Blaylock, James P - Langdon St Ives 02 (41 page)

 
          
 
"What on earth are you talking
about?" she asked, looking at him fearfully, as if he had lost his mind.

 
          
 
He almost started to explain, but it was too
much for him. Now that he had made up his mind to leave, the future was calling
to him, and the shortest route back to it sat in the middle of the street a
block away. "Trust me," he said. "I won't be gone a
moment." He kissed her again, and then stepped out of the doorway, turned,
and loped off, not looking back, his heart full of gladness and regret.

 
          
 
HE LANDED ON the meadow, half expecting heaven
knew what. There was no telhng what was what anymore. Maybe Parsons would leap
out of the bushes and claim the machine. Maybe Narbondo, or Frost, or whatever
he called himself now, would menace him with a revolver. Maybe anything at
all—he didn't care. They could have the machine. He didn't want it anymore. His
work was done, and he was ready to confront the results, whatever they were,
and then to give up his chasing around through time.
At least
for the moment.

 
          
 
What he couldn't do, though, was face himself.
There were two present-time copies of him now, and he was determined to let the
other one
depart
gracefully and, he hoped, privately.
What sort of man had he become? A happy man, perhaps, who wouldn't relish the
idea of this copycat St. Ives popping in at the window to replace him? Or, just
as easily, a miserable man, who might gladly hand over the reins and disappear
forever.

 
          
 
Fragments of his memory were even now starting
to wink out like candle flames in a breeze. His nightmares about the Seven
Dials, the very fact of his returning there, his whole tiresome rigamarole life
during the past three years—all of it would become vapor.

 
          
 
And good riddance, too.
He would welcome new memories, whatever they were. He realized that this was
bluff, though. He thought one last time of the child Narbondo, huddled in dirty
rags in Limehouse, and of his mother and the sailor in the doorway. There were
memories worse
than his own
. That's partly why he was
still sitting there in the machine, wasn't it? He had no idea what he would fmd
inside the manor—who he would discover himself to be.

 
          
 
He climbed through the hatch into the wind. It
was sunny and fine with just the hint of a smoky autumn chill in the air. He
pulled his coat straight and fiddled with his tie, realizing that he was a wet
and dirty mess. But he felt fit, somehow, as if a great weight had fallen away
from him, and then, in a confused shudder of memory, it occurred to him that he
couldn't bear eating eggplant again. Not once more.

 
          
 
His head reeled, and he nearly fell over.
Eggplant?
It was starting. His memories would depart like
rats from a ship. Disconcerted, he hurried through the window, into the study,
and there stood Hasbro, staring at him strangely.

 
          
 
"We'll have to move the time machine into
the silo," St. Ives said to him. "I wasn't sure whether it was empty
or not."

 
          
 
"I beg your pardon, sir?"

 
          
 
"The machine on the meadow," St.
Ives said. "We'll want to get it into the silo, out of the weather."

 
          
 
"I'm sorry, sir. I wasn't aware that Dr.
Frost had returned it. This comes as a surprise. I was under the impression
that he had stolen it from Secretary Parsons. He's brought it here, has
he?"

 
          
 
"Stolen it?" St. Ives was gripped by
vertigo just then. His memory shifted. He fought to hold on to it, afraid to
let pieces of it go completely. "Of course," he said. "It's a
mystery to me, too, but there it sits." He gestured out the window, where
the machine glinted in the sunlight.

 
          
 
Narbondo had taken it! That was funny,
hilarious. Now St. Ives had reappeared with it, and that meant that Narbondo's
copy was in the process of disappearing, out from under his nose, and stranding
him, St. Ives hoped, in some distant land. Either that or the villain was gone
somewhere in time, and would someday perhaps return, and then St. Ives's
machine would disappear. Time and chance, he reminded himself.

 
          
 
And then new memories, like wraiths, drifted
into his mind, shifting old memories aside. "
Alice
!" he cried.
'Ts she
here then?"

 
          
 
*'She's still in the parlor, sir," Hasbro
said, looking skeptical again.
''Where you left her moments
ago.
I really must advise you against that suit, by the way. The tailor
is certifiable. Perhaps if I laid something else out ..."

 
          
 
"Yes," St. Ives said, hurrying
through the door.
"Lay something out."

 
          
 
He was dizzy, foggy with memories, drunk on
them. And as if he were literally drunk, he felt free of the depressing guilt
and worry that had plagued him . . . for how long?
And why?
He couldn't entirely remember. It seemed so long ago. His mind was a confusion
of images now, stolen from the man whose ghost was where? Blowing away on the
wind, across the meadow? Would he remain to haunt the manor, exercising a
ghostly grudge against his other-time self for having returned to supplant him?

 
          
 
Mrs. Langley loomed out of the kitchen, her
hands white with baking flour.

 
          
 
"I've taken your advice, Mrs.
Langley," he said.

 
          
 
"Beg pardon, sir? What advice?"

 
          
 
"I . . ." What advice, indeed? He
didn't know. He pulled at the collar of his shirt, which was too tight for him.
"Nothing," he said.
"Never mind.
I was
thinking out loud." She nodded, baffled, and he forced himself along,
walking toward the parlor. Steady on, he told himself. Keep your mouth closed.
There's too much you don't know yet, and too much of what you do know is
nonsense.

 
          
 
And then there sat
Alice
, reading a book. He was astonished by the
sight of her. She hasn't aged a day, he thought joyfully, and then he wondered
why on earth he thought any such thing, and a garden of memories, like someone
else's anecdotes, sprung fully bloomed in his mind. His head swam, and he sat
down hard on a chair. Maybe he ought to have waited, to have grappled with the
business of memory before wading in like this. But he hadn't, and now that he
got a good look at
Alice
, with her dark hair done up in a ribbon, he was happy that he hadn't
wasted another moment.

 
          
 
"I'm sorry about the eggplant," she
said to him, just then glancing up from her book. She squinted at the sight of
him, looking unhappily surprised, and he grinned back at her like a drunken
man. "That awful suit of clothes," she said. "You look rather
like a dirty sausage in them, don't you? I've seen those before ..."

 
          
 
"I'm just getting set to burn them,"
St. Ives said hurriedly. "They're a relic, from the future. A sort of . .
. costume."

 
          
 
"Well," she said. "The trousers
might look better if you hadn't waded across the river in them. But I am sorry
about the eggplant. I don't mean to make you eat it every night, but Janet's
cook, Pierre, is apparently fixing it for us this evening. Will you be ready to
leave in a half hour? You looked wonderful just moments ago."

 
          
 
"Eggplant?
Janet?" His mind fumbled with the words. Then through the parlor window he
saw
Alice
's garden, laid out in neat rows.
Purple-green eggplants hung like lunar eggs from a half-dozen plants.

 
          
 
''Oh, Janet,
" he
said, nodding broadly. "
From the
Harrogate
Women's Literary
League!"

 
          
 
"What on earth is wrong with you? Of
course that Janet, unless you've got another one hidden somewhere. And don't go
on about the eggplant this time, will you?"

 
          
 
Suddenly he could taste the horrible sour
stuff. He had eaten it last night mixed up with ground lamb.
And
the night before, too, stewed up with Middle Eastern spices.
He had been
on a sort of eggplant diet, a slave to the vegetable garden.

 
          
 
"You could use a bath, too, couldn't you?
At least a wash up.
And your hair looks as if you've
been out in the wind for three days. What have you been up to?"

 
          
 
"I . . . old Ben," he began.
"Mud, Up to his blinkers."

 
          
 
But then he was interrupted by a sort of
banshee wail from somewhere off in the house. It rose to a crescendo and then
turned into a series of squalling hoots.

 
          
 
He stood up, looking down at
Alice
in alarm. "What . . .?"

 
          
 
"It's not all that bad," she said,
nearly laughing. "Look at you! Anyone would think you hadn't ever changed
his nappies before. They can't be a tremendous lot dirtier than your trouser
cuffs, can they?"

 
          
 
The baby's crying had very nearly inundated
him with fresh memories.
Little Eddie, his son.
He
smiled broadly. It was his turn to change the nappies. They had agreed against
a nanny, were bringing up the child themselves,
spoon
-feeding
it with stuff mashed up out of the garden. Eddie wouldn't eat eggplant either,
wouldn't touch it on a bet. "Good old Eddie!" he said out loud.

 
          
 
"That's the right attitude,"
Alice
said.

 
          
 
And now in the shuffle of
the old being washed out by the new, he saw it all clearly for one last long
moment.
His fears for the future had come to nothing.
Alice
was safe. They^had a son. The garden was
growing again. They were happy now. He was happy, nearly delirious. He found
that he couldn't think in terms of future-time selves and past-time selves any
longer. None of his other selves mattered to him at all.

 
          
 
There was only he and
Alice
and Eddie and . . . rows and rows of
eggplant. He nearly started to whistle, but then the baby squalled again and
Alice
widened her eyes, inviting him to do
something about it.

 
          
 
"I've changed my mind," he said,
heading for the stairs. "I love eggplant." And he very nearly meant
it, too.

           
 
James P. Blaylock was born in
Long Beach
,
California
, and has Uved on the West Coast all his life. After working as
pet-store clerk, construction laborer, and part-time English teacher, Blaylock
began to pursue his idiosyncratic vision of the world in fiction that has
received the World Fantasy Award for the story 'Taper Dragons," the Philip
K. Dick Memorial Award for the novel Homunculus, and The 0. Henry Awards: Prize
Stories 1990 for "Unidentified Objects." The author has been married
to his wife Viki for nearly twenty years and has two sons.