Doyle After Death (7 page)

Behind me, the sun was rising over Garden Rest, its light turning the green pools of the swamp a sparkling silver. The cypress trees, roots lifted like mossy skirts over the water, were thickly hung with Spanish moss; a woodpecker flashed in red and white between trees; something splashed back in the shadows. Cicadas buzzed—­or something that mimicked cicadas—­and the flooded woodland exuded a smell that was at once rank and delightful.

Bull Moore tugged at his rust-­colored beard with his left hand, his right jabbing a finger at me to emphasize the words: “What you need to
ask
yourself Fogg is,
Do I believe everything they're telling you?
”

“You asking if you believe them or if I do?”

“What? You know what I mean, dammit.”

I stared at Bull Moore, still coming to terms with having met someone I knew from before I died—­especially when that someone was Bull Moore. I had a friend, Lou Stathis, who'd died of cancer. Just my luck it couldn't be Lou walking up to me here, in afterlife; or maybe my white-­haired Science lab instructor, from high school, Mr. Croggins, the only teacher I'd really liked. Or my Aunt Hattie—­why couldn't it be my dear old cocktail-­swilling Aunt Hattie?

But no such luck. I drew Bull Moore. I'd had private-­eye dealings with him now and then—­he'd been a bubbling stream of information on every twitching survivalist, fringe loony, tweaking meth dealer and gunrunner in Nevada, whether or not those were all the same guy. But I'd never liked Moore's company. Now, if anything, his personality seemed more outsized than ever. It was almost a caricature.

I cleared my throat. “You were asking if I believe—­”

He interrupted me without waiting for an answer—­as he always did. “Come off it, Fogg! You think ­people are any more trustworthy in this place than—­wherever we were before? I suppose they told you that you were dead, that you're in the afterlife, all that malarkey . . .”

“I knew I'd died the moment I woke up on that beach,” I said, aware that the statement sounded self-­contradictory. It was, however, the simple truth. I shaded my eyes to look down the row of cottages in the hopes the major and Doyle would come along and rescue me from this close encounter. You don't need to shade your eyes much in Garden Rest. Not much glare. But I wanted him to know I was expecting someone, in the hopes it might scare him off. I didn't want the distraction of a real confrontation with him. “I'm kinda surprised to see you here, Bull—­in Garden Rest, I mean. Seems like it's a big, nearly endless selection of places to go when a person dies, out there. You died, what, a year before me? Just . . .
amazing
to see you, really. Small world . . . small afterworld.” I looked at his ratty sweater, his stained Dockers, his rotting tennis shoes. “That what you died in when the ATF agents shot you? You could change, dude. I understand it's not that hard to get new clothing here . . .”

Moore ignored everything I'd said—­except three letters. “The
ATF!
You think
ATF
stands for Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms? It does—­but that's their little in-­joke! Among the agency cognoscenti, it stands for
Alien/Terrestrial Force
!”

“Uh-­huh . . .” Was that the major, waving at me from down the street? Doyle at his side? Thank God.

“Who do you think brought you here, Fogg? I ask you! Who brought you to a world with no moon?” He was stalking back and forth now, slashing at the air with the edges of his hands, like a movie action hero fighting unseen assailants. “A world with a purple sea—­a world with birds that read your mind? It's an
alien planet
, you damn fool! We're being conditioned by the Reptoids, mind-­controlled in this little artificial world of theirs! The same conspiracy that stole my money and called it ‘taxation' secretly turned the USA over to the aliens years ago! It happened within a year of Roswell! But it goes back farther—­thousands of years! The aliens started out working with the ancient Jews in the Middle East, Fogg!”

“Yeah? The Jews, huh? Man those guys get around. Got a finger in everything.”

“You can laugh about it but—­goddammit—­
think,
man! All that business about Ezekiel's Wheel, and Elijah ascending, that was all about alien spacecraft . . . and it came from Jews! Ezekiel and his ‘sainted' pals made a deal with the aliens! They agreed to be the Reptoids' stooges if they could rule the world through their Zionist . . .”

He broke off, hands balling into fists at his side, mouth quivering, as he saw the major and Doyle striding up.

“What ho, there, Moore!” Doyle called jovially. “Made the acquaintance of my new assistant?”

I raised my eyebrows at that. Assistant? When was this decided?

Moore looked at me with squinting suspicion and backed away. “So you work for
them
. . .”

“Haven't been much help to them yet,” I admitted. “ The more things change, the more they—­”

“The more things—­
the Moore
things! Is that what you're saying? More change . . . ? Change Moore? Into
what?”
He suddenly spun about and floundered into the swamp, splashing hurriedly off into it, wading up to his knees, then his hips; he dodged behind the bole of a cypress, and I lost sight of him. We stared after him, hearing him splashing onward for a while, ignoring the raised trail leading into the woods.

“He's got a place out there,” the major remarked. “A sort of big clunky tree house he's built for himself. Keeps an eye on us all from up high or something . . .”

“I knew him from Las Vegas,” I said. “A business connection. He took a fee sometimes for information. He was always cracked, but this . . .”

Doyle nodded gravely, smoothing his mustaches with the ball of his thumb. “Och, the poor man. ­People bring themselves along, do you see, when they come here. They are their own ‘baggage'! Of course, full-­on lunatics go to quite another place, where they seem to get sorted out. But the half-­sane, the willful paranoids like Moore—­they seem to look for healthier ­people to hide amongst. They come to saner ­people and try to infect them with their own sickness.”

“He tell you the ‘space aliens' story, did he, Fogg?” the major asked, seeming only distantly interested.

“He did. Back when we . . .
before
we came here, Moore used to go on Art Bell's radio show and rant about conspiracies and Reptilian aliens. He's a former wrestler—­just the guy you want to explain the mysteries of the afterworld to you.”

“A wrestler!”

“ That's where he got the ‘Bull' moniker. No one's sure what his real first name is. Could be the ATF might know.”

“There are far worse ­people than Moore here,” Doyle remarked. “In outlying areas. Roundabout . . . and perhaps among us, since it appears someone's committed murder.”

“How is it a guy like Bull Moore ends up here, in this little town—­where I happen to be?”

“Ah!” Doyle grinned. “That particular personal incongruity is one of the imponderables of the afterlife. We're not sure why it happens, but we assume it has something to do with unfinished business, what the Hindus call karma—­something like that.”

I shook my head, feeling an existential fatigue. “You've been here a long time—­but you guys don't seem to know that much about how the afterlife works. Unless there's a lot you're not telling me.”

“We know a good deal about practical existence here,” Major Brummigen said. “We'll tell you something about it in time. But we know a lot less about the, ah, administrative side. We haven't met anyone in charge of the afterworld. Not sure who's up the chain of command.”

Doyle looked contemplatively at the peculiar sun of the afterworld. “Once, I heard Diogenes remark that
the sun
is the seat of the power here. As if it were a big glowing angel! Oh, it isn't, exactly—­it's a sphere of glowing energy. But it's apparently intelligent. Yet we cannot speak to it. We can only
receive
its intelligence, somehow—­in a quite subtle process of receptivity. And . . .” He waved sweepingly at the world. “The world itself seems to be its own administration, in a sense.”

The major nodded. “That's a fact! You notice that though there are things
for sale
here, no one puts up signs anywhere but at the business establishment. A sign on your shop seems permitted—­but try putting up a sign on any of the roads coming in. It disintegrates within a minute! Gone! And yet I've heard that in other places, road signs are the norm. It seems to have something to do with the locale—­coarse commerciality wouldn't fit in with Garden Rest, so Garden Rest, the place itself, just doesn't allow it.”

“Suits me,” I said, thinking of Las Vegas. “I've had enough advertising to last me . . .” I smiled. “A lifetime.”

“Exactly,” Major Brummigen said, nodding, “Somehow—­­people here chose Garden Rest because they needed it. Or because somehow they can be of some special use here.”

“Speaking of being of use,” Doyle said, “I believe you had a conversation with the mayor this morning . . .”

“Yeah.” I filled him and Brummigen in on what I'd learned.

“Most of that I knew,” Doyle said. “But the part about Merchant . . . didn't know they'd spent so much time together. Something to add to the fact sheet.”

I looked up at the coruscating star that gently warmed and watched over us. “Diogenes says the sun is the ‘seat of power'? Anyone try . . . ?”

“
Praying
to it?” Doyle chuckled. “Asking it for a response? Certainly! One gets no reply, not in any obvious way.”

“Diogenes seems to have the answers,” I said. “You must have sat down with the guy and asked—­”

Brummigen raised a warning hand, like a traffic cop signaling a stop. “Can't go there with him, Fogg. The Lamplighter simply will not submit to any real interrogation. He is often gone from here, and we don't know where he goes to—­and he won't say! He doesn't directly involve himself in most local affairs.”

Doyle chuckled. “I recollect when a feeble-­minded young woman followed Diogenes around, insisting the old boy was an angel! He told her she needed to get her wits in order—­that's just how he put it—­and he informed her in no uncertain terms that he was no angel, and he wouldn't allow anybody trailing after him. He left that night and we didn't see him again till long after she'd moved on.”

“Moved on—­to where?”

Brummigen shrugged. ­“People stay here indefinitely—­or they move on. Sometimes they feel another stage calling them. Summoning them . . .”

Doyle was frowning worriedly at me. “Hello! You look pale, Nicholas!”

“Yeah, I feel . . . worn.”

“Did you sleep—­perchance to dream?”

“I did.” I didn't want to think about the dreams. Dreams, for me, here, were memories, so far. Badly tangled memories that chewed at the back of my mind. “Maybe I need to eat. Had some coffee and some kinda pastry. Seemed to be doughy air, to me, I don't know how nutritious it could be . . .”

“Right. It's a pity there's not much in the way of solid food here. Of course there are creatures one
could
eat. But trying it—­even thinking of it—­leaves a strange, unpleasant taste in the mind. Eggs now—­there
are
eggs. But they're not like back home. I'm thinking of trying to formulate some real eggs from memory. Perhaps some kippers to go with them.”

The major glanced at him, a grin flickering and gone. He was far too straight-­faced as he said, “But Doyle, I heard you and your Spiritualist chums were sure there'd be constant
feasting
in a glorious wonderland here . . .”

Doyle sniffed at the needling. “We said nothing of the sort! Not . . . exactly. Garden Rest is more or less . . . is
rather
what I envisioned.” He sighed. “Some of the Spiritualist message seems to've been confirmed—­some of it contradicted.” He shrugged. “That's to be expected. And there's much more to be discovered when the time comes!” He looked at the sky, repeating to himself, almost ruefully, “When the time comes . . .”

I'd forgotten about the Arthur Conan Doyle dichotomy. I'd read somewhere, before I'd died, that the creator of Sherlock Holmes—­the fictional personification of reason, logic, empiricism—­had become a “Spiritualist”: a crony of spirit mediums, an attendee of séances. Not very damned rational or logical. But who was I to mock the afterlife now? “So,
about
Spiritualism—­I mean, you know, the process. Does anyone here contact the, uh, mortal world, through mediums or whatever?”

“No,” said the major.

“Yes!” declared Doyle.

Brummigen waved a dismissive hand. “Come on, Doyle, you've never confirmed a single instance of it here. We haven't got any mediums calling
us
up, no one going back from Garden Rest to shoot ectoplasm at a séance . . .”

“But I confirmed it
before
I passed to this world!” Doyle insisted. “And coming here is
proof
of the afterlife, of the persistence of spirits. Put the two together—­”

“Yes, yes, this is an afterlife—­but it doesn't prove all that Spiritualist stuff is true—­just a little corner of it.”

Doyle gave out a grunt of annoyance. “We've worn this argument out, many a night. But in time we'll contact the mortal world, Major! Mark my word! Just now let's improve our contact with this one.” Doyle turned to clap me on the shoulder—­a ringing thump that almost knocked me over. “Fogg, you're looking a bit blanched but we'll soon get you right. Here is where you'll have your breakfast. Turn and face the sun.”