The Sea Peoples(54)
I have enough bad memories of my own! Why am I remembering someone else’s? How did I get chained up like this—
? ? ?
He climbed the three dilapidated flights of stairs, which he had so often climbed before. . . .
Wait a minute. Who am I? John thought, as he felt his feet on the worn wooden risers. Is this a hallucination, or a dream, or what? Where am I really? What am I really?
The thought was very much like teetering over a canyon, or hang-gliding at Hood River on the Columbia, but without the fun. His parents had once heard of a man who’d gone on a long journey to find himself, and had laughed uproariously together and said that if he couldn’t find himself at home, he wasn’t likely to do it by taking a caravan over the mountains. He hadn’t always been satisfied with who and what he was, but it had never been a matter of doubt.
Dreaming. You often think you’re someone else in dreams.
The thought calmed him; somewhere he could feel his heart slowing and frantic panting turning to deep breaths.
The man he dreamed . . .
And I’m dreaming I’m someone else dreaming I’m this man too. Someone else is dreaming he’s Hildred Castaigne.
. . . knocked at a small door at the end of the corridor.
It opened, pulled so by a mutilated dwarf barely four feet high, and he had only the stumps of ears. They were badly covered by two grotesquely perfect wax prosthetics, strung from a silver wire and painted a blushing pink in total contrast to the jaundice-yellow and fishbelly pallor of the man’s face. His eyes were the pale color of frosted lead cast too hot and let cool, but they smoldered. Fresh deep scratches scored the skin of his face, and others in successive stages of healing or infection; all the fingers were missing from his left hand, leaving only stubs that had healed to ragged lumps.
It wasn’t the injuries that made John’s mind recoil. He knew folk as ugly whose selves made their looks irrelevant. One of his instructors in the lute had been a knight who’d taken a spray of napalm across the eyes from an airburst flame-shell at the battle of the Horse Heaven Hills, and they’d been excellent friends from the first lesson. The thought of the man’s face still brought an immediate association of warmth and shared accomplishment even now, though strangers often gave involuntary gasps the first time they saw it.
It wasn’t even the odd shape of his totally bald head, lumpy and flattened and drawn almost to a point at the rear.
The eyes, it’s something about the eyes.
They gave him an unhinged feeling, as if just looking into them knocked the whole world askew, distorting the angles of things. The second sense of self within him—the man who dreamed he was Hildred Castaigne—felt a fascination mixed with dread. Castaigne himself . . . if that muffled wave of sensation was his . . . watched the dwarf with something not far short of love, seasoned with an odd mix of resignation and terror.
The room Castaigne entered was shabby in a dusty, neglected way that was somehow dirty without looking or smelling particularly filthy, things neatly placed in ways that made you confused just looking at them. It smelled of dust, old paper, ink, stale laundry and a not very well cleaned catbox.
Wilde, John thought, one of the bits that floated through the triply shared consciousness he unwillingly inhabited. The dwarf’s name is Wilde.
Wilde double-locked the door and pushed a heavy chest against it, then came and sat down in a chair with extra-long legs, while peering up into John’s face. A black cat retreated under a couch and growled faintly.
He’d handled the furniture effortlessly; he might be small but his shoulders were broad, his chest deep, and his legs stumpy but powerful. After an unnerving silent interval he picked up a massive leather-bound ledger, handling it effortlessly with his right and the fingerless stump of the left. Another stale gust hit John/Alan/Hildred’s face as it opened, and John would have sworn there was something like old fear-sweat as well, the sort of waft you got from an arming-doublet sometimes.
“Henry B. Matthews,” Wilde read. “Bookkeeper with Whysot Whysot and Company, dealers in church ornaments. Called April 3rd. Reputation damaged on the race-track. Known as a welsher. Reputation to be repaired by August 1st. Retainer Five Dollars.”
He turned the page and ran his fingerless knuckles down the closely-written columns.
“P. Greene Dusenberry, Minister of the Gospel, Fairbeach, New Jersey. Reputation damaged in the Bowery. To be repaired as soon as possible. Retainer $100.”
He coughed and added: “Called, April 6th.”
The dwarf coughed again and went on: “Listen. Mrs. C. Hamilton Chester, of Chester Park, New York City. Called April 7th. Reputation damaged at Dieppe, France. To be repaired by October 1st Retainer $500. Note.—C. Hamilton Chester, Captain U.S.S. Avalanche, ordered home from South Sea Squadron October 1st.”
“Then you are not in need of money, Mr. Wilde,” Hildred Castaigne said. “The profession of a Repairer of Reputations is lucrative!”
That’s a lot of money, John felt/knew, as his mind seemed to translate it into terms of rose nobles. Sort of middling-merchant guildsman money.
The colorless eyes looked up at him impassively. “I only wanted to demonstrate that I was correct. You said it was impossible to succeed as a Repairer of Reputations; that even if I did succeed in certain cases it would cost me more than I would gain by it. Today I have five hundred men in my employ, who are poorly paid, but who pursue the work with an enthusiasm which possibly may be born of fear. These men enter every shade and grade of society; some even are pillars of the most exclusive social temples; others are the prop and pride of the financial world; still others, hold undisputed sway among the ‘Fancy and the Talent.’ I choose them at my leisure from those who reply to my advertisements. It is easy enough, they are all cowards. I could treble the number in twenty days if I wished. So you see, those who have in their keeping the reputations of their fellow-citizens, I have in my pay.”