The Breath of Suspension (34 page)

The man snorted. “I deserve that, I suppose. But you must understand, the dead cannot mix with the living. It just cannot be. We had a dead man in our Emergency Room once. He wouldn’t go away. He tried to be part of everything. A ward birthday party turned gloomy because he tried to join it, and the patient whose birthday it was sickened and died within the week. He tried to participate in the close professional friendship of a pair of nurses, built up over long years of night duty and family pain, and they had fights, serious fights, and stopped ever speaking to each other. The gardener, whose joy in his plants he tried to share, grew to hate the roses he took care of, and in the spring they bloomed late and sickly. I’ve always liked roses. Life is hell with ghosts around, Stanley. Believe me, I know all about it.” He had put the roses last, he noticed, as if they were more important than people. How much like a doctor he still was....

Stanley watched as the white-clad men strapped the man in the black coat into the stretcher and rushed off, one of them holding an IV bottle over his head. The train pulled out of the station. “I—you don’t understand, you don’t understand at all.” Stanley found himself shaken with sobs. How could he explain? As a child he’d wanted to play a musical instrument, like his sister, who played the piano, or even Frank, his next-door neighbor, who played the trumpet in the school band. He’d tried the piano, the saxophone, the cello. None had lasted longer than two years, and he never practiced, despite his mother’s entreaties. As an adult he’d tried the recorder, the guitar, and failed again. Yet this very night he’d felt what it was like to play Schumann on a piano and an oboe, and feel the music growing out of the intersection of spirit and instrument. He’d felt what it was like to be alive. “I know what to
do
now, don’t you see? I realize what I was doing wrong, how I was wasting everything. Now I know!”

“So now, at last, you know.” The man shook his head sadly, and held a flat, polished bronze mirror in front of Stanley’s face. Stanley looked into the speculum, but saw nothing but roiled darkness, like an endless hole to nowhere. He felt weak. “Lie down, Mr. Paterson,” Harmon said softly. “You don’t look at all well. You should lie down.”

Somehow they had come to be standing on the same damn platform again, as if the train had gone absolutely nowhere at all. The unnatural blankness of the mirror had indeed made him feel dizzy, so Stanley lay down. The platform was hard and cold on his back now. Nothing made sense anymore. He watched the stars spin overhead. Or was it just the lights of the apartment buildings?

“You can’t leave me here,” he said. “Not just when I’ve figured it out.”

“Shut up,” Harmon said savagely. “It’s too late.” He drove a long silver nail into Stanley’s right wrist. Stanley felt it go in, cold, but it didn’t hurt. “You’re dead.” He drove another nail through Stanley’s foot, tinking on the head with a little hammer. “That first one, in the ER. He almost killed
us
, he was so strong. But we bound him, finally, once we’d figured out what to do. If I went back there now, I would hear him, talking to himself, as if he’d just woken up from a nap and was still sleepy. I hear you everywhere, where I have bound you, on street corners, in hallways, in alleys. In beds.” Harmon found himself crying, tears wetting his cheeks, as if he were the one Stanley Paterson was supposed to be feeling sorry for. Stanley Paterson, who would have only the understanding that he was dead, not alive, to keep him for all eternity. “Don’t worry, Stanley. Life is hateful.”

“No!” Stanley cried. “I want to live!” He reached up with his free hand and grabbed Harmon by the throat.

Harmon felt like he was being buried alive, but not buried in clean earth. He was being buried, instead, in the churned-over corrupted earth of an ancient cemetery, full of human teeth and writhing worms. It pushed, damp and greasy, against his face. The smell was unbearable. Darkness swelled before him, and he almost let go.

The darkness drained away, and the platform reappeared. Dexter stood over him, his tongue sticking out slightly between his lips. He held the speculum over Stanley’s face, forcing him back. Dexter’s clothes flapped, and he leaned forward, as if into a heavy foul wind. “Quick, Professor,” he choked. “He’s a strong one, like I said.” Harmon tapped the fourth nail into Stanley’s left wrist.

“I want to live!” Stanley said, quieter now.

Harmon said nothing. Dexter held the fifth nail for him, and he drove it through Stanley’s chest. “There. Now you will remain still.” He rested back on his heels, breathing heavily. How like a doctor, he thought. He could eliminate the symptom, but not cure the disease. Those ghosts, no longer disturbing the living, would lie where he had nailed them until Judgment Day. And there was nothing he could do to help them. He sat there for a long time until he felt Dexter’s hand on his shoulder. He looked up into that kindly, ugly face, then back at the platform, where five silver dots glittered in the overhead lights.

“That was a bad one, Professor.”

“They’re all bad.”

“It’s worse if they never lived before they died. They want it then, all the more.” Dexter packed the instruments away. Then he rubbed the tension out of Harmon’s back, taking the feel of death up into himself. Dexter, with his credulous beliefs in anything and everything, absurd in his Minnesota Vikings cap with the horns. Without him, Harmon could not have kept moving for even a day.

Harmon thought about going home. Margaret would be there, as she always was, on the side of the bed where the blankets were flat and undisturbed. He hadn’t acted in time, when she had her final, fatal heart attack. He had waited, and doubted his own conclusions, and let them put her on life support for three days in the cardiac ICU, before he decided it was hopeless and let them pull the plug on her. By then, of course, it had been much too late. He should simply have let her die there, next to him. But how could he have done that? Whenever he changed the sheets, he could see the rounded heads of the five silver nails driven into the mattress, to keep her fixed where she died.

She had loved life, but she had wanted to stay with him... always. So he had lain down on the bed with her and felt her cold embrace. For a doctor with a good knowledge of anatomy his suicide attempt had been shockingly bad. Slitting your own throat is rarely successful. It’s too imprecise. They had found him, and healed him, reconstructing his throat. Modern medicine could do miracles. When he was well enough, though still bandaged, he went and found Dexter. They took care of the man in the ER, and then Margaret. She had cried and pleaded when the nails went in. But she had loved life, so it wasn’t as hard as it could have been, though Harmon could not imagine how it could have been any harder.

When he came back, she would ask him, sleepily, how it had gone. She always sounded like she was about to fall asleep, but she never did. She never would.

“Let’s go,” Dexter said. “It’ll be good to get back to bed. I gotta open the store in three hours. Jeez.”

“Yes, Dexter,” Harmon said. “It will be good to get to bed.”

Hugh Solomon
took a step on the sunlit landing stage of Time Center and felt the rocking of a ship’s wooden deck underneath his feet. The mountains and bright snowfields of the Rockies had vanished, replaced by darkness. He stood, arms loose at his sides, and felt the moment of nausea he always did, and the wash of giddiness from the effects of Tempedrine, the time-traveling drug. Focusing on the ship
Dagmar
of Lübeck, a tiny platform in the middle of the sea fourteen hundred years in the past, had been no simple problem, but it was much too soon to feel pleased with himself. Someone was mucking around with the past, and he had to put things to right.

The breeze was fresh. The moon gleamed on the clean cold waters of the Baltic and turned the rigging overhead to silver. Rising clouds boiled just below the moon, heralding a change in weather. Someone groaned. As if in response, the wind shifted and he smelled an overpowering odor of shit and dead men. His throat tightened. He stepped back, and his foot came down on something soft. He kicked it, and a dead rat slid out onto a moonlit patch of deck.

He turned, and stumbled right into someone, who shouted and grabbed at him. Solomon found himself pinioned by arms like bands of steel, a sailor’s arms. Unable to reach his sword, he stomped down on the sailor’s foot and was rewarded with a cry of pain. It was too late. The sailor shouted warnings and alarms in Swedish, and there were answering shouts from the darkness all around.

Rough hands seized him, and someone lit a torch. The faces of the men around him were pale and sick, with fever-bright eyes. Plague. One of them turned, stumbled to the rail, and vomited black bile into the sea. He then slumped to his knees and curled up around the pain in his gut. No one moved to help him.

“Hugh!” a voice said, in a tone of quiet satisfaction. “You fell for it. You had to, of course. Sailing in the wrong direction, aren’t we? So you’ve come to turn us around. That’s the job of a Full Historian.” Andrew Tarkin stepped forward. “How have you been? God,” he added, startled. “You’re old.”

Though the two of them had been students together, Solomon was now near fifty, while Tarkin, though careworn, his ginger hair thinning, could not have been more than thirty. He stopped his pacing and stared at Solomon, hands on his hips. Solomon glared back. The past always throws up its ghosts, but time travel enabled them to take physical form. He wondered why Tarkin had chosen to resurrect himself from whatever tomb of the past he had been hiding himself in.

Solomon was a tall man, with bushy hair now going gray, with cheeks sunken beneath high cheekbones. Tarkin was young, but youth, though vigorous, has many disadvantages when confronted with experience. Particularly experience like Solomon’s, who had been dredging the past for its secrets for almost thirty years.

“What do you want from me, Tarkin?” Solomon said through clenched teeth. He pulled forward, testing the strength of the men who held him. They were weak, shivering uncontrollably with fever, but there were enough to hold him fast.

“Do you see him, men?” Tarkin said, raising his voice to address the crew. “This looks like a man, but it is a demon, appeared among us from Hell. He has burned the innocent with fire. We must destroy him.”

Solomon heard, in memory, the crackle of the fire once again, as the boardinghouse burned with Louisa inside it. Questions licked up like flames, but he forced them back. First he had to survive.

The effect of the speech on the crew was the opposite of what Tarkin had intended. If the creature they had captured was a fiend from Hell itself, he could pull them all screaming to perdition. They weakened their grip, for they did not share Tarkin’s hate. The light of the torches flickered in the rising wind, and Solomon could see the scurrying shapes of rats just beyond its edge. The deck rocked in the growing swell.

Tarkin stepped closer to Solomon. “We were friends once,” he said softly. Looking down, Solomon could see the ring glinting gold on his finger, with bright flecks of emerald in the serpent’s eyes. He’d always wondered about that damn ring. “You came here to make sure that this ship and its crew crash on the shore of Livonia and spread the Black Death, just as you once made sure that someone I loved died. To what end? To preserve your image of history? A sense of the duty of a Full Historian?”

“Please, Andy.” Solomon decided to sit on his pride and ask the question. “Do you really think that I caused Louisa’s death? Is that what it all comes from?” His pleading words tasted sour in his mouth. But a Full Historian would do anything to get the facts.

“You bastard!” Tarkin shouted, suddenly enraged. “We should
both
have burned there with her. For you, it’s in the past and it’s what happened. Remember how we argued about the immutability of Time when we were back during our research, in Chicago? Nothing has changed. You are still in charge of maintaining that immutability. And I still believe that we can never really know what happened, even if we were there to see it.” He stopped, as if expecting Solomon to involve himself in an intellectual argument on the nature of perception.

At that moment, a sudden gust of wind caused the ship to heel sharply. There was a bright flash of lightning, followed immediately by a thunderclap, and a heavy rain began to fall, accompanied by a high wind. Tarkin shouted commands to his crew, ordering them to pull in the sails, tighten the sheets, and lash the rudder. They stumbled to obey. Several of the men holding Solomon went with them.

Solomon twisted, drove his elbow into the side of one of his remaining captors, and broke free. The men were too panicked to react. Solomon lunged for Tarkin and dragged him to the deck. Lightning flashed above them, and waves crashed over the deck.

Tarkin drove the heel of his hand between Solomon’s eyes and knocked him back as the wind tore off the top of the mast with a screaming crash. Rigging fell upon them from overhead. Tarkin rolled over and kicked him with a booted foot. Solomon grabbed at it, but was swept back by a heavy wave. Bitter saltwater filled his nose and mouth, and he choked. He rolled down the deck and grabbed at the railing. He felt himself slipping.