It was a splendid party, and
up to a point Billy Boggs did have a wonderful time.
Sheila had never looked
lovelier. Deciding to go all out in the matter of traditional evening dress,
she had unwrapped one of her treasures, a formal gown that had been her
grandmother's.
"This was the height of haute
back in the 1970s," Sheila said as she twisted to inspect the drape of the
dress in back. It was a slim silver sheath glimmering with sequins and crusted
with crystal beads that swayed and faintly chimed.
"But can you sit down in
it?"
"Yes, if I'm very
careful."
Boggs rented a tuxedo from a
theatrical costumer and thought he looked surprisingly distinguished in it,
although the crimson cummerbund did draw attention to his middle. He drew
himself up and sucked in his stomach, and the mirror showed him a man of
substance and dignity.
His cheerful mood seemed
indestructible. As for the rumors of an affair... well, people had malicious
tongues, and Humphrey's was sharper than most. With this in mind, Boggs was
cool when the Hump greeted them on their arrival at the house.
The party was held in
Humphrey's own home, a big, sprawling, two-century-old mansion surrounded by
elaborate gardens and crammed with a hodgepodge of expensive though peculiar
furniture and art objects. He had a mania for collecting that was more
energetic than disciplined, as Boggs had often pointed out.
"It shows why you never
married," he'd said on one occasion. "You've put all your mental and
physical energy into assembling people and things and moving them around to
suit yourself. The relationship of marriage requires more humility and
self-restraint than you're capable of."
On this occasion, however,
Humphrey seemed eager to efface himself and focus everyone's attention on his
oldest friend. With his own voice he announced Bill and Sheila on the speakers
as they arrived, and at once, with uncommon tact, walked away and allowed them
to be the centre of the crowd that flocked from the rooms all around.
All their friends and
acquaintances were there. Literary rivals, media colleagues, old school pals,
even Billy's few relatives. Ken Sharp handed him a glass of champagne and told
him what a fine figure he cut in that tuxedo. The daily and monthly editors
hovered and said fervently and uncharacteristically kind things about his
latest articles. Two women, friends of Sheila's, kissed him affectionately.
Boggs beamed with genuine
pleasure at first. But after fifteen minutes of this friendly uproar his face
began feeling stiff and unnatural. He started to wish he hadn't come after all.
He was relieved when Humphrey, now present only in voice, announced dancing to
a live twentieth-century style band in the large drawing room. For the more
sedate the treat was to be a tour of the private art collection, conducted by
Humphrey himself.
Hand in hand, Billy and
Sheila wandered over to the buffet. Here they found waitpersons in black
dresses and white aprons, instead of overalls, and with silly bits of white
frill on their heads. They served a variety of foods on china dishes.
Boggs, who had studied the
previous century thoroughly, knew what all the concoctions were, and he noted
with a sniff that Humphrey had, as usual, mixed old and new in a careless
mishmash.
"Look at that! Beef
shishkabob -- must have cost him the earth! -- and synpro croquettes right next
to them. And that white pasty stuff beside the jellied miso, that's potato
salad."
"Hm." Sheila
sampled a spoonful. "I think I can guess why it went out of style."
Nearby stood silver urns of
real coffee and tea, and rank upon rank of sea-green champagne bottles. Boggs
felt his mood soften again. He was actually enjoying himself. The food was
delicious, even the historical dishes, and a haunting melody by some long-dead
folk singer floated in from the drawing room. The subdued lighting mellowed him
still more. In fact, most of the lights had been turned off and replaced by
clusters of tall white candles.
"Hump really has no
sense of period," Boggs said. "They didn't live by candlelight in the
late twentieth century, they -- " He glanced at Sheila, but she wasn't
there. She was not in the dining room. He looked this way and that among the
crowd, and then he froze.
Just behind the row of coffee
urns, standing like a black pillar, he saw the servitor.
Seeing him, Boggs realized
why he hadn't spotted him before. The man was dressed exactly like most of the
male guests, in traditional black and white. At the level of his waist he
carried a small silver tray, richly embossed and scalloped, and on the tray
stood a twinkling crystal glass. It was three-quarters full of a pale golden
liquid.
Boggs stood very still and
looked into the man's face. A dark, quiet face that might have been dead or
carved of wood, except that the eyes were open, and black, and they glittered.
And they looked straight into his.
Boggs felt his heart contract
with a sickening boom, and then begin to pound. A drop of sweat ran down past
his ear. He felt cold to the bone. Oddly enough, at that moment his worst fear
was that he would drop his plate from shaking hands and make a disgraceful and
public mess on the floor. He took three steps and set the plate down on a table
near the door. Looking back, he saw the servitor moving slowly through the
crowd towards him.
He bolted into the next room.
A wave of panic hit him then and turned him blind. The last time he'd felt like
this, fifty-five years ago, he'd heard Something stir under his bed and knew
Something was crouching there in the dark, waiting for him to put his foot out.
Then panic receded, or he was
able to force it back from the front of his mind. He felt adult again. The
lapse had lasted only two seconds, when he'd stood and glared wildly about,
chest heaving. Now he took a deep breath and went in search of Sheila.
The enormous drawing room was
crammed with people from wall to wall, couples bobbing around in time to the
music, or sometimes not in time. A noisy, baffling place, made more mysterious
by the changeable candlelight.
Finally he spotted Sheila
three yards away, standing against the room's central pillar, talking to a
stranger. The man was perhaps twenty-five years old, perhaps younger; tall,
slim and strikingly handsome in a polished, fashion-conscious style, and the
look in his eyes was anxious and questioning. Boggs saw all that instantly.
Sheila was speaking urgently,
that was plain, though he couldn't hear the words. Her eyes ate up the man's
face; her hand kept reaching for his sleeve. Then, as she glanced around
nervously, her eyes caught Billy's. Such a look of guilt and panic flooded her
face that his chest jerked with sudden pain.
She was... It was all true.
While he stared, she seized
the man's arm and rushed him into the jigging crowd. Her silver dress flickered
like a trout in a stream, and then was gone.
He became aware then that the
crowded room was not crowded where he was. There was a space around him. Nobody
came near, and nobody looked at him. He began to walk, moving his eyes
deliberately from face to face. Bland smiles and glazed eyes deflected his
glance. If any eye by accident met his, it slid away at once. He had become -- not
exactly invisible, but untouchable. His impending death made a glass shell
around him.
"As far as they're
concerned, I'm already dead," he muttered.
Savagely he shoved the
thought of Sheila into the back of his mind and kept it there. He wasn't afraid,
now, so much as angry. Even when the band swung into the soft, sweet strains of
"Crossing O'er Jordan," he didn't panic again. He looked for the
servitor who carried death on a tray, and saw him standing near the door to the
dining room, turning his head slowly this way and that, searching. Quickly, but
not in a rush, Boggs walked out of the room, through the foyer and out of the
big front door.
The sky was a satiny dark
blue. The air was cool and scented with lilacs. Boggs noted these things as he
marched down the driveway towards the gate, a pair of tall, elaborately
scrolled openwork panels in the iron fence. The gate was closed and locked when
he reached it. At least, it wouldn't budge and he believed it was locked: it
was hard to be sure of anything in the dark. The gateway should have been lit,
he knew, but all the grounds were drowned in darkness. At the centre, the house
was a looming crag starred with light.
Beyond the gate, a wide
border of trees and shrubbery screened the property from the streets around.
The night was quiet, traffic a murmur on distant highways.
Boggs squeezed his eyes shut
and tried to think. Why would the gates be locked? Well, against burglars, of
course. There would be guards somewhere around too, and alarms on the fence.
But those were to keep people from getting in. Why should they stop someone
from getting out?
He guessed the gate was eight
feet high, but with all those iron tendrils it couldn't be too hard to climb,
even for a sedentary sexagenarian. He put out a hand to the bars... then
hesitated and stepped back into the shadow of a lilac bush. Something had moved
in the shadows on the other side of the gate.
In a moment a uniformed guard
came into the edges of light cast by the house. A dog on a leash strained from
his hand. It poked its muzzle through the bars and growled. The man drew his
gun, a solid and gleaming object, unmistakable even in the half-dark.
With exquisite care, Boggs
eased backward until the shrubbery cut off his view of the gate. Then he
started around the perimeter of the grounds, looking for another way out. It
was clear to him, now, what the plan was. He would be shot, and the gun placed
in his hand. An unusual method of suicide these days. People would say how
typically old-fashioned it was.
But the documents! The
Intent-to-Suicide forms! Boggs felt a sudden surge of hope, then shook his
head. They hadn't filed the forms (he avoided naming "them" in his
thoughts) because they had anticipated his suspicion. There were ways to alter records
after the fact, though: a serious crime and expensive to buy, but it could be
bought.
He found no way to climb the
fence, which was as tall as the gate and made of straight iron bars. From time
to time he heard footsteps on the other side, and the quick panting of a dog.
By the time he reached the back of the house, where the vehicles were parked,
he knew he was trapped. He was unsurprised to see a row of vans drawn up near
the back door, with the white Charon logo (a hand grasping an oar) clearly
visible on the black paint.
By the side of the nearest
van a shadow stirred, separated and became a man dressed in black, his chest a
flash of white. Something in his hands caught the starlight. Smoothly he
approached, halted in front of Boggs, respectfully bent his head, and presented
the tray.
Boggs stood frozen a moment,
not quite breathing. It never occurred to him to strike the man or otherwise
put up a physical fight. About the servitor there was an air of something that
could not be fought physically, something as impersonal and elemental as death
itself.
He reached out and picked up
the glass. The gesture was one of bravado. It was a beautiful object, he told
himself, hand-cut, heavy, costly. Its facets glittered like diamond. He looked
into it, sniffed it: he could smell the champagne.
It was both terrifying and
absurd that these few millilitres of chilled liquid were all that lay between
him, alive on this earth, and... nothingness. This glassful of wine was more
powerful than the biggest bomb that ever was. For Billy Boggs, it had the power
to wipe out the cosmos. The ultimate power, and all here in a little glass.
"And after all," he
muttered half aloud, "what have I got left to live for?"
The dark servitor stared at
him, motionless as a graven image.
end
of part 4