Aftershock & Others (30 page)

Strangely, that doesn’t bother me nearly as much as it should. Not in this place.

Then in the distance I see two other figures approaching, and as they near I recognize Kim, and she’s leading a beaming towheaded boy toward Beth and me.

A burst of unimaginable joy engulfs me. This is so wonderful…almost too wonderful to be real. And there lies my greatest fear. Are they all—Beth, Kim, Timmy—really here? Or merely manifestations of my consuming
need
for this to be real?

I look down and see my slowly falling body nearing the pavement.

Very soon I will know.

The Year of the Almost-Good Script.

I started off by jumping into a fourth Repairman Jack novel.
Legacies
…
Conspiracies
…let’s call this one
Tendencies
. (Yes, I know—a truly awful title.)

On March 18, after months of back and forth with the hosting service and the Web designer,
www.repairmanjack.com
went live. One of the best things I’ve ever done. Somehow, people found it—Jack fans, SF fans, Adversary Cycle fans began to trickle in, hanging out at the forum’s message board, getting to know one another and forming a close-knit community. I participated almost daily and still do. A year later, when I published the URL on the last page of
Conspiracies
, the membership swelled. It’s still growing, averaging over two million hits per month.

Sometime around midyear Richard Chizmar asked me to do a story for the novella series Cemetery Dance had been publishing. I’d seen this article in the
New York Times
that had mentioned how chimps and humans share 98.4 percent of their DNA. It had occurred to me: What if someone increased the share to, say, 99.3 percent? What would you have?

So I began outlining this story about transgenic chimps called sims. But the more I worked on it the larger it grew, until I told him no way I could squeeze it into 40,000 words. And I couldn’t commit to a major novel because of other books contracted. We talked about it and Rich suggested I do a series of novellas on the theme and he’d publish them as they were written—no deadlines. I loved the idea.

So I doodled with
Sims
while working on the RJ novel. When I finished a draft of
Tendencies
, I sent it to Steve Spruill for his input (he sees every novel first), with the added plea for a title. I couldn’t come up with anything I liked. After reading it Steve suggested
All the Rage
. Perfect.

But I couldn’t start
Sims
right away. In order to do it justice I had to go back and give myself a course in genetics. During my medical school days in the early seventies we knew a tiny fraction of what we do now. What we’ve learned in thirty years blew me away and opened up worlds of fiction possibilities. Trouble is, science is moving so fast you’ve got to keep running to prevent the work from being obsolete by the time it’s published.

Later in the year I flew to Bermuda for some wreck diving—the island is ringed with them. I wanted to center a novel around a wreck but the story was taking its time coming.

On the film front, Beacon renewed its option on
The Tomb
for another year. I was in fairly regular e-mail contact with Craig Spector as he was working through the script. In September Barry Rosenbush sent me the latest iteration and I liked it a lot. Jack was a bit more avuncular than I’d depicted him, characters had been dropped, and a spear-carrier had been expanded to a major supporting role, but all in all it was faithful to the spirit of Jack and the novel.

Beacon’s distribution deal was with Universal at that time. Universal was enthusiastic about the script, but thought it needed a polish. They wanted a certain writer to do the work, Beacon wanted someone else. Negotiations began.

This rewrite/polish process would screw up a perfectly good script and push it further and further from the source novel. But I didn’t know that at the time.

Alan Clark’s
Imagination Fully Dilated
anthology (containing “Lysing Toward Bethlehem”) had been a success, so he decided to self-publish volume two. The same scenario: Pick one of his paintings and write a story around it. I chose “I Become My Resting Place.” It’s one of a series of bucolic landscapes focused on twisted pieces of wood that look like people or almost-people.

I looked at that painting and saw a wooden corpse. (Google the title if you want a peek.) I asked myself how that could come to be. The answer was “Anna,” a traditional horror story that draws on one of my favorite locales.

The bushy-haired young man
with long sideburns arrives on deck with two cups of coffee—one black for himself, the other laced with half-and-half and two sugars, the way his wife always takes it. Rows of blue plastic seats, half of them filled with tourists heading back to the mainland, sit bolted to the steel deck. He stops by a row under the awning. His wife’s navy blue sweatshirt is draped over the back of one of the seats but she’s not there. He looks around and doesn’t see her. He asks a nearby couple, strangers, if they saw where his wife went but they say they didn’t notice.

The man strolls through the ferry’s crowded aft deck but doesn’t see his wife. Still carrying the coffee, he ambles forward but she’s not there either. He wanders the starboard side, checking out the tourists leaning on the rails, then does the same on the port side. No sign of her.

The man places the coffee on the seat with her sweatshirt and searches through the inner compartments and the snack bar. He begins to ask people if they’ve seen a blond woman in her mid-twenties wearing a flowered top and bell-bottom jeans. Sure, people say. Dozens of them. And they’re right. The ferry carries numerous women fitting that description.

The man finds a member of the crew and tells him that his wife is missing. He is taken to the ferry’s security officer who assures him that his wife is surely somewhere aboard—perhaps she’s seasick and in one of the rest rooms.

The man waits outside the women’s rooms, asking at each if someone could check inside for his wife. When that yields nothing, he again wanders the various decks, going so far as to search the vehicle level where supply trucks and passengers’ cars make the trip.

When the ferry reaches Hyannis, the man stands on the dock and watches every debarking passenger, but his wife is not among them.

He calls his father-in-law who lives outside Boston. He explains that they were on their way over for a surprise visit but now his daughter is missing. The father-in-law arrives in his chauffeur-driven Bentley and joins the young man in storming the offices of the Massachusetts Steamship Authority, demanding a thorough, stem-to-stern search of the ferry and too damned bad if that will delay its departure. The father-in-law is a rich man, influential in Massachusetts politics. The ferry is detained.

The state police are called to aid in the search. The Coast Guard sends out a helicopter to trace and retrace the ferry’s route. But the wife is not to be found. No one sees her again. Ever.

“Ow!”

William Morley grabbed his right heel as pain spiked through it. His knee creaked and protested as he leaned back in the chair and pulled his foot up to where he could see it.

“I’ll be damned!” he said as he spotted the two-inch splinter jutting from the heel of his sock.

Blood seeped through the white cotton, forming a crimson bull’s-eye around the base of the splinter. Morley grabbed the end and yanked it free. The tip was stiletto sharp and red with his blood.

“Where the hell…?”

He’d been sitting here in his study, in his favorite rocker, reading the Sunday
Times
, his feet resting on the new maple footstool he’d bought just yesterday. How on earth had he picked up a splinter?

Keeping his bloody heel off the carpet, he limped into the bathroom, dabbed a little peroxide on the wound, then covered it with a Band-Aid.

When he returned to the footstool he checked the cushioned top and saw a small hole in the fabric where his heel had been resting. The splinter must have been lying in the stuffing. He didn’t remember moving his foot before it pierced him, but he must have.

Morley had picked up the footstool at Danzer’s overpriced furniture boutique on Lower Broadway. He’d gone in looking for something antiquey and come out with this brand-new piece. He’d spotted it from the front of the showroom; tucked in a far rear corner, it seemed to call to him. And once he’d seen the intricate grain—he couldn’t remember seeing maple grained like this—and the elaborate carving along the edge of the seat and up and down the legs, he couldn’t pass it up.

But careless as all hell for someone to leave a sharp piece of wood like that in the padding. If he were a different sort, he might sue. But what for? He had more than enough money, and he wouldn’t want to break whoever did this exquisite carving.

He grabbed two of the stool’s three legs and lifted it for a closer look. Marvelous grain, and—

“Shit!” he cried, and dropped it as pain lanced his hand.

He gaped in wonder at the splinter—little more than an inch long this time—jutting from his palm. He plucked the slim little dagger and held it up.

How the hell…?

Morley knelt next to the overturned stool and inspected the leg he’d been holding. He spotted the source of the splinter—a slim, pale crevice in the darker surface of the lightly stained wood.

How on earth had that wound up in his skin? He could understand if he’d been sliding his hand along, but he’d simply been holding it. And next to the crevice—was that another splinter angled outward?

As he adjusted his reading glasses and leaned closer, the tiny piece of wood popped out of the leg and flew at his right eye.

Morley jerked back as it bounced harmlessly off the eyeglass lens. He lost his balance and fell onto his back, but he didn’t stay down. He’d gained weight in his middle years and was carrying an extra thirty pounds on his medium frame, yet he managed to roll over and do a rapid if ungainly scramble away from the footstool on his hands and knees. At sixty-two he cherished his dignity, but panic had taken over.

My God! If I hadn’t been wearing glasses—!

Thankfully, he was alone. He rose, brushed himself off, and regarded the footstool from a safe distance.

Really—a “safe distance” from a little piece of furniture? Ridiculous. But his stomach roiled at the thought of how close he’d come to having a pierced cornea. Something very, very wrong here.

Rubbing his hands over his arms to counter a creeping chill, Morley surveyed his domain, a turn-of-the-century townhouse on East Thirty-first Street in the Murray Hill section of Manhattan. He and Elaine had spent just shy of a million for it in the late eighties, and it was worth multiples of that now. Its four levels of hardwood floors, cherry wainscoting, intricately carved walnut moldings and cornices were all original. They’d spent a small fortune refurbishing the interior to its original Victorian splendor and furnishing it with period antiques. After the tumor in her breast finally took Elaine in 1995, he’d stayed on here, alone but not lonely. Over the years he’d gradually removed Elaine’s touches, easing her influence from the decor until the place was all him. He’d become quite content as lord of the manor.

Until now. The footstool had attracted him because of its grain, and because the style of its carving fit so seamlessly with the rest of the furniture, but he wouldn’t care now if it was a genuine one-of-a-kind Victorian. That thing had to go.

Tugging at his neat salt-and-pepper beard, Morley eyed the footstool from across the room. Question was…how was he going to get it out of here without touching it?

The owner of Mostly
Maple was at the counter when Morley walked in. Though close to Morley in age, Hal Danzer was a polar opposite. Where Morley was thick, Danzer was thin, where Morley was bearded, Danzer was clean shaven, where Morley’s thin hair was neatly trimmed, Danzer’s was long and thick and tied into a short ponytail.

A gallimaufry of maple pieces of varying ages, ranging from ancient to brand new, surrounded them—claw-footed tables, wardrobes, breakfronts, secretaries, desks, dressers, even old kitchen phones. Morley liked maple too, but not to the exclusion of all other woods. Danzer had once told him that he had no firm guidelines regarding his stock other than it be of maple and strike his fancy.

Morley deposited the heavy-duty canvas duffel on the counter.

“I want to return this.”

Danzer stared at him. “A canvas bag?”

“No.” With difficulty he refrained from adding,
you idiot
. “What’s inside.”

Danzer opened the bag and peeked in. He frowned. “The footstool you bought Saturday? Something wrong with it?”

Hell, yes, something was wrong with it. Very wrong.

“Take it out and you’ll see.”

Morley certainly wasn’t going to stick his hand in there. Last night he’d pulled the old bag out of the attic and very carefully slipped it over the stool. Then, using a broom handle, he’d upended the bag and pushed the stool the rest of the way in. He was
not
going to touch it again. Let Danzer find out firsthand, as it were, what was wrong with it.

Danzer reached in and pulled out the footstool by one of its three carved legs. Morley backed up a step, waiting for his yelp of pain.

Nothing.

Danzer held up the footstool and rotated it back and forth in the light.

Nothing.

“Looks okay to me.”

Morley shifted his weight off his right foot—the heel was still tender. He glanced at his bandaged left hand. He hadn’t imagined those splinters.

“There, on the other leg. See those gaps in the finish? That’s where slivers popped out of the wood.”

Danzer twisted the stool and squinted at the wood. “I’ll be damned. You’re right. Popped out, you say?”

Morley held up his bandaged hand. “Right into my palm. My foot too.” He left off mention of the near miss on his eye.

But why isn’t anything happening to you? he wondered.

“Sorry about that. I’ll replace it.”

“Replace it?”

“Sure. I picked up three of them. They’re identical.”

Before Morley could protest, Danzer had ducked through the curtained doorway behind the counter. But come to think of it, how could he refuse a replacement? He couldn’t say that this footstool, sitting inert on the counter, had assaulted him. And it
was
a beautiful little thing…

Danzer popped back through the curtain with another, a clone of the first. He set it on the counter.

“There you go. I checked this one over carefully and it’s perfect.”

Morley reached out, slowly, tentatively, and touched the wood with the fingertips of his left hand, ready to snatch them back at the first sharp sensation. But nothing happened. Gently he wrapped his hand around the leg. For an awful instant he thought he felt the carving writhe beneath his palm, but the feeling was gone before he could confirm it.

He sighed. Just wood. Heavily grained maple and nothing more.

“While I was inspecting it,” Danzer said, “I noticed something interesting. Look here.” He turned the stool on its side and pointed to a heavily grained area. “Check this out.”

Remembering the near miss on his eye, Morley leaned closer, but not too.

“What am I looking for?”

“There, in the grain—isn’t the grain just fabulous? You can see a name. Looks like ‘Anna,’ doesn’t it?”

Simply hearing the name sent a whisper of unease through Morley. And damned if Danzer wasn’t right. The word “ANNA” was indeed woven into the grain. Seeing the letters hidden like that only increased his discomfiture.

Why this unease? He didn’t know anyone named Anna, could not remember
ever
knowing an Anna.

“And look,” Danzer was saying. “It’s here on the other one. Isn’t that clever.”

Again Morley looked where Danzer was pointing, and again made out the name “ANNA” worked into the grain.

Morley’s tongue felt as dry as the wood that filled this store. “What’s so clever?”

Danzer was grinning. “It’s got to be the woodworker. She’s doing a Hirschfeld.”

Morley’s brain seemed to be stuck in low gear. “What the hell are you talking about?”

“Hirschfeld—Al Hirschfeld, the illustrator. You’ve seen him a million times in the
Times
and
Playbill
. He does those line caricatures. And in every one of them for the last umpteen years he’s hidden his daughter Nina’s name in the drawing. This Anna is doing the same thing. The shop probably doesn’t allow its woodworkers to sign their pieces, so she’s sneaked her name into the grain. Probably no one else but her knows it’s there.”

“Except for us now.”

“Yeah. Isn’t that great? I just love stuff like this.”

Morley said nothing as he watched the ebullient Danzer stuff the replacement footstool into the canvas duffel and hand it back.

“It’s all yours.”

Morley felt a little queasy, almost seasick. Part of him wanted to turn and run, but he knew he had to take that footstool home. Because it was signed, so cleverly inscribed, by Anna, whoever that was, and he must have it.

“Yes,” he mumbled through the sawdust taste in his mouth. “All mine.”

At home, Morley couldn’t
quite bring himself to put the footstool to immediate use. He removed it from the canvas bag without incurring another wound—a good sign in itself—and set it in a corner of his study. He felt a growing confidence that what had happened yesterday was an aberration, but he could not yet warm to the piece. Perhaps in time…when he’d figured out why the name Anna stirred up such unsettling echoes.

He heard the clank of the mail slot and went down to the first floor to collect the day’s letters: a good-sized stack of the usual variety of junk circulars, come-ons, confirmation slips from his broker, and pitches from various charities. Very little of a personal nature.

Still shuffling through the envelopes, he had just reentered the study when his foot caught on something. Suddenly he was falling forward. The mail went flying as he flung out his arms to prevent himself from landing on his face. He hit the floor with a brain-jarring, rib-cracking thud that knocked the wind out of him.

It took a good half minute before he could breathe again. When he finally rolled over, he looked around to see what had tripped him—and froze.

The footstool sat dead center in the entry to the study.

A tremor rattled through Morley. He’d left the stool in the corner—he was certain of it. Or at least, pretty certain. He was more certain that furniture didn’t move around on its own, so perhaps he hadn’t put it in the corner, merely intended to, and hadn’t got around to it yet.