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

I lifted the lamp to get a good look—

If Durell Coll’s reputation was built on gloomy perceptions of a hostile universe, the man himself, at least during his early years on Rimway, had always enjoyed a good party. He was usually surrounded by women, and loved to spend the long winter evenings (we lived high in the northern hemisphere) talking and drinking with old friends.

He laughed easily; and nothing amused him more than suggestions by people who should have known better that his work needed cheering up. More vitality, they used to say. More life.

It was only toward the end that the shadows that had been lengthening across his art began, finally, to darken his features. And a Durell Coll that I did not know appeared, a man who took solitary strolls through snow-filled streets, who endured intense nightmares of which he would not speak, and who ultimately withdrew into a world not unlike that of the Cordelet .

It was the early Durell that I preferred to remember, and whom I’d hoped to find in the old studio.

What I found instead was something dredged out of the soul of a madman: a face barely human, rendered in Durell’s painfully realistic fashion. It was of a man in middle age, with a full beard and commanding features. But his terror-ridden eyes gaped out of deep black sockets. The mouth was twisted in a frightful snarl, and flecks of saliva flew from the beard.

I stumbled backward over a hand truck. The light went out, and I was not at all anxious to put it back on. Instead, I lay in the dark, listening to the sound of my own breathing, feeling the palpable presence of the thing on the wall, trying to understand how a young Durell Coll, my Durell, could have created the monstrosity.

There was no doubt: it was his work. Despite the lurid nature of the subject, tone and texture were clearly his.

I’d bruised an elbow, and the pain began to intrude itself. I rubbed it, grateful for the distraction.

Who was the bearded man? I wondered whether he’d actually existed, or whether the tortured image had been constructed from whole cloth. In a sense, I supposed I had what I’d come for: an unknown work by Durell, a previously unsuspected creation. It would be worth a lot of money.

But not to me.

The image appeared, at first, to be badly faded, until I realized someone had painted over it. And then, not satisfied, had covered the result with panels. But over the years, the paint had faded, and only the image remained.

And the other panels: what lay under them ? I played my light across the swirl of spring colors, and my heart sank.

The sensible thing would be to leave. God knows the place had chilled and I wanted to get out of there, and off Fishbowl, and to put behind me, somehow, the last four years of my life.

I removed a second panel. There was enough light from outside to see that there was another sketch. I hesitated, and put the lamp on it.

It was the same hideous figure.

And I uncovered another , next to the second.

I was slow to realize that the three images, however, were not identical. The angle of the profile changed from one to another, the shading in each set of eyes was subtly different, the beards—I took them all down, ten or eleven panels: the same face appeared again and again, its grotesque expression, each time, varied in some way.

My Durell. The gentlest, finest human being I had known.

I replaced the panels. If there had been a way, I would have razed the walls, or destroyed the building. No wonder the proprietor of the crockery shop had been frightened of me.

Fishbowl’s chess club meets in a glass-lined conference room on the second level of the Annex, which is a flattened pyramid adjacent Survey’s main administration building. On the night of my visit, there were roughly a dozen games in progress, and one spectator, an elderly woman with the glittering eyes of a bird of prey. She immediately challenged me to play.

I declined politely, whispering that I did not understand the game (an explanation which provoked a brief look of disbelief), and inquired whether she’d ever heard of Durell. She hadn’t, and I settled in to watch for an opportunity to ask someone else. The only sounds in the room were the occasional scraping of chairs, and the ticking of chess clocks.

It was difficult to find a way to talk to any of them. Players had a tendency to resign merely by stopping the clock. Then, within moments, they’d reset the pieces and begun again. Not that it mattered: when I tried to ask questions, people shook their heads irritably, and looked pointedly at their boards.

I retired from the field of combat, and settled for intercepting players on their way to the washroom. Two or three remembered Durell, but only as someone who came occasionally to the club. (“Liked to play the Dragon Variation of the Sirian, but he was far too cautious.”)

Toward the end of the evening, I approached an overweight, red-faced little man whose name was Jon Hollander. Hollander was one of the club’s officers. Someone told me later that chess was the consuming passion of his life, but that he wasn’t very good at it. “I don’t recall him, Tiel, but we’ve had a lot of members over the years. What precisely did you want to know?” He looked at me the way men do when they’ve been a long time without a woman.

I had no idea. “He was an old friend. I suppose I just wanted to talk with someone who’d known him,” I said.

“And you can’t find anybody?”

“Not really.”

He nodded. “Maybe we can find something in the archives.”

We left the clubroom, and turned into a long carpeted corridor that curved and rose until we’d ascended approximately one floor. He led the way into an office, and sat down at a terminal. “There may not be anything,” he said, “but we can try.”

He punched in Durell’s name. Dates and numbers appeared. Hollander tapped the screen. “He was a member for almost two years.” He grinned. “He had some problems paying his dues.”

“What else do you have?”

“Address and code number. You want those?”

“No.”

Hollander frowned. “How about one of his games? We have three on record.”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“Looks like he lost them all anyhow.”

“You don’t have a picture of him, do you?”

Hollander pushed a pad, and an index appeared. “No,” he said, running his eye down the names. “We have several group photos from the period when he was a member, but he doesn’t seem to be in any of them.” The index faded, to be replaced by several people in parkas, standing outside the Annex during a snowstorm. “The Second Winter Open. Coll played in that tournament, but I guess he wasn’t around when they took the picture.” Another group appeared, still cold weather, but the snow was gone. “This was our first Masters’, the same year. He wasn’t eligible for that one.”

He changed it again, for an indoor shot. But something had struck me about the Winter Open, and I didn’t know what. “Go back to the first one, Jon,” I said.

The snow scene reappeared. Three women were seated on a bench, in front of four men. “That’s me on the left,” said Hollander.

“Who’s that beside you?”

He squinted. “Looks like Ux.” The man was bigger than Hollander, shorter than the other two. Although his hood was tied down against the chill of the day, he wore a wide smile. Hollander brought his image up. “Yes,” he said, “it’s Reuben Uxbridge. Did you know him?”

I knew him: his was the face on the wall. “Who is he?”

Hollander’s features softened. “He was a charter member. One of the strongest players we’ve ever had. He specialized in the end game. Absolutely deadly once the queens were off the board.”