The Stranger tloe-1 Page 27

  There was nothing to keep me here. My life stretched before me like a meaningless, empty expanse.

  There wasn’t even anyone I needed to call to say goodbye to.

  Well, there were, of course, people to call. A good fifty names in my telephone book, which I had acquired only a month ago. But there was no one I wanted to talk to, much less see. Maybe I was just depressed. In that case, long live depression! That hypothetical malady made it very easy for me to make the most important decision in my life. It surprises me to this day.

  I was possessed by a strangely pleasant lightheadedness. I was moved neither to try to put my effects in order, nor to share my plans with trusted friends. I spent the evening not in tormented deliberation, but over endless cups of tea in front of the TV. Even the last episode of Twin Peaks didn’t seem to me to be a bad omen. I just thought that if I had been Agent Cooper I would probably have continued wandering around the Black Wigwam—anything was better than returning to reality and messing up the lives of others, along with one’s own.

  Rather, I behaved as though the most intriguing event of the evening would be the ritual of taking out the trash. Packing my backpack with only a thermos of coffee and a three-day supply of sandwiches, I felt like a first-class idiot, but I thought that even being a first-class idiot would be a welcome change. In recent years I had been a paragon of sensible behavior, and the results were not impressive.

  I left home at one o’clock in the morning, and it took me about twenty minutes to Green Street. I had to hang around there for quite a while. One of the last things I recall in that world was the sight of the enormous numbers on the electric clock hanging above the telephone company building: 2:22. I don’t know why, but symmetry like that has always struck me as an auspicious sign.

  The loud rumble of the approaching streetcar shattered the stillness of the night, interrupting my contemplation of multiple twos. I wasn’t exactly afraid, but my head started spinning, my eyes saw double, and I just couldn’t get my mind around how the streetcar tracks had suddenly appeared in the middle of the narrow cobble-stone street. I was able to make out a sign that indicated I was at the stop for streetcars following route 432. For some time, the number struck me as even stranger than the very existence of the streetcar. In our city there had never been more than thirty routes, at most. I chuckled nervously. The sound of my own laughter seemed so terrifying to me that I immediately stopped. Then the streetcar appeared from around the corner.

  I wanted very much to peer at the driver’s cabin. (People have a habit of doing on occasion what they know they shouldn’t.) When I did, I saw a broad, carnivorous-looking face sporting a sparse growth of whiskers. His tiny eyes, drowning in abundant flesh, burned with unearthly ecstasy. It was hard to determine what frightened me most about his appearance. Let’s just say that at that moment I understood what a soul wandering through Bardo must feel when it first comes across the procession of Divine Furies. Ordinary epithets (“fear,” “horror,” “shock”) cannot begin to describe what I felt.

  The streetcar slowed as it approached the stop. Then I realized that this was the end: if I got in, it was the end of me, and if I turned tail and ran, all the more so!

  I glanced again at the driver’s seat. Now it was empty, to my relief. A streetcar without a driver, on a street where streetcars don’t run, along route 432, from nowhere to nowhere—that was alarming, but bearable. This form of distorted reality was more to my liking.

  The streetcar came to a halt. It was a completely unidentifiable old model with crude letters scrawled on the side that read “Sex Pistols” and “Michael is an ass.”

  I’ll always be grateful to this Michael. He saved my life, or my reason, or both. Contemplating the animal nature of the person immortalized on the side of the streetcar reassured me, and I entered the empty semidarkness of the compartment. I sat down by a window and arranged my backpack on the next seat. The door closed. It closed very gently. There was nothing in the least bit frightening about it. We started moving. Even our speed seemed just right.

  The nighttime landscape outside the window was in no way unusual—half-familiar urban streets illumined by the pale globes of streetlights, now and then cheerful yellow patches of windows, the weak neon shimmer of store signs. I felt happy and calm, as though I were on my way to my grandmother’s house in the country, where I hadn’t been since I was fourteen. My grandmother died, the house was sold, and I had never again been as free and happy as I was then. I looked at my reflection in the glass: cheerful, eager, youthful. What a nice guy I can be.

  On one of the seats I discovered some sort of magazine, and I reached for it happily. The magazine was a news digest, a genre I am especially fond of. Some people like things that are a bit hotter, but at that stage in my life I liked to numb my brain with digests—an ecologically clean drug. It made time pass the way I like it to: imperceptibly.

  This probably all seems very absurd—jumping without a backward glance into an old jalopy of a streetcar, reaching for an out-of-date magazine, and devouring the day before yesterday’s news over fresh sandwiches. But that’s just how I am: when I don’t understand what’s going on, I try to find some activity that will distract me. In everyday life I often behave like a lunatic, but as soon as things start getting strange, I become a psychologically balanced bore. It’s no doubt my unique version of the instinct of self-preservation.

  When my attention wandered away from the magazine, I noticed that it was getting light outside. Suddenly I felt like there was a taut string inside me, quivering and ready to snap. Two cheery suns were clambering up into the heavens above the horizon—each one above its own horizon, that is. Two sunrises in one—or one sunrise twice? To the left and to the right, so that neither eye would feel left out.

  Come what may, I had to gather my wits about me. So as not to panic, I turned away from both windows, screwed up my face, relaxed, yawned, and tried to get more comfortable on the hard seat. Surprisingly, it worked—the seat seemed to become roomier and softer. I laid my head down on the sandwich-stuffed backpack and fell asleep.

  I slept soundly. No nightmares haunted me. Apparently, the demons in charge of my dreams were taking a smoke break. Good for them.

  All in all, the streetcar-microcosm was kindly disposed toward me. When I woke up, I realized I was lying not on a hard seat, but on a short, soft leather divan. It was possible to fit my whole body on it if I pulled my knees way up near my chin. In addition, a scratchy plaid throw, almost as comforting as the one I had left at home, had appeared out of nowhere.

  “How sweet you are to me,” I mumbled, and fell into an even deeper sleep.

  When I woke up again, the streetcar compartment looked like a dormitory for gnomes. All the seats had turned into short, leather divans, which suited me to a tee. After all, it would be a crime not to take advantage of such creature comforts in the face of the complete unknown. I slept a lot, munched on my provisions, and discovered new magazines now and then, sometimes in the most improbable places—one of them turned up tucked under my armpit; another was stuck in the ticket puncher like a monstrous, interstellar transfer pass.

  As for surrealistic landscapes like the double dawn, there were no further surprises. A permanent darkness settled outside the windows of the streetcar, making it easier to preserve my emotional equilibrium.

  According to my approximate calculations, this idyll continued for three or four days. Who knows, though, how much time really passed in this extraordinary streetcar? To this day, the most inexplicable phenomenon of that experience remains the fact that I never once felt the call of nature or noticed the absence of a bathroom. This, to put it mildly, contradicts what I know of human capabilities. The whole time I waited with trepidation for the familiar distress signals from my plumbing system, all the while trying to come up with a somewhat hygienic solution to the awkward problem I anticipated —but it turned out to be unnecessary.

  My final “awakening” was strikingly differe
nt from the previous ones, beginning with the fact that I found myself wrapped not in the scratchy throw, but in a fur blanket. And I could finally stretch out my long-suffering legs. Looking around, I discovered that I was lying not in a bed and not on a divan, but on a very soft floor in a huge, half-dark, and nearly empty room. At the far end of this room, someone was breathing heavily, menacingly, as it seemed to me. I opened my eyes wide, then turned over awkwardly and got up on my hands and knees. The breathing ceased, but a few seconds later something softly nudged my heels. To this day, I don’t know how I kept myself from screaming out.

  Instead, still crouched on the floor, I pivoted around and found myself nose-to-nose with another one, very soft and moist. Then something licked my cheek. Indescribable relief nearly robbed me of my senses. Before me was an absolutely charming creature—a shaggy puppy with the face of a little bulldog. Later, I found out that Chuff wasn’t a puppy at all, but a seasoned canine. His compact size and exuberance had misled me.

  Soon, a small figure draped in capacious garments flowing down to the floor materialized in the twilight of the room. Peering closely at him, I realized that it was not my dream companion. It was someone else. Could I have come to the wrong address?

  “Mister Venerable Head is expected later this evening. If you please, sir, inform me of your wishes,” requested the stranger, a fragile, wizened old man with radiant eyes and a pensive, thin-lipped mouth. This was Kimpa, Sir Juffin Hully’s butler. Juffin himself did indeed arrive later that night.

  Only then did it sink in that the unimaginable journey from one world to another had really taken place.

  That is how I ended up in Echo—which I have never had cause to regret, even on days as hopeless as this one seemed to be.

  While I was lost in reminiscences, the amobiler, manned by Sir Juffin Hully, was winding in and out among the luxuriant gardens of the Left Bank. Finally, we turned into a narrow driveway that seemed to be paved exclusively with semiprecious stones. At first I didn’t see the house amid the thick undergrowth. Sir Maba Kalox is probably a philosopher, and his philosophy requires that he become one with nature. That’s why he lives in a garden without any architectural superfluities, I thought cheerfully, just before we nearly ran smack into the wall of his house, all but invisible under the opaque curtain of vines.

  “This is what you call camouflage!” I exclaimed admiringly.

  “You can’t imagine how right you are, Max. Now do you see why I sat behind the levers of this blasted buggy? During my lifetime I have paid several hundred visits to Maba, and I have always been forced to find my way to his lair by guesswork. It’s impossible to memorize the way here. Every time you just have to arm yourself with the hope that you’ll get lucky. Maba Kalox is an unsurpassed master of discretion!”

  “Is he hiding from someone?”

  “No, not at all. People just have a hard time discovering his whereabouts. It happens of its own accord, with no help from him. One of the side effects of studying True Magic.”

  “And why is your house so easy to find?”

  “In the first place, we all have our eccentricities. And, second, I’m by no means as old as he is.”

  “Do you mean to say—”

  “I don’t mean to say anything. But I have to, since you asked. The Order of the Clock of Time Backwards has existed . . . let me see . . . yes, around 3,000 years. And I have yet to hear that there has been a succession of Grand Magicians.”

  “Wow!”

  I had nothing more to add.

  Sir Juffin turned behind the well-concealed building. There we came upon a decrepit plywood door, more fitting for a toolshed than a Grand Magician’s villa. The door opened with a creak, and we found ourselves standing in the middle of a large, rather chilly hall.

  Maba Kalox, the Grand Magician of the Order of Time Backwards, was known for having peacefully disbanded his Order several years before the onset of the Troubled Times, after which he managed nearly to disappear from sight without ever leaving Echo. This living legend was waiting for us in the sitting room.

  The “living legend” was quite ordinary looking. He was a shortish, stocky fellow of indeterminate age with an animated expression. His merry, round eyes were the true embellishments of his face. If he could have been said to resemble any of my companions, it would have had to be Kurush, our wise buriwok.

  “Haven’t set eyes on you in ages, Juffin!”

  Sir Maba Kalox said this with such unfeigned enthusiasm that it seemed Sir Juffin’s presence filled him with cosmic joy.

  “I’m happy to see you,” he said to me, making a low exaggerated bow. “You could have brought your marvel around sooner, Juffin. May I touch him?”

  “Go ahead. As far as I know he doesn’t bite. He doesn’t kick. It’s even safe to drop him on the floor.”

  “On the floor! That’s a good one.”

  Maba Kalox really did probe me with his index finger, then immediately drew back as if he were afraid of getting burned. He winked at me conspiratorially, as if to say, “You and I know this charade is just for Juffin’s sake—so bear with me. Let’s humor the old geezer.” Sir Maba didn’t use Silent Speech, but somehow I knew just what the wink meant. I liked his approach, in spite of the fact that he had called me “marvel” and pinched me like fresh dough.

  “Sit down, friends,” Sir Maba Kalox said, gesturing broadly toward the table. “I’ll rustle up some of your best black poison.”

  By “black poison” he meant kamra, of course.

  “It will probably be some potion of boiled herbs again,” Juffin commented peevishly. He could grow savage when someone took aim at one of his little weaknesses.

  “Well, at least it’s not any of that liquid tar of yours. Whoever decided that was fit for drinking at all? No matter how often those misery-mongers muttered spells over it. Don’t pout, Juffin. Just try this. It really is something special.”

  Sir Maba Kalox was absolutely right. The steaming, ruby-hued beverage that appeared on the table had a flavor somewhat reminiscent of Elixir of Kaxar, of which I was particularly fond, infused with some kind of celestial flower.

  “Well, at long last I get offered something decent in this house,” Juffin said gruffly, beginning to come around.

  “I haven’t seen you this tired since the Code was adopted,” our host said, standing up and stretching creakily. “Why worry so much about these murders, Juffin? When the World might really have collapsed you were much calmer about it—and for good reason.”

  “First, if I can’t solve a case within an hour, it makes me very irritable, you know that. Second, Max has gotten an idea into his head that I don’t like one bit. At the same time, it would explain everything. If we left the door open between Worlds—well, Maba, you realize it’s nothing to joke about.”

  “The door between Worlds is never really closed, Juffin. It’s time you realized that. In any case, I’m at your service, on the condition that you both drink another cup of my concoction. I’m extremely vain, you know.”

  “And I was worried that you had left all your human weaknesses far behind,” Juffin said, grinning. Then he turned to me, “Sir Max, don’t sit there looking so stiff and awkward. This may be the only house in Echo where you have no cause to feel shy.”

  “I’m not feeling shy. I just always need a little time to—”

  “Sniff things out?” Maba Kalox asked. His eyes were the kindest X-rays I had ever been subjected to.

  “Something like that. It usually lasts just a short time, and then I realize that I’m already used to things. But sometimes—”

  “Sometimes you understand that you’ll never get used to it. You don’t have to, but you try to swallow it anyway,” Maba said, finishing the end of my thought. “Well, I’d say that’s a very sensible approach to things. Sniff it out, Marvel. As for me, I’ve already sniffed you out.”

  I nodded and reached for the second cup.

  “You can check out whether Max is right or not, can�
��t you?” asked Juffin, drumming his fingers on the tabletop nervously.

  “Of course. But why check it out? You already know he’s right, Juffin. You’re just tired. And not only because of this. But it was your choice—wasting your life on trivial nonsense.”

  “Somebody has to do it,” Juffin grumbled.

  “And not just anyone, but you in particular. So it’s all well and good. You want me to look into the matter, do you?”

  “Of course I do. If a fellow from another World is roaming around Echo, I have to know at the very least whether he ended up here just by chance, or—”

  “Why don’t you call a spade a spade, Juffin? What you really want to know is how many other uninvited guests are likely to fall into your warm embrace.”

  “Well, you’ve got my number. Of course that’s what I want to know. That’s my job.”

  “Fine. If you want a refill, the jug’s on the table. I hope you won’t be bored. I’ll be back shortly.”

  With this, Sir Maba, much to my astonishment, crawled under the table. I stared at Juffin, dumbfounded.

  “Look under the table and you’ll understand.”

  I looked. There was nothing there. What else did I expect?

  “The door between Worlds can be anywhere, Max,” Juffin said softly. “Even under the table. What difference does it make? But whoever wants to find it has to hide from the eyes of others. Maba needs only seconds. I’d need a minute or two. How long did you have to wait for that curious contraption that delivered you to my bedroom?”

  “About an hour.”

  “Not bad for a beginner. It’s just a matter of practice, son. Pour me some more of that potion. I think I’ve found just what the wiseman ordered for a weary man.”

  “I’d like to get the recipe for this out of him,” I murmured dreamily.