The Whirlwind in the Thorn Tree (53 page)

“Oh?” asked Lucas. “Why’s that?”

“I realized some time ago...I had become partial to the anticipation.”

Lucas smiled. It was a warm smile, but his eyes were dead and cold. “I see. You’ve become a hunter. Didn’t anyone ever tell you it’s rude to play with your food?”

Normand simply stood there, crow’s-feet in the corners of his tight eyes.

The smile dropped like a hot potato. “Without the chase, you ain’t nothin no more. You’re a hollow hunter, Kaliburn. Full of vengeance and nothing else. Whoever ends this today, it don’t matter. You’ll die either way!”

Lucas broke into uproarious laughter, giving Normand the half-second he needed to draw first.

—The Fiddle and the Fire, vol 7 (unfinished) “The Gunslinger and the Giant”

Dreaming in Technicolor

C
LAYTON TREATED US TO A HUGE
dinner at a little restaurant in the first tier of the city. Well, I say restaurant, but it was more of a roach coach. We ordered our food from a little window in the side of a drawn carriage and sat at one of a half-dozen tables by the street to wait for our orders.

The fare was decidedly less seaside and more upscale than Salt Point, and more meat-and-potatoes than Maplenesse. Several other carriages were lined up next to that one, each one of them touting different dishes and desserts.

I ordered something that looked like an open-faced chili-burger: crumbled ground meat in a bowl made of a crusty heel of bread, covered in something like a cross between chili and curry.

It had beans but looked milky and had peppers julienned into it. The bread’s crust was as hard as a rock, and the stuff piled on was hot enough to strip the paint off of a Cadillac, but the whole thing was amazing. I ate it with a fork in one hand and a sweaty napkin in the other.

I got the feeling Clayton fed us less out of generosity, and more out of a need to flaunt his financial plumage. He seemed to have warmed up to the idea that his youngest son was back in Destin, and asked Sawyer questions about himself between gulps of beer. The more he drank, the friendlier he became. I sensed that this was a trend.

“So what do ye do for a livin, back in Zam?” asked the old man. He smoothed out his salt-and-pepper mustache with his thumb and forefinger. It struck me how often I’d seen Maxwell Bayard do that.

Sawyer was eating some sort of flatbread club sandwich. It smelled like chicken. “I’m going to school. I’m a student.”

“A student, eh? A scholar?” said Clayton. He leaned back, his belly pressing against the table. “What are you studying?”

I decided that it was dubious whether fame and affluence had been good to the Chiral. I wondered what he was like when he and Normand were young. It suddenly occured to me that I hadn’t seen any copies of the
Fiddle
series lying around in either of my father’s houses.

“Making movies.”

“Movies?” asked Clayton. “What are those?”

Sawyer seemed to be confused, then he remembered who he was talking to and where he was. “They’re like...a combination of books and stage plays. They’re like a stage play you can take home and watch whenever you like.”

“Oh!” said Walter, squinting through his smoke. He tapped ashes into an ashtray, sneaking fried potatoes out of Sawyer’s basket. “Picture shows. We have those. Well, something like them, I suppose. I guess if you had the equipment you could take it home and watch it.”

“Are you serious?” asked Sawyer.

“Oh, yeah,” said Clayton. “They been around for a good ten or fifteen year’n. They were invented by an Iznok named Atanaz...Atanzas ...see-jee...whatever the hell his name was. I used to know the guy. Real good sort, charitable chap.”

Sawyer took a huge bite of his sandwich, and said through it, “Can we go look at it when we’re done here?”

“Why not.”

“I’ll be,” said Clayton. He threw back his head and barked laughter. “My youngest is a picture-show maker. Not what I expected, but there are...worse things a man could do with his life. What kind of picture shows d’you make, boy?” He pretended to fondle his own nipples and wobbled in his chair. “The ones with dancin women in em?”

Walter dropped his face into his palm.

Sawyer grinned. “No. I used to want to be a nature film-maker, but I got into a project with a friend of mine and got hooked on making horror movies.”

“Nature?” asked Clayton. “What’s that, you take pictures of the woods?”

“Ahh, sort of. It’s kind of like hunting, but instead of killing animals, you make picture shows of animals in faraway places that most people wouldn’t get to see up close. And then later you record someone talking about the animals, and put it with the picture show so people can learn about them.”

“Oh, okay then. Well, that’s certainly charitable of ye. There ain’t a many farmer in Ain get to leave his farm for too long, what with his work and all. It’s mighty nice you make it so they can see the world.”

“I like to think so. It’s a good career. Lots of famous film-makers.”

“What’s a horror movie?”

“It’s a picture show with...scary things in it. Some people back on Earth like to be scared, I guess. There isn’t much to be scared of there, so people like to get a thrill seeing spooky things.”

“I get what you’re saying, I get you, I get you,” said Clayton. “We don’t cert need that here, I figure. There’s plenty to be scared of here. You want a thrill? I know where to take you and show you things that would make you piss your pants. And the next guy’s pants.”

“I believe it. I’ve seen plenty of scary things since I’ve been here.”

I noticed that Noreen seemed quiet and introspective. She was picking at some sort of chowder in a big spun-clay bowl, absent-mindedly dipping a breadstick in and nibbling on it.

“What’s up, buttercup?” I asked her, dipping a breadstick into the chowder and leaving it there.

“I wish Normand could be here,” she said. “I want to hang out with him.”

My heart ached. “Awww. I bet you do. He probably doesn’t come out too often these days, though. He’d probably get mobbed or something like Brad Pitt at a McDonald’s.”

“Yeah,” said Noreen, staring into her food as if she were trying to scry her father in it.

After we ate, Clayton broke off and went back to Weatherhead, while the four of us strolled up the main avenue, enjoying the dry, cool evening. The streetlights were short steel lamps, squat like fire hydrants, with conical shades. They gave off a soft and indirect electric light that I found very comfortable.

Next to the half-timbered shops and boutiques, and the fact that there were so many slat benches, the lamps made me feel as if I were in an inside-out house. The sky full of stars I saw now was more familiar, faded by the light-pollution of sprawling Ostlyn.

“Why is this city laid out like this?” I asked. “This big round maze is a pain in the ass.”

Noreen took a deep breath, her head tilting back and her eyes scanning the tops of the protective walls. “Mainly for siege purposes. The longer it takes invaders to get to the center of the city, the more time the troopers have to attack them from the ramparts. The streets are basically great big gauntlets.”

“The streetlights are low and soft to keep the battlement patrol in shadow,” said Walter. “And to prevent any troopers on the ground from being dazzled in a gunfight.”

We found the picture show in a stucco-sided cabin in the crook of the first switchback. Inside was a dark room full of wooden folding chairs. Upturned faces watched a flickering movie projected over their heads onto a white sheet stretched taut across the far wall.

The image was of a man in chaps and a hat, wearing dark eyeliner and gripping an oversized six-shooter, creeping up to a doorway. Beyond, three men were lasciviously counting a pile of shiny coins on a heavy pub table, by candlelight.

“Oh!” I murmured. “It looks like the little theater from
The Green Mile
where they take John Coffey to see a Fred Astaire movie.”

“It’s a silent movie,” said Noreen, the herky-jerky image dancing across her eyes. “Just like the old Charlie Chaplin films.”

Sawyer was beaming. “I feel like I’ve gone back in time to see the birth of cinema. Like I could turn around and see Georges Méliès running the projector.”

There were a few empty seats in the back row. We sat down and settled into the droopy canvas seats. On the screen, the man in the chaps and hat had gotten the drop on the others, and they were taunting each other. Script cards popped up between each line, but they were in Ainean and mostly illegible to me. I leaned back, folded my arms, and relaxed in the cool moviehouse.

I recall wishing I had a box of Junior Mints, and then I was sitting in a dark study, slumped in a Victorian wingback chair. A nearby window flickered with faint firelight, giving me enough visibility to see that the place was tastefully furnished. I recognized the titles and authors of the books arranged on the shelves: Dickens,
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
, Jean-Paul Sartre.

I got up out of the chair and went over to the window. The scene that awaited me was one of total devastation. The ruined shells of a peaceful neighborhood lay scattered all over the place, flaming and crumbling. The night sky held not stars but a goose-flock of airplanes. I could hear the drone of their engines.

I looked down on this Boschian hell from a third-floor window. Someone was standing in the street. I opened the window and called out, though I don’t remember having a voice.

The figure turned around. He was wearing a yellow longcoat.

Embers danced across the brim of his weatherbeaten black Boss. I couldn’t discern his face because of the hat, but I already knew what I would see. He had taken out a gold pocket watch and was looking down at it.

He snapped it shut and slipped it into a pocket. He walked toward the window, and into the entrance of the building.

I ran for the door and closed it, not with a slam, but softly. As soon as it clicked, I hid in the footwell of the broad mahogany desk by the window, hugging my knees. I pulled the chair in with me.

I waited. The oblivious ticking of a grandfather clock reminded me of the passage of time, sounding out a bat-like sonar that ricocheted off the passing seconds. I heard faraway thunder, muffled by the walls of the house. No—not thunder. Bombs. The planes I’d seen were dropping bombs.

Tick. Tick. Tick.
Where the hell was I?

My legs began to cramp. Maybe the front door was locked. Maybe he couldn’t get in at me. I pushed the chair out of the kickspace and slid out, unfolding myself. I stood like that for a moment, my hands on my knees, stretching my back.

Tick. Tick. Tick....

The clock had stopped. I walked over to it, the floorboards groaning under my feet, and looked up at the clock face. The arms had ceased to move. I opened the face’s glass front and saw a hole just below the arms’ center pin, and lying on the inside of the frame was a little key. I inserted it and started winding the clock up.

The loud ratcheting of the clockwork startled me as I worked. I tried to turn it a little softer, but it was impossible, so I just turned it slower.

A searing pain crept into my hand. I snatched it away. “Ow.”

The key was red-hot, glowing in the shadows. I licked my fingertips and blew on them.
What on Earth?

The paper clock-face caught on fire. A trickle of flames licked up from the bottom and started chewing up the sand-colored backing. I could see orange metal inside, as if the gears themselves were connected to some power source.

I backed away as the paper burned. Tiny ashes floated out of the clock like snow; as I remained there, the face’s backing was obliterated by a ring of glowing hot metal inside. It was like the eye of a electric stove. The arms drooped and fell off, and oozed down the front of the clock like slugs.

I saw movement out of the corner of my eye. Something was next to the piano.

I looked down and perceived a shape in the dark, a dimmer, hunched figure. It shuffled toward me and uncoiled as it moved, writhing open like a newborn fawn and reaching upward with long, angled arms and hands like empty black gloves.