself.