David Policar 1991
Gardson's pendant captured the bright lights of the Boston skyline, sparkling more brightly than the waves below. He held it tight-fisted, his arm cocked as if preparing to toss it over the bridge's railing and far out into the river. But instead he drew his arm back and held the pendant up to the streetlight.
This was the third time he'd done that since walking out onto the bridge, and by that point I was aching to at least know what the damned thing looked like. I saw the silver chain and the shiny stone, but any closer and he'd probably notice me. I was tailing him too closely as it was, on a bridge with no cover but passing cars between us, but I didn't want to lose him.
I almost lost him anyway when he turned back towards Boston; turning around to follow him would have been too obvious. But a minute later he stopped and turned around again, back towards me and the Cambridge riverside. Looked like he'd made a decision.
I wasn't going to take a shot at him on the busiest street in Cambridge. Too many potential witnesses, even late at night in the middle of a New England winter. But following him on the mostly empty streets was, again, too obvious. So I stayed in front, guessing he was heading to Harvard, where he'd started the evening.
Of course, once he got there I was probably in for another long wait before he was alone. He wasn't keeping to a pattern and I was out of time; I was going to have to create an opportunity, take a chance.
I hate taking chances.
I make it a point to find out everything I can about my targets, even when it takes weeks. It always pays off: no matter how many precautions a man takes, there's always a weak spot I can find. Unfortunately, my employers wanted the kid dead that night, and they had practically no useful information on him. Normally I turn down jobs like that, but at the time the job made sense.
Look: two tall black men (black, not the browns we're used to in the States) with thick foreign accents show up in my private office, the one nobody knows about. They're careful not to touch anything that might take prints, and offer to pay me in foreign coins, gold, lots of them. Their target was an exchange student from their country, Janus Gardson, a blond white guy barely in his twenties.
It added up to a political killing, one they needed a local for. The Gardson kid was someone's heir or some rich diplomat's brat. Those deals are always trouble in the movies, where mysterious figures always step out of the shadows to silence the shnook who takes the shot, but in the real world it doesn't work that way: everyone knows who's responsible, nobody can prove it, and nobody cares about the hired gun. The kid's new in town, no local friends, nobody owes him favors. Even the local cops lay off the case as soon as the political angle turns up. It's practically heatless.
I had the stuff checked, of course. Old Art Donnelly was an antique-coins freak from way back, and a damned good fence. I don't move much merchandise myself, you understand, but a man in my position gets to know a lot of people. Anyway, Donnelly didn't recognize the coin's markings, but it was real gold, purer than usual. Hell, he offered me full market rate for the thing! If it was typical, the box was worth a fortune... enough to retire on.
Sure, I still shouldn't have taken it as a rush job. But times had been tight, and that much gold can do strange things to a man's priorities. And... oh, hell, I don't know. They talked me into it. Gardson was a Harvard grad student, anthropology. A bit of snooping dug up a girlfriend's name and address, a single dorm room, regular fencing practice, and lots of after-hours work studying old crap in private offices. Plenty of chances to catch him alone, or with his pants down, right?
Wrong. I had a rifle trained on his girlfriend's bed when he showed up there, but he never even came into the room. She screamed, yelled, slammed the door, and he jackrabbited down the stairs and out the side door before I could reposition. I barely managed to put the rifle away without losing track of him.
Caught up with him a few buildings down and we waited on line together for twenty-four minutes while I watched his perfectly inviting back and tried not to be too obvious about keeping my hat-brim low. The perfect target, if we hadn't been in a crowded office with two security guards standing nearby. Campus cops, but still, why take the chance? So I watched him instead.
You can tell a lot about a guy from the way he stands still. Most folks don't -- they shuffle, sway back and forth, slouch, lean against things, check their watches, whatever. The rest are mostly military, or ex; they stand straight, arms fixed, holding a position as if waiting for inspection. Even when they try to slouch they can't quite bring it off. And then there are jokers like me, ex-military types who've practiced blending into civilian crowds, but even so there's a limit. We can move like just plain folks, but after a while you notice something's off.
Gardson was something else again. He didn't slouch, exactly, but seemed genuinely relaxed. Except he hardly moved a muscle. Tall kid, thin, relatively in shape, though not enough to worry about. Blond hair hanging straight down and tucked under his jacket collar, covering the ears. Smart move in winter. Nice clothes... not fancy, but custom fitted, probably expensive. No jewelery I could see. Basically, a whole lot of nothing.
Anyway, I won't bore you with the details. Let's just say that after two hours freezing my ass off outside his girlfriend's place, half an hour watching him cancel next term's classes, and twenty minutes waiting for a bus after ditching my hat, I was ready to strangle the kid. 'Course, I'd been ready to do that before we started.
Thought I had the perfect chance when he wandered through the Fenway, but I lost him somehow. Found him again half an hour later, jogging back towards Cambridge... then he stopped to admire that pendant of his, right in the middle of the bridge. Where'd he gotten it? And more importantly, how obvious was I when I switched gears, strolled casually, tried not to get too far ahead of him? I had no idea. Somehow, the kid had kept me from tagging him without being spotted for practically the whole night. I was seriously considering just taking him out in public and hoping nobody noticed.
So OK, I was an idiot. It honestly never occurred to me that he might have been playing me all along. He was just a kid, for Chrissake! Anyway, it wasn't till he got back on the campus and slipped himself through a basement window, left half-open in January, that the thought crossed by mind. So the question was, once my rabbit knew he was being stalked, would he fight or run? If I had known more about him I could have decided, but I was going in blind. I knew there was a reason I never do that.
So, lady or the tiger? Mentally, I tossed a coin and watched the sharp teeth and snarling snout of its head flip in and out of my mind's eye until it faced me from the ground. It was an unusual image, and prompted a gnawing doubt -- if he did fight, could I take him?
Empty room, dark. Dark hallway, flight of stairs at the end, receding footsteps. Another hall, a few doors, one doorknob warm to the touch -- bingo! Grabbed it, twisted, pulled. Locked. Way past time for subtlety, but I still winced at the crash of splintering wood... this just wasn't the way I normally did business.
His back was toward me as I dove into the oddly-lit room; I fired and hit the floor rolling. The impact came a second too late, surprisingly soft and damp -- something was wrong, but I had no time to worry about it. I rolled to my feet and tripped over an unexpected obstacle, botching my second shot and falling to the damp ground again. Bounced back up for a third shot, but the target was already down and bloody. That was as it should be, but nothing else was.
To my right was the treestump that fouled my second shot. It sat, absurdly, rooted in the equally-absurd damp grassy soil I had fallen on. Even that seemed normal, though, compared to the bright sunlight that was streaming through the window. Inside a Harvard office building. In January. In the middle of the night.
Dimly, I heard the call of a strange bird outside, and watched clouds covering the sun. A brisk wind blew through the dense forest that blocked much of the sky, shaking the leaves and blowing a warm draft on my back. A door slammed; behind me I saw a solid wooden door swinging in the wind, leading out to more damp, grassy soil. And then suddenly I had higher priorities.
Crazy Jack Mallone, my commander back in the day, used to crack that my head was wired to some other joker's body, and we didn't talk much. An aikido instructor years later put it differently, telling me I had mastered the art of fighting with the body and seeing with the mind. It's a knack that has saved my life more times than I care to think about; before I've fully acknowledged that a target exists, I'm already aiming at it. I felt the kick of the gun in my hand before I heard him move, or saw the knife in his hand, or noticed the flesh wound along his side where my shot had hit.
A fourth shot knocked itself off about when I realized he'd somehow dodged the last one, and passed under him as he made an impossible overhead leap. There wasn't a fifth shot, though... I felt the pain before seeing the flash of metal he threw. Gun, knife, and no small amount of blood landed in the corner. I threw myself in the other direction and rolled into a guard position.
Again, my brain caught up with my instincts... he'd probably move to cut me off from the gun, so I'd have a moment to recover while he was off-balance. But instead, I rolled up just in time to deflect a whistling roundhouse kick -- he was fast! I struck at the still-bleeding wound on his exposed side, the roundhouse became a blocking spin. Another strike connected while he was off-balance, but I felt him roll with it, away from me.
Perfect. He sidestepped my clumsy lunge before he regained his feet; I sailed past him and came up onto my feet with his knife in my left hand and my gun, levelled at his chest, in my right.
"I don't miss twice." It wasn't bravado... not entirely, anyway. I'm an excellent shot and was expecting his moves this time. I probably could have taken him then. But I'd missed twice before, and I needed a breather, and he was more wounded than I was. Taking a few seconds to stare each other down would do me more good than him.
Then he surprised me, slumping heavily to the ground, exhausted. Well, I don't care how fast the guy is, nobody can move from that position before I get three shots into him. And I had a lot of questions. Maybe he could answer them.
"You realize you're going to die?" It would help to get that topic out of the way early, I figured.
"Of course. As will you, undoubtedly, though perhaps not of the same causes. But I do hope you will forgive me if I attempt to put off my death as long as possible?" His voice had the same unusual lilt that my employers' had had, and he smiled more broadly at my silence.
"Very well," he continued, as if I'd agreed. "I assume you have been employed by my pursuers -- tall gentlemen, with accents like my own, but darkskinned?" An angry look flashed across his face.
"You aren't asking the questions here, friend. I am. Who's after you? Why?" Somehow, he had managed to take control of the conversation.
"You wouldn't believe me if I told you."
"Try me."
He laughed then, and a shiver ran up my spine. Not that his laugh was frightening, quite the contrary; besides, I gave up hiding under the covers when I got my draft notice. His laughter wasn't frightening, it was music. I didn't like it.
"Very well, my friend, I shall. They are ghosts."
My first reaction was to threaten him, but something in his voice stopped me. Whatever else he was, the kid was sincere -- it wasn't going to be easy getting real answers out of him.
"Of course, you don't believe me. Would you prefer it if I said they were holograms, or hypnotic suggestions, or figments of your imagination? Those are all true, also. The men who hired you weren't really there.
"Let me make some speculations. They appeared somewhere you frequent regularly, somewhere very privately yours, that very few other people know about. They touched nothing that they did not bring with them, certainly not you. They paid you in extremely unusual gold coins, which you were unable to identify."
He paused thoughtfully, as if trying to deduce more about my mysterious employers. That he knew this much about them confirmed that this was a political move -- I really wanted some answers out of him. Evidently, these jokers had a regular MO.
"They were practically motionless throughout your meeting, and remained standing at all times. If they walked, you heard no footsteps. Had you been close enough, you would have noticed no heartbeat and no breathing.
"Their manner... rushed but unable to say much about me. They indicated no knowledge of even the most basic aspects of everyday life -- at no point did they mention guns, automobiles, subways, trains, television, pizza, all-night diners, drive-in movies, and so forth. Any reference you made to anything of this sort was cleverly dismissed, ignored, or circumvented.
"At no point did they ever speak to you on the telephone, through speakers, or using any other voice mechanism. Recordings of their voices, if you made any, failed. Photographs and videotapes showed no sign of their presence.
"At no point did you and they handle the same coins. If they handled any, they were not the ones you were actually given. The coins felt somewhat unusual to you, if you have any familiarity with gold. Smoother, warmer than normal. If you had them inspected professionally, the difference was noticed and likely attributed to extreme purity. In point of fact, the difference is indicative of the true nature of the coins, which are nothing but disks of base metal which will lose their appearance as gold in a day or two. I suggest you sell them all before then."
I don't mind admitting that the kid was spooking me -- so far, he hadn't missed a trick. Of course, it wasn't that impressive: he knew who was after him, so it stood to reason that he'd be familiar with their attitudes and MO. The rest of it had to be guesswork -- he'd counted on my not having taped or photographed them, not having gotten close to them, not having kept the coins. Of course, whenever anyone throws that many guesses one after the other, their luck is bound to run out -- he had no way of knowing I was carrying a handful of coins with me.
"Nice try, kid. You actually had me going for a while there. Story time's over, though.
"Point one: I always videotape prospective employers, as insurance. Your friends showed up just fine. Point two: I happen to have a handful of those coins with me. So why don't we cut the crap and get to cases?"
He just looked at me. Somehow I couldn't meet his eyes.
"They did not show up on your videotape machine. Perhaps you are confused, perhaps simply lying, but nevertheless, any such tapes you may have made remained blank.
"As for the coins, if you brought them with you across the threshold, I suggest you look at them."
I had expected the kid to back down, or backpedal to explain away my fictitious videotape evidence. Instead, he pretty much called me a liar -- and he'd been right. Except for the coins.
"Let's get one thing straight, kid -- I never bluff," I bluffed.
Making sure to keep my gun levelled at him at all times, I slipped the knife into my belt and shrugged my left arm out of my backpack. I transferred the gun into my left hand, fully expecting and prepared for him to try to take me then, then removed the pack entirely when he didn't. Transferring the gun again, I fished through my supplies with my left hand until I found my pouch of coins. I tossed it, open, at the kid's feet.
In retrospect, I ought to have prepared for the shock. But I hadn't, and the sight of steel chips and pebbles scattered across the ground where I had expected gold grabbed my attention at precisely the wrong moment. Before I could recover, the kid had launched himself off the ground and snatched my gun, sidekicking me into the wall for good measure, and suddenly I was looking into the barrel of my own .45, aimed quite professionally at my chest.
"Nice move, kid. Very nice."
"Thank you."
"Whatever. Where'd you learn to pull a con like that, anyway? The bit with the coins nearly had me believing that crap -- you have quite a career ahead of you."
He smiled wryly, almost bitterly. "Yes, so I'm told. No 'crap', though. The gentlemen who hired you were projections, looking for an agent who could actually hurt me. They were strong enough to enchant you, but not much more than that -- nuisances, really.
"Of course, now I really do have to worry about them -- their magic works here."
Wonderful, I thought. There's a crazy man levelling my own gun at me.
Outside the window, the clouds had cleared again. Sunlight streamed through dense forest, almost jungle, of a kind I hadn't seen since the war. The air was hot, oppressive, tropical. The door still showed no signs of forced entry, and was still on the ground floor -- literally. This still wasn't the indoor office I'd entered on a blustery January night in Massachusetts.
The window itself was thick and solid, and locked. The lock was massive, easy to pick but hard to break. Whoever built here built to last. Wherever here was.
"This isn't Cambridge." It was inane, but somehow the words made the idea seem more real, so I repeated it. Possibly more than once, I forget. Eventually the idea, through repetition, went from unacceptable to self-evident. In turn, it opened up a floodgate of perceptions and sensations I had been ignoring.
You don't think much about smells unless they're strong and novel, but I could smell the air in that room was wrong, in a hundred subtle ways. I knew the smells of city and jungle, intimately, and this wasn't either. Plants, yes, and animals, and dirt, and insects. Not jungle, though.
At least, not Earth jungle.
"This isn't Earth?"
The words had come out on their own, but seemed more believable when said aloud.
"This isn't Earth," I said again.
I heard the tone of shock and hysteria edging into my voice. I had to get control of myself.
"This isn't Earth," I repeated with finality.
The kid smiled, and I saw him as if for the first time. A fine scar traced his jaw, but otherwise his features had a finely chiseled look to them, like a statue. His body was leaner than I remembered, stronger-looking somehow, a fighter's build. His hair had pulled loose in the fight; now he tied it into a ponytail. I looked away.
Absurdly, I found myself remembering a decades-forgotten high school English class. Mrs. Lee felt very strongly that students should not be coddled, and so she insisted on teaching at a rate she considered appropriate, and Devil take the hindmost. Any protests about her pace fell on deaf ears, so we never did make her understand that we were way ahead of her and bored to distraction.
When she devoted a full week to the format and length requirements of our term paper, we fought back against crushing boredom. Thus did The Story begin, a tale of a heroic band of adventurers, trapped within the demesne of an evil queen, seeking the fabled free lands of Summer. The Queen's lands were a dangerous place, inhabited by irregular verbs (mutant creatures with bug eyes and octopus tentacles, who would appear as harmless and inconspicuous tools until you tried to use them) and dangling participles (rarely a threat, but prone to lying in wait at the ends of long corridors and strangling unwary passers-by), but could be escaped through the Castle Term Paper.
Hundreds of passed notes chronicled the adventurers' passage through the Term Paper, first outlining its perimeter, then slaying the guards with a rain of index cards listing references and sources (mostly fictitious ones, conjured by magic from thin air). We avoided Term Paper's many traps and pitfalls, leaving behind the requisite number of words in every sentence we passed, keeping a one-inch margin from the walls on either side and the right number of blank spaces between our front and back lines. Our Queen paid little attention to the contents of Term Paper so long as the forms and protocols were followed.
Of course, we were spotted occassionally, note-passing being at best an uncertain medium of communication. Mrs. Lee's face upon reading one note (which read "'To immediately teleport' would be faster, but of course I know better than to split an infinitive with an adverb, and you never do know when an unknown infinitive might turn out to be an irregular verb, so I'll use 'to advance carefully', instead.") was a priceless study in inarticulate confusion (she never did figure out why proper grammar inspired such fervent enthusiasm in her students, nor would she have understood had we explained it).
Finally we made it to the Final Draft, which conveyed us to the land of Summer. No one understood why we arrived at graduation in elaborate fantasy costumes until Craig, our wandering minstrel, published the compiled notes in the school paper.
Craig's an electrician, married, three kids, house in the suburbs. I dropped out of college, got drafted, survived, did intelligence work for a few years, and became a professional assassin. Funny how life works, sometimes.
We met again at a class reunion and were introduced to Dungeons and Dragons, a role-playing game with a familiar flavor. In short order we were braving our newest challenge, the Castle of Financial Success -- unfortunately, the Elf I was playing made a wrong turn into the Maze of Purposeless Existence, following the brightly-colored ghost of Instant Gratification, and the party was forever lost.
I never played again, but after the war Blueblade Elfson formed an alliance in my dreams with the Grey Mouser, Fafhrd, and an ill-rendered Superman of my early boyhood to battle the nightmares. By the time they all died their bloody deaths (even Superman), I had learned to shoot back on my own.
I could still see Blueblade Elfson, young as only a figment (or, I suppose, an Elf) can stay young, and shook my head to clear it. When an armed lunatic is holding you captive is no time to completely lose your grip on reality! When I opened my eyes again, though, Elfson remained, slightly altered -- hair a little longer, robes gone, eyes shining gold rather than my imagined ice-blue but still slightly almond-shaped and large, and somehow familiar. I shook my head again, more forcefully this time, and stars swam in my vision, but Elfson's face remained.
"Look at me," that face repeated through oddly thin lips, and suddenly, finally, the visions of my fantasies cleared away, leaving me face-to-face with a reality that differed from it barely, if at all.
"You're an Elf," I said, this time half-expecting the sense of belief that followed the absurd declaration.
My captor, loosening his hair to once again cover the points of his ears, merely smiled.
"You're an Elf," I repeated slowly, tasting each word. Despite having heard it twice, from my own lips, it still sounded like lunacy.
"You..." - Be quiet!, I shouted at myself. No matter what, I was being irrational -- either I was hallucinating, in which case I had completely snapped, or I wasn't, in which case I had no excuse for not saying it out loud. I couldn't shake the feeling, though, that to actually say it would somehow make it true. Which meant, of course, that if I didn't I was crazy.
"...are..." Be crazy! Everything else in the damned world is! It was an echo from the past, and a philosophy that had kept me going through three years overseas and fourteen worse years at home. It didn't work this time, though. Whatever I thought I knew about the world was meaningless at that moment -- I no longer believed a word of it. What was real, what mattered, was what I could see...
"...an Elf."
He smiled again. "Yes." Somehow he looked different. He was taller, leaner, with an unusual skeleton; his angular features had sharpened further, and his eyes shone a liquid gold. There was no doubt in my mind that whatever he was, it wasn't human.
At just that moment, a three-legged ocelot with purple wings could have walked up and invited me to a dinner party and I would have cheerfully inquired about the menu -- after a certain point, the human mind becomes unwilling to accept any further stress. So when he disappeared with a faint "pop" in a flash of blue light, and my gun fell to the ground where he had been, and a half-dozen other elves burst into the room and held me at swordpoint, I just watched.
It was going to be a long day.