Robert Wilson - Julian Comstock - A Story of 22-nd Century America

Enough time passed, however, that we eventually began to let down our guard; and I was admiring her clockspring hair by lamplight, and beginning to feel brave again, when she stood up from her chair at the window and said, “Oh, Hell!” [Or an even stronger word, best understood under the generous allowances of Cultural Relativism, and not printable here.]

“They’re coming?”

She nodded. I hurried to the window, and caught a glimpse of two burly men, one in a patched wool coat and one in what looked like a sailor’s pea-jacket, as they strode across the torch-lit street to the entrance of the Thirsty Boot directly below us.

“Put out the light!” Calyxa said. “But before you do, unlatch the window. ”

“Why, what for?”

“In case we need a quick escape.”

“There’s nothing outside but the street, and that’s two stories down,” I said.

“Consider it a last resort,” she said.

We huddled in the darkened room, anticipating disaster. The heat was oppressive. I could smell the approaching storm—a heavy, salty odor—and I wasn’t very fresh myself, though I had bathed that very morning. Perhaps Calyxa was equally conscious of her own scent—I was aware of it, but it wasn’t offensive to me—to me she smelled steamy and utterly distracting—but I won’t dwell on the matter.

Her brothers kept themselves downstairs for a great length of time, perhaps drinking and evaluating the tavern. But they were here for a purpose, and it was not to be indefinitely postponed. We heard footsteps on the stairs… it was Evangelica, the friendly waitress, come in stealth to warn us.

She knocked very faintly at the door of the room. “ They’re coming up!

” she whispered. “Arnaud and the bartender threatened them, but the Blakes showed their pistols and everyone is cowed. They mean to search all the rooms in the building—I have to go back! Be prepared.”

“Is your weapon loaded, Adam Hazzard?” Calyxa asked in a firm voice.

I took it out and made sure it was ready to fire.

“Give it to me, then,” she said.

“Give it to you!”

“I don’t want to burden you with the work of killing my brothers.”

“It’s not a burden—I only hope it doesn’t become a necessity.”

“Not a burden for you, but a positive pleasure for me.” (She was pretending to be bloodthirsty in order to spare my feelings, and my heart melted a little at her generosity.) “Give me the gun,” she said.

“I won’t.”

“Well, then, will you shoot them? Shoot them dead? Do you promise to shoot them?”

“At the first hint of a threat—”

“The hint has been given! Adam, they’re experienced murderers ! You must shoot them, as soon as you see their shadows—and shoot to kill, not to wound —or we’re already lost!”

“They can’t be as ferocious as all that.”

“Dear God! Give me the gun, I beg you.”

“No—if there must be bloodshed, I want it on my conscience, not yours.”

“Conscience!” She pronounced the word as if it were a lament. “ A quel genre d’idiot j’ai affaire? [Calyxa, unlike myself, was fluent in French, and sometimes fell into that language at odd moments. French has always been a mystery to me, and remains so; but I have taken pains to make sure her words are accurately transcribed.]

Maybe the window is the better option, if you won’t hand over the pistol…”

“Surely we needn’t jump to our doom!”

“I’m not suggesting we jump! The only danger is that we might fall. Quickly, Adam, I hear them on the stairs… take off your shoes!”

I obeyed without question, because she seemed to have some plan in mind, though I was not pleased that it involved the window. “Why am I taking off my shoes, though?”

“Leather doesn’t grip like flesh. Holster your pistol, to keep your hands available. Now follow me.”

I followed her as closely as I could through the darkened room, though not without stubbing my toe on a barrel-rim. Then she threw open the hinged window, admitting a gust of rain and a lightning-flash. The storm, which had threatened all day, was upon us. The rattle of thunder was continuous, and the wind howled mercilessly. I watched with disbelief as Calyxa put her upper body through the open window and squirmed until she was standing outside of it, her toes clasping the narrow sill. Then she grabbed a gable on the roof above and hauled herself up.

At last her pleasant face appeared again, upside down in the high end of the window frame. “Hurry, Adam! Take my hand.”

It was embarrassing to be assisted by a girl at such a time, but it would have been more embarrassing to be trapped by a Blake brother and shot, or to tumble to my death; so I took her hand, and put my bare feet on the rain-drenched sill, and tried not to think of the hard surface of the street below, or of the lightning that forked about the sky and fingered the lightning-rods of the city’s countless steeples.

“Now grasp the rim of the roof and pull yourself up!”

I doubted I could do so—I was convinced I could not—but a few breaths later I was lying beside Calyxa on the half-pipe ceramic tiles that capped the Thirsty Boot. We were inclined at a reckless angle, and in danger of sliding into the void. Rainwater sluiced over us freely. But we were, for this fraction of a moment, more or less safe—if that word can be stretched to cover the situation.

I turned to speak to Calyxa—her face was only inches from mine—but she put a finger to her lips and hushed me. “Your pistol?”

I took it from where I had secured it. It was a Porter Earle military revolver of modern design, and I was almost certain it wouldn’t be badly affected by the weather.

“Point it,” she said.

“At what?”

“Between your feet!” Where the roof ended, she meant: at the eaves-gutters, where we had just lofted ourselves up. I obliged her whim, steadying my right hand by bracing it with my left, and pressing the tiles with my feet to keep from falling. As warm as the day had been, the rain was plummeting down from some glacial height of the atmosphere, and I had to clench my teeth to keep from shivering. “Probably it won’t occur to them to look for us here,” said Calyxa. “But if they do, you must shoot the first person who attempts to cross the margin of the roof. In other words, if you see a head , put a hole in it. Now be quiet!”

I had no difficulty keeping quiet, and in any case it was a noisy night. The rain had the velocity of artillery fire, and it burst upon the roof with a similar impact. The roofs of these Montreal City buildings were irregular—they didn’t bear the stamp of the work of the Secular Ancients, which is an exacting symmetry; rather, they had been built over the dismantled remnants of older buildings, with haphazard attention to detail and no coherent plan. Water gushed down labyrinthine flues and runways, cascaded into bricked cisterns and holding tanks, and ran across the tiles in glistening washes. We might have been inside a flooding river, for all the noise we could contribute to it.

But Calyxa was listening intently for sounds from inside the room we had recently left, below us. She cupped her ear in that direction, and I tried to listen as well, though without success—or with too much success, for I imagined I heard innumerable thumps and rattles, any one of which might have signaled the approach of an angry Blake Brother. Suddenly Calyxa stiffened, and her eyes went wide. “Be ready, Adam!” she said.

I put all my attention on the eaves of the roof, though my heart was beating a military tempo. Rainwater in my eyes gave the scene a liquid inconstancy. I saw the tile-ends, and the edge of the eaves-gutter, and the high building across Guy Street , and a section of the street far below. There was a sound that might have been a window swinging wide and bouncing on its hinge-stops. Calyxa inhaled fearfully, and I reminded myself to continue breathing.