The Eternal Footman Read online

  Nora scowled and finished her coffee. So the tow would happen. Very well. Maybe it was even the right thing to do. Maybe she should’ve robbed a bank when her husband died, sent the cash to the Augmentation Institute, and had him frozen instead of buried.

  Oh, God, how she would love to see Eric’s face when he thawed. Would the world still need stage magicians in A.D. 2500? Probably. As Eric liked to say, “Conjurers and concubines are invulnerable to automation.”

  Throughout the rest of that hot, long, dreary day and for into the sticky night, they dragged the defunct Cornucopia, her frightened crew, and her frozen passengers from the 27th parallel to the Tropic of Cancer, a journey punctuated by the clank and clatter of the tow chains. Everything aboard the sternwheeler seemed to occur in slow motion—the steering, the chopping, the stoking, the bailing—a situation that Nora decided to exploit.

  Since first glimpsing the Natchez Queen in its Riverwalk berth, she’d wanted to know how the boat worked, and Crock, to his credit, believed she would make a good pupil. By sunset she could trace the “live steam” as it traveled from boiler to pump to drive shaft on its way to becoming “dead steam”—water—in the condenser. She could light the burners, stoke the fires, lubricate the pistons, and operate the throttle.

  Nora’s investigation of the engine room not only provided her with insights into nineteenth-century motive power, it gave her an opportunity to test Marbles Rafferty’s glory grease. Ascending the narrow ladder that led from the boiler pit to the cargo deck, she banged her bad knee on the railing. The pain was immediate and excruciating, a red-hot iron spike driven into her patella, her worst such spasms since the original lacrosse accident.

  She hobbled to her stateroom and opened the peanut butter jar, releasing a fragrance suggestive of Brussels sprouts boiled in molasses. With her index finger she extracted a blob of the holy unguent and smeared it on her knee. The grease was warm—and potent. Her pain vanished, quickly and completely. As she screwed on the lid, the grease continued to bless her, seeping through her flesh and bathing her nervous system in the sort of intense well-being she’d previously known only from Percodan and sex. She climbed into her bunk and fell asleep, dreaming of a post-plague world where Kevin, cured, had become a famous film director whose latest project was a sixty-million-dollar remake of Corman’s The Last Woman on Earth.

  As dawn suffused the Queen, Nora rose and visited her son. His stateroom stank, polluted by the fetch’s exhalations. She kissed Kevin’s spotted cheeks. His pajama top lay open, exposing the pocks on his chest—an array of darkening stars, she decided, a constellation allied to some ugly and depleting myth. Fully awake now, she gave him his first physical therapy session of the day, levering his legs and pumping his arms for a solid hour.

  She left the stateroom and wandered aft. Cassie leaned against the starboard transom, binoculars raised, looking past the wake and the tow chains toward the Cornucopia.

  “Good morning!” yelled Nora over the thunderous suck of the paddles.

  “Christ almighty! I can’t believe this!”

  Groaning, Cassie shoved the binoculars into Nora’s hands and bolted toward the pilothouse.

  Nora lifted the binoculars and twisted the focus knob. The skull grew sharp, pouring down its monotonous mockery. She lowered her gaze and immediately saw the reason for Cassie’s distress. During the night, a two-masted schooner loaded with famished Texans had overtaken the Cornucopia, and now they swarmed across her decks like pirates boarding a merchant ship. After neutralizing Lampini and his colleagues, a straightforward matter of knocking the distraught scientists unconscious and roping them to the masts, the invaders split into two forces and set about their ghoulish business. One group concentrated on the Dewar vessels, tipping them over and attacking the lids with crowbars and chisels. The others pulled down the photovoltaic cells, evidently seeking to improvise a cooking device.

  She studied the nearest cylinder, horizontal now, stenciled with the name HOSKINS. Crowbars in hand, two Texans crouched over the top—a bearded, emaciated man wearing a ragged red blazer and a battered cowboy hat, and a spidery, athletic woman in a threadbare business suit. Together they wrenched off the circular lid. A wave of formaldehyde rolled out, an image that for Nora recalled the gush of amniotic fluid that had heralded Kevin’s arrival. The refrigerated preservative splashed across the deck, meeting the warm tropical air to form billowing clouds of steam.

  Reaching inside the Dewar vessel, the Texans retrieved the Institute’s dead client and pulled him into the daylight. Ice crystals clothed the naked corpse head to toe. The Texans kissed—lovers evidently, possibly married. In one sense, their expedition was a kind of date, a dining-out experience they would both remember.

  Nora fixed on the corpse, a bald, toothless man with a misshapen jaw. Quite possibly cosmetic surgery had figured in Mr. Hoskins’s postresurrection plans.

  The lovers surveyed the mess they’d made. Their expressions bespoke confusion, as if they’d expected Hoskins to arrive with microwaving instructions or a recipe card. They hauled their prize toward the solar oven. Already a plutocrat was under the heat, defrosting slowly, cold droplets raining from his flesh.

  As Nora averted her eyes, Anthony and Cassie appeared on the Queen’s afterdeck. The captain grabbed the binoculars and handed Cassie a pair of canvas gloves. He brought a walkie-talkie to his mouth.

  “Can you hear me, Crock? Over.”

  “Loud and clear!” came the engineer’s voice, barbed with static. “You on the bridge? Over.”

  “Afterdeck! Helm’s locked! Half ahead, okay?”

  “Half ahead!”

  The Queen decelerated.

  “Set us free!” Anthony commanded his wife. He peered through the binoculars. “Lee side first, then the windward!”

  “Aye-aye,” said Cassie.

  “What do you see?” Nora asked the captain.

  “You don’t want to know.”

  Cassie, gloved now, grasped the starboard loop of chain with both hands and lifted it off the cleat. She hurled the steel noose into the Gulf, then crossed the stern and unhooked the second chain. The disconnected Queen lurched forward like a bronco released from a rodeo chute.

  “Full speed ahead!” screamed Anthony.

  “Poor rich people,” said Cassie, flashing a dark smile. “They can’t even get their money back.”

  “Maybe they’re better off dead,” said Nora. “To wake up penniless and alone in a hostile future, that sounds like hell to me. Lampini’s patients would probably get treated like slaves, or freaks. Like second-class citizens at best.”

  “Unless, of course,” said Cassie, “they also froze their lawyers”

  I am near death. That’s what the new dream tells me.

  My arms and legs are back, but only so the doctors can perform more surgery—a “somatodectomy,” a body removal, in a matter of minutes they cut me down to nothing. Skin, organs, muscles—everything melts under their knives, as if I were just one big tonsil.

  Now they start on my skeleton, lifting away each bone. I’ve become a game of pick-up sticks. Soon I’ll be like God Himself, nothing but a skull.

  The lights appeared at midnight, straight off the port bow, sixteen red and roiling masses speckling the black horizon like St. Elmo’s fire. Anthony, staring through the pilothouse window, interpreted the phenomenon as signal beacons set by Puerto Chicxulub residents to warn fishing boats off the rocks, but Nora, stationed at the helm, found a more sinister meaning in the fires. She’d seen too many pyres between Boston and New Orleans to doubt that these flames served any purpose beyond corpse removal. It hardly mattered. The Queen had reached the Mexican coast. A thirty-degree turn followed by a halfday’s voyage across the Bahía de Campeche would land them in Coatzacoalcos.

  Anthony sipped instant coffee from a stained Exxon mug. “Tell me your darkest secret,” he said.

  Nora winced. Tightening her grip on the wheel, she reluctantly described her refusal to bless th
e Army of Northern New Jersey with the plunder from Harvey Sheridan’s school bus.

  “Now tell me yours,” she said.

  “Like yours, it involves fossil fuel.”

  For the first time Nora apprehended her captain’s true identity. This was the Anthony Van Home, the hapless skipper who’d cracked up the Carpco Valparaíso.

  “Matagorda Bay?” she said.

  “Five hundred miles of blackened beaches,” he said, nodding. “Sue hundred acres of ruined shrimp beds. Three hundred and twenty-five manatees got oil in their eyes and scratched them out.”

  “The grand jury exonerated you,” she said vaguely, uncertain how to comfort her captain and equally uncertain whether he wanted comforting. “They said you weren’t to blame.”

  “I am technically innocent. Like God.”

  How would history remember him? she wondered. As the adventurer who’d hauled the Corpus Dei to an Arctic tomb, or as the blunderer who’d dumped eleven million gallons of crude oil into a vital ecosystem?

  “So here I am, back in the Gulf,” he said. “The criminal always returns to the scene of the crime.”

  “You’re not a criminal.”

  He started to respond when a deep, growling, superhuman voice rang out, filling the pilothouse with reverberations so violent that they cracked the glass in the compass binnacle.

  TAKE OFF THY SHOES!

  Anthony said, “What?!”

  YOU HEARD US! SHOW SOME RESPECT! TAKE OFF THY SHOES!

  Anthony removed his sneakers, leaving his feet clothed only in threadbare white cotton. Following his example, Nora pulled off her hiking boots but kept her socks in place.

  STATE YOUR NAME!

  The captain glanced in all directions, seeking the source of the command. “Anthony Van Horne, master of the Natchez Queen.”

  AND WE ARE GOD ALMIGHTY, MASTER OF THE UNIVERSE!

  “What?”

  ARE YOU DEAF? GOD ALMIGHTY!

  Acting on instinct, Anthony and Nora lashed the wheel and, slipping and sliding in their stocking feet, rushed out onto the signal deck. The Puerto Chicxulub air was cool. Myths flecked the heavens: Orion, Cassiopeia, Pegasus. Prickly with fear, Nora hugged herself, rubbing her hands up and down her biceps.

  “God doesn’t exist,” Anthony announced to the watery blackness. “His body went to pieces while I was towing it through the English Channel.”

  WE ARE THAT WE ARE.

  “Show Yourself.”

  USE YOUR EYES.

  Nora and Anthony glanced skyward, fixing on the lambent death’s-head.

  NOT UP THERE, DUMMIES. DOWN HERE, IN THE GULF. THE DIVINE INTESTINES, YOU WILL RECALL, DID NOT DISINTEGRATE THAT DAY.

  They leaned over the rail, Nora favoring the bow, Anthony looking aft. Suddenly she saw it, basking in the skullglow: a huge, pulpy, corpulent worm, festooned with algae and stippled with barnacles, the whole impossible beast coiled tightly upon itself and sealed at both ends like a sausage. Immediately she thought of Jormungand, the Midgard serpent, wrapped around the mortal world, tail in mouth, an organic equator.

  “See anything?” Anthony asked her.

  “I see it, but I don’t believe it.”

  Anthony pivoted, sharing her view. “Holy shit.”

  PRECISELY. TELL ME, CAPTAIN, DO YOU KNOW WHERE YOU ARE?

  “Latitude twenty-one degrees, forty minutes, north,” said Anthony, closing his eyes. “Longitude ninety degrees—”

  YOU ARE TWO KILOMETERS FROM THE LARGEST IMPACT CRATER ON THE PLANET, THE CHICXULUB, FORMED BY THE VERY ASTEROID THROUGH WHICH WE EXTERMINATED OUR CHERISHED DINOSAURS.

  “I’ve heard about that.”

  IT’S A CONTROVERSIAL THEORY, BUT THERE’S LOTS OF EVIDENCE.

  “How could a single asteroid destroy hundreds of species?”

  WE HAVEN’T THE TIME. THERE ARE BOOKS.

  “If You valued the dinosaurs, why did You kill them?”

  DIDN’T YOU WATCH THE TRIAL? DON’T YOU HAVE CABLE? THE PROSECUTION CALLED IT RIGHT: WE POSSESS AN EVIL DIMENSION.

  “What do You want with me?”

  NOT YOU, CAPTAIN—YOUR AMBITIOUS PASSENGER OVER THERE.

  Fear exploded in Nora’s chest, her worst such jolt since the school-bus spiritualist tried to shoot her.

  LOOK AT US, ENGLISH TEACHER.

  “Where’re Your eyes?” she asked. “Your mouth?”

  WE ARE EVACUATING OUR WORDS DIRECTLY INTO YOUR BRAIN.

  She flashed on Kevin’s beloved Attack of the Crab Monsters, with its memorable scene of the mystified scientist—a hammy performance by Leslie Bradley—being lured to his death by the projected voices of two sailors, their brains still active even though they’d recently been devoured by giant mutant crabs.

  “I get it,” she said. “We’re communicating telepathically.”

  YES. TELEPATHICALLY. LIKE THE TWO SAILORS IN ATTACK OF THE CRAB MONSTERS LURING THAT SCIENTIST PLAYED BY MEL WELLES.

  “No, Mel Welles played the other scientist.”

  IT WAS MEL WELLES.

  “It was Leslie Bradley.”

  SHUT UP. LISTEN, ENGLISH TEACHER, THE INSTANT YOU GET TO COATZACOALCOS, YOU MUST SEEK OUT A SCULPTOR NAMED GERARD KORTY.

  “Korty of the Korty Madonna?”

  THE SAME. HE WAS ALSO COMMISSIONED TO DESIGN THE CINECITTÀ RELIQUARY, BUT IT DIDN’T WORK OUT. HIS CURRENT OBSESSION IS THE HUMAN BRAIN HE’S CARVING FROM THE CHICXULUB ASTEROID. WE SHALL REMAIN SILENT CONCERNING ITS AESTHETIC VALUE. GOD DOES NOT FANCY HIMSELF AN ART CRITIC, THOUGH THE REVERSE FREQUENTLY OCCURS. OUR POINT IS THIS. THE PROJECT IS MUCH TOO BIG FOR HIM. MARK OUR WORDS, HEED OUR PROPHECY, READ OUR ENTRAILS: KORTY’S BRAIN WILL SHRED HIS PSYCHE AND CRUSH HIS SOUL. YOUR SACRED DUTY IS OBVIOUS.

  “Warn him?”

  WARN HIM. HE MUST ABANDON THE BRAIN OR GO MAD.

  “Why do You care whether one pathetic sculptor retains his sanity?”

  AT THE MOMENT, WE READILY ADMIT, YOU ARE ADDRESSING YOUR CREATOR’S EVIL SIDE, WHICH MEANS THAT YOUR QUESTION IS, ON THE SURFACE, ASTUTE. WHAT YOU FAIL TO APPRECIATE IS THAT OUR FACETS SPORT DUALITIES OF THEIR OWN. YOU MIGHT BE ADDRESSING THE EVIL SIDE OF OUR EVIL SIDE, OR YOU MIGHT BE ADDRESSING THE GOOD SIDE OF OUR EVIL SIDE—THERE’S NO WAY TO TELL. EVEN IF THE LATTER UNEQUIVOCALLY OBTAINED, YOU COULDN’T BE CERTAIN WHETHER YOU WERE ADDRESSING THE GOOD SIDE OF THE GOOD SIDE OF OUR EVIL SIDE OR THE EVIL SIDE OF THE GOOD SIDE OF OUR EVIL SIDE. METAPHYSICS IS A TRICKY BUSINESS. WE WANT YOU TO RESCUE THE SCULPTOR BECAUSE, ONCE ADRIAN LUCIDO DIES, KORTY BECOMES THE LOGICAL MAN TO CARRY ON HIS VALIANT MISSION.

  “So the Lucido Clinic really exists?”

  YOU’LL FIND OUT SOON ENOUGH.

  “Do You want the Clinic to endure because it works—or because it doesn’t work?”

  THAT DEPENDS ON WHETHER YOU ARE ADDRESSING THE GOOD SIDE OF THE GOOD SIDE OF OUR EVIL SIDE OR THE—

  “Last year somebody put a magnifying glass in my son’s Wizard of Oats.”

  DON’T INTERRUPT US. OR THE EVIL SIDE OF THE GOOD SIDE OF OUR EVIL SIDE. HIS CONJURER CRUNCH, ACTUALLY.

  “No, his Wizard of Oats. It took me to the Lobo mausoleum in Arborway Cemetery.”

  I BESEECH YOU, IN THE BOWELS OF CHRIST, THINK IT POSSIBLE YOU MAY BE MISTAKEN.

  “Right.”

  GONERIL DID IT.

  “Goneril?”

  YOUR FETCH.

  “I’ve always hated that name.”

  THAT’S WHY SHE PICKED IT.

  “My fetch put the magnifying glass in Kevin’s cereal?”

  YES.

  “Are You sure?”

  ARE WE SURE? YOU ARE TALKING, MRS. BURKHART, TO THE LORD OF HOSTS AND THE ARCHITECT OF REALITY. IN OUR DAY WE COULD DO ANYTHING. PART OCEANS, JUGGLE PLANETS, IGNITE STARS, PLAY KASPAROV TO A DRAW. NOW OUR REIGN IS ENDING. TONIGHT WE DIVE INTO THE YUCATÁN FISSURE AND FROM THERE TO THE HEART OF OBLIVION. “THE OLD ORDER CHANGETH, YIELDING PLACE TO NEW.” WORDSWORTH.

  “Tennyson.”

  WORDSWORTH.

  “Tennyson.”
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  Anthony said, “If You have a shred of decency left, You’ll tell us whether Adrian Lucido can help our children.”

  YOU STILL FEEL GUILTY ABOUT MATAGORDA BAY, DON’T YOU, CAPTAIN? DYING SEA TURTLES HAUNT YOUR DREAMS.

  “I blinded three hundred manatees.”

  A TERRIBLE MIGRAINE POSSESSED YOU THAT NIGHT, SO YOU ABANDONED THE BRIDGE, LEAVING FOOLS IN CHARGE. YOU HAVE OUR SYMPATHY. WE ARE PREY TO MIGRAINES OURSELVES. THE 1527 GERMAN PEASANTS’ REVOLT GAVE US A LOLLAPALOOZA.

  “You mean…I’m forgiven?” said Anthony.

  YOUR OIL SPILL WAS BAD, BUT OUR ASTEROID WAS WORSE. IF YOU’LL FORGIVE US, WE’LL FORGIVE YOU.

  “It’s not in my power to forgive You.”

  QUITE SO. DO IT ANYWAY.

  “Really?”

  YES.

  “I forgive You, God.”

  DITTO.

  “I’ve got something on my conscience as well,” said Nora.

  YOU SHOULDN’T HAVE HOARDED YOUR DIESEL FUEL. WE WON’T PRETEND OTHERWISE.

  “Do I have Your forgiveness?”

  The beast said nothing. A cold and abrasive Gulf breeze arose, spitting spray across the signal deck.

  “I understand why Anthony abandoned the bridge,” said Nora, zipping up her Celtics jacket, “but not why You’re abandoning the world.”

  AND LEAVING FOOLS IN CHARGE?

  “I’m not a fool.”

  THEN WE CAN VAPORIZE IN PEACE. FAREWELL, MRS. BURKHART. SAYONARA, CAPTAIN VAN HORNE.

  “Don’t go!” cried Nora.

  “We have more questions!” shouted Anthony.

  “How long will the plague last?”

  “Why did You have to die?”

  But already the beast had started to sound, its compacted coils paying out like a fire hose designed to douse the flames of Hell. For a brief instant the skull’s floating reflection crowned a sinuous loop of bowel, a configuration suggesting an enormous grinning cobra. Twist following twist, turn following turn, the enigmatic mass plunged beneath the black waters off Puerto Chicxulub, until only a swirling skein of bubbles remained, and then the foam too was gone, leaving the humans alone on the signal deck, bound together in apocalyptic astonishment.