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* * * Roughly half an hour later, in a sudden shaft of brightness that fell some twenty miles west of Grand Street, a woman named Willy Bryce Patrick (soon-to-be Faber) turned her slightly dinged little Mercedes away from the Pathmark store on the north side of town and, instead of proceeding directly home, succumbed to temptation and drove two and two-tenths miles along Union Street’s increasingly vacant blocks. When she came to a vast parking lot with two homely sedans trickling through its exit, she checked her rear-view mirror and looked around before driving in. Irregular slicks of water gleamed on the black surface of the lot. Both of the men waiting to drive out of the lot took in the young woman entering their field of vision at the wheel of a sleek, snub-nosed car; one of them thought he were looking at a teenaged boy. Once inside, Willy drifted along until she had gone past three-fourths of the penitentiary-like building dominating the far end of the parking lot. Her shoulders rode high and tight, and her upper arms seemed taut as cords. Some twenty feet from the building, Willy pulled into an empty third-row space and regarded what was before her: a long shabby-looking brick structure, three stories high, with wide metal doors and ranks of filthy windows behind cobwebs of mesh. Around the back, she knew, the dock that led into the loading bays protruded outward like a pier over the surface of a lake. A row of grimy letters over the topmost row of windows spelled out MICHIGAN PRODUCE. That had been the start of it somehow. MICHIGAN PRODUCE: the words, not the building, which appeared to be a wholesale fruit and vegetable warehouse. Two days earlier, driving along inattentively, in fact in one of her “dazes,” her “trances” - Mitchell Faber’s words - Willy had found herself here, on this desolate section of what had started out as Union Street, and the two words atop the big grimy structure had all but peeled themselves off the warehouse, set themselves on fire, and floated toward her through the slate-colored air, aflame in all that grayness. Now, she asked herself, was that an accident? Willy had the feeling that she had been led here, that the “trance” had been charged with purpose, and that she had been all along meant to wander from her accustomed path and by doing so come across this building. Michigan Produce, produced by Michigan? This was not true of Willy, though strictly speaking it was not terribly far off, given that she had grown up in Illinois. From the point of view of New Jersey, where she now whiled away her hours, she hoped more or less cheerfully, Illinois and Michigan might as well have been the same state. The truth was that she had never so much set foot in Michigan. As far as she knew, she had never even flown over it. However, something about the state of Michigan had to mean a great deal to her, because the letters blazing on the big unprepossessing building had once again seized her as if by the throat. She wondered if this had ever happened to someone else, that for no apparent reason a previously disregarded building reared up and commanded all the attention available? And later kept seeping into their thoughts? Almost instantly, Willy dismissed the strange little vision that blazed abruptly in her mind, of a teenaged boy, skateboard in one hand, standing dumbstruck on a sunlit street before an empty but ordinary-looking building. Her imagination had always been far too willing to leap into service, whether or not at the time imagination was actually useful. That sometimes it had been supremely useful to Willy did not diminish her awareness that her wonderfully useful imaginative faculty could also turn on her, savagely. Oh, yes. You never knew which was the case, either, until the dread began to crawl up your arms. Right now, the image of a teenaged boy and an empty house added to the sum of disorder at large in the universe, and she sent it back to the mysterious realm from which it had emerged. Because: hey, what might be in that empty house? * * * The memory of the messages he had seen on Monday awakened Tim Underhill’s curiosity, and before going on to answer the few of the day’s e-mails that required responses, he clicked on Deleted Items, of which he seemed now to have in excess of four hundred, and looked for the ones that matched those he had just received. There they were, together in the order in which he had deleted them: Huffy and presten, with the blank subject lines that indicated a kind of indifference to simple decorum he wished he did not find mildly annoying, but did anyhow. He clicked on the first message. From: Huffy re member Yeah, sure. That was the opposite of dis member, Tim supposed, and dis member was the guy standing next to dat member. He tried the second one. From: presten no helo Useless, meaningless, a nuisance. Huffman and presten were kids who had figured out how to hide their e-mail addresses. Presumably they had learned his from the back flap of his latest book, Lost: This Boy, This Girl. He looked again at the two e-mails he had just dumped. From: rudderless no time and FROM: loumay there wuz There wuz, waz there? All of these enigmatic messages sounded as though their perpetrators were addled or half-asleep, or as though their hands had been snatched off the keyboard - maybe by the next customer, since the second messages came only minutes after the first ones. Wait, wait. what were the odds that four people savvy enough to delete the second half of their e-mail addresses would decide, more or less simultaneously, to send early-morning gibberish to the same person? And how much steeper were the odds against one of them writing “no helo,” whatever that meant, and another deciding, with no prior agreement, upon the echo-phrase “no time”? Although he thought such a coincidence was impossible, he still rejected it with some mild uneasiness. Because that left only two possibilities, and both of them raised the ante a bit above Tim Underhill’s comfort level. Either the four people who sent the e-mails to him were acting together in conspiracy, or the e-mails had all been sent by the same person using four names. He looked at the names, Huffy, presten, rudderless, loumay, without seeing anything like a pattern. The names were not familiar. A moment later, Tim remembered that back in Millhaven, Illinois, his home town, a boy named Paul Resten had been on the Holy Sepulchre football team with him for a single season. That Paulie Resten, who had been a chaotic little fireplug with greasy hair, a shoplifting problem, and a tendency toward violence, might decide after a silence of forty-odd years to send him a two-word e-mail seemed profoundly unlikely. Tim read the messages over again, thought for a second, then rearranged
them: which could just as easily have been or which wasn’t much of an advance, was it? Tim made a hmmm noise as another possibility came to mind, that “helo” could be a typo for “help.” No time/no help made more sense than no time/no helo. “Remember, there was no time, no help.” Whatever the hell that was about, it was pretty depressing. Also depressing was the notion that someone, even worse four someones, had decided to send him that message, and in dismembered form. If Tim felt like getting depressed, he had merely to think of his brother, Philip, who, one year after his wife’s suicide and the disappearance of his son, had announced his impending marriage to one Rusty Macnee, whom Philip had met on or about her emergence from the chrysalis of an exotic dancer as a born-again Christian. On the whole, Tim decided, he’d actually rather think about the inexplicable e-mails. Four people, sending four meaningless messages that connected up into one that only barely made sense? This had the slightly staid, slightly stale air of a Sherlock Holmes set-up. The rusty machinery of a hundred old detective novels could faintly be heard, grinding into what passed for life. Once upon a time, a prospective client very likely had walked into a brownstone on West 34th Street and laid this problem on the desk of Nero Wolfe. Here he was, Tim Underhill, confronted with a puzzle that might have come straight from genre fiction. Nonetheless, in the twenty-first century any such thing had first to be considered a possible threat. At the very least, some malign hacker could have compromised the security of his system. Before doing anything else, Tim checked for new downloads for his virus protection and learned his definitions were up to date. Then, almost certain he was wasting his time, he ran a full-system virus scan. It took forty minutes, and while it ran in the background he deleted spam and dealt with all the remaining e-mails from friends, fans, and people in publishing. He clicked on one button to contribute a dollar for breast cancer research and on another to register his objection to the invasion of Iraq, not that he thought it would do any good. He read Publisher’s Lunch and discovered that a writer named Arnold Wittig, who had said in The San Francisco Chronicle that his, Tim’s, fifth novel displayed its author’s “almost willful ignorance of his proper place,” had switched publishers for an advance said to be in excess of six million. Nice work, Arnie, you good and faithful watchdog. When the anti-virus program discovered nothing loathsome hidden within his numerous folders and files, Tim decided to procrastinate a little further and called his computer technician and guru, Myron Dorot-Rivage. Myron looked like a Spaniard, spoke with a musical German accent, and had rescued Tim and his companions at 55 Grand from multiple catastrophes. He was brilliant, rapier-like, always in motion. Needless to say, Myron was so busy that he seldom answered his cell phone but relied on an intricate system of callbacks followed by yet more callbacks. There were people who went through the process just for the pleasure of having him drop in for an hour - even if nothing had gone amiss inside your computer, his restorative voodoo could always perk it up. Amazingly, Myron answered his phone on the second ring. “So, Tim,” he said, being equipped with infallible caller ID as well as a headset, “tell me your problem. I am booked solid for at least the next three days, but perhaps we can solve it over the phone.” His breathing suggested that he was lying on his side while massaging the guts of a wounded computer with both hands. “It isn’t a computer problem, exactly.” “You are calling me about a personal problem, Tim?” “Maybe,” Tim said. “I’ve been getting these weird e-mails.” He described the four messages he had received. “I did a virus check and came up clean, but I’m still a little worried.” “You probably won’t get a virus unless you open an attachment. Are you bothered by the anonymity?” “Well, yeah. How do they do that, leave out their addresses? Is that legal?” “Legal schmeagle. I could arrange the same thing for you, if you were willing to pay for it. But what I cannot do is trace such an e-mail back to its source. Which is probably what you would like me to do.” “You can’t trace it back?” “Sorry, but that would be literally impossible. These people pay their fees for a reason, after all!” Myron drew in his breath, and Tim heard the clatter of metal against metal. It was like talking to an obstetrician who was delivering a baby. After they ended the call by making a vague arrangement to get together sometime in the coming week, Tim noticed that three new e-mails had arrived since his last look at his In-box. The first, Monster Oral Sex Week, undoubtedly offered seven days’ free access to a porn site; the second, 300,000 customers, almost certainly linked to an e-mail database; the third, nayrm, made the skin on his forearms prickle. The Sex and the customers disappeared unopened into the landfill of deleted mail. As he had dreaded, nayrm proved, when clicked upon, to have arrived without benefit of a filled-in Subject line or identifiable e-mail address. It had been sent at 10:58 AM, in other words, three minutes previous, and consisted of three words: hard death hard [END] |
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Not
long after 10:00 on a Wednesday morning of a rain-drenched June,
a comfortably worn-in novelist named Timothy Underhill finished
off both a mushroom omelet and The New York Times crossword puzzle
at a friendly neighborhood diner and returned, right on schedule,
to his third-floor loft at 55 Grand Street. He clanked his streaming
umbrella into an upright metal stand, transported a fresh cup of
decaffeinated coffee to his littered desk, parked himself in a tall,
flexible mesh chair bristling with controls, double-clicked on Outlook
Express’s arrow-swathed envelope, and called to the surface
of his screen the day’s first catch of e-mails, ten in all.
Tim Underhill had no way of knowing this, but two of these had been
sent by dead people. Because the messages came from strangers (whose
names came unattached to specific domains, he would notice later),
bore empty SUBJECT lines, and consisted of no more than a couple
of disconnected words each, he promptly deleted them. As soon as
he had done so he remembered deleting a couple of similar e-mails
two days earlier.