Джек Макдевитт - Cryptic - The Best Short Fiction of Jack McDevitt

We lost the cable at four o’clock, and with it the Weather Channel.

Gradually, the light faded out of the sky. I put on steaks and Helen made up a salad. Our timing was perfect because the power failed just as we put everything on the table. I lit a couple of candles, and she sat in the flickering light and looked happy. If the clouds had not dissipated, at least for these few hours they had receded.

Afterward, we retreated into the living room. The music had been silenced by the power outage, so we sat listening to the fire and the whisper of snow against the house. Occasionally, I glanced up at the door to the wardrobe, half-expecting it to open. I tried to plan what I would do if Shel suddenly appeared on the landing. I was caught in the ultimate eternal triangle.

It did not happen. We talked into the early hours, until finally she gave out and fell asleep. I moved her to the sofa and went upstairs for blankets. The heating system, of course, was not working, nor was anything else in the house. The second floor was already cooling off, but I had plenty of firewood.

I settled into a large armchair and drifted into sleep. Somewhere around two, I woke and lay for a time, listening to the silence. The fire was low. I poked at it, and tossed on another log. Helen stirred but did not waken.

The storm must have passed over. Usually, even during the early morning hours, there are sounds: a passing car, the wind in the trees, a dog barking somewhere. But the world was absolutely still.

It was also absolutely dark. No stars. No lights of any kind.

I pointed a flashlight out the window. The night had closed in, wrapped itself around the house so tightly that the beam seemed to plunge into a black wall. I felt internal switches go to alert. It looked like an effect out of a Dracula film.

I picked up the phone to call the 24-hour weather line. But it was dead.

“What is it, Dave?” Helen’s voice was soft in the dark.

“You awake?” I asked.

“Sort of.”

“Come take a look out the window.”

She padded over. And caught her breath. “Where’d that come from?”

“I don’t know.”

We went outside. It was the thickest, darkest fog I’d ever seen. We didn’t sleep well the rest of the night. At about six, Helen made toast over the fire, and I broke out some fruit juice. The lights were still off. More ominously, there was no sign of dawn.

I wondered about Ray White, my neighbor. Ray was a good guy, but he lived alone in a big house, and I thought of him over there wrapped in this goddamn black cloud with no power and maybe no food. He wasn’t young, and I thought it would be a good idea to go check on him.

“I’ll go with you,” Helen said.

I got an extra flashlight, and we let ourselves out through the sliding door. I locked up, and we stumbled around until we found the pathway that leads down to the front gate. The flashlights didn’t help much. The beams just got swallowed. There’s a hundred-year-old oak midway between the house and the stone wall. It’s only about ten feet off the walk, but we could not see it. In fact, I could barely see Helen.

We picked our way to the front gate. I opened it, and we eased out onto the sidewalk. “The entrance to Ray’s house is across the street, about twenty yards down,” I said. “Stay close.”

We stepped off the curb. Her hand tightened in mine. “Be careful,” she said. “Somebody might be trying to drive.”

Carmichael is two lanes wide. It is blacktop, and bordered by a single line of bricks on either side, just below the curb. We intended to cross it in a straight line, and I warned Helen about the curb on the other side which, under these conditions, would be easy to trip over.

But we kept walking and never came to a curb. No curb and no sidewalk. After a while I was sticking out my foot, trying to determine what lay ahead. And then I knelt down and held the flashlight close to the road surface. “This is rock ,” I said, staring at the ground. Where the hell was there rock on the other side of Carmichael Drive? A patch of grass, yes, and some concrete. But not rock.

Something in my voice scared her. “You sure you know where we are?”

“Yes,” I said. “Of course.”

The rock was black. It almost looked like marble.

“Which way did we come?” she asked.

It was a bad moment. We stood in the street, on the sidewalk, wherever, and I had got turned around and had no idea.

“Stay,” she said. I tried to keep her from walking off, but she just repeated the word.

After a minute I heard her voice. “Talk to me.”

“I wish we weren’t lost.”

“That’s good. Keep talking.” Her voice came from my right, maybe ten yards away. I started chattering, and she said okay, don’t stop. But don’t move. She was circling me. Finally, in my rear, she said, “Okay, I’ve got it. Come this way.”

As nearly as I could make out, the blacktop ended near White’s side of Carmichael Drive. It just seemed to turn to rock. There was no distinct dividing line, but rather simply a gradual, uneven transformation from the one to the other.

I tried calling White’s name. But no one answered.

“Are you sure we came out the right way?” Helen asked.

Saturday, November 26. Late morning.

I woke up in a room lit only by a low fire. The powes was still off. “You okay?” Helen asked. Her voice was thin.

I looked at the clock on the mantel. It was almost noon.

She came over and sat down beside me. “I’ve never seen weather like this,” she said.

I got up, collected snow, and melted it to make water. (It’s amazing how much snow you have to melt to get a little water.) I went into the bathroom, and, with the help of a flashlight, brushed my teeth. I tried to draw the bathroom around me, as a kind of shield against what was happening outside the house. The shower. The medicine cabinet. A couple of bars of soap. It was familiar, my anchor to reality.

When I returned downstairs, Helen was putting the phone back in the cradle. She shook her head no. It was still out. We opened a can of meat, added some vegetables, and cooked them over the fire. No matter what happened, we were in no personal danger. That was good to know, but it did not ease my fears.

Helen said she wasn’t hungry, but she ate well anyhow. So did I.

It had to do with Shel. I knew that beyond any doubt. We were in the presence of the irrational. I wondered whether we had already done irreparable damage, whether the old world had already receded beyond recall? I was terrified.

When we’d finished eating, I went upstairs to the wardrobe. Shel would be easy to find.

He was standing where I knew he would be: on the slopes of Thermopolae watching the troops come in. He looked good. Tanned. Fit. Almost like a man on vacation. There were a few lines around the eyes, and I knew that, for him, several years had passed since the funeral.

“Shel,” I said. “We need you.”

“I know,” he said gently. Below us, the Thespians were examining the ground on which they would fight. Out on the plain, north of the pass, we could see the Persian army. They stretched to the horizon. “I will go back.”

“When?”

His eyes took on a hunted look. “When I’m ready. When I’m able . There’s no hurry, Dave. We both know that.”

“I’m not so sure,” I said. “Something’s wrong. We can’t even find the rest of New Jersey.”

“I’m trying to live my life,” he said. “Be patient with me. I have a lot to do yet. But don’t worry. You can count on me.”

“When?”

“We have all the time in the world. Relax.”