Michael Jasper & Tim Pratt & Greg van Eekhout - Gillian Underground.pdf
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G
ILLIAN
U
NDERGROUND
M
ICHAEL
J
ASPER
, T
IM
P
RATT
,
G
REG
VAN
E
EKHOUT
In the year since she’d dropped out of college, Gillian had hitched her way all
over the South, from the waterfront elegance of Savannah to the wroughtiron
decadence of New Orleans. She’d visited Dr. King’s church in Alabama and looked
for peacocks in Flannery O’Connor’s yard in rural Georgia. Now after four straight
days of hitching by sunlight and sleeping rough, fleeing a bad scene at a country bar
in West Virginia, she’d fetched up in the North Carolina mountains, on the road
near the outskirts of a town. The spring sky above was stern and gray, a wind
howling down from the weathered peaks, threatening rain.
Welcome to Dearborne, the sign by the roadside read. From what she could see
Dearborne was a big town trying to burst the boundaries of its valley and become a
city. The name sounded familiar. There was a college here, maybe. She shouldered
her patched camouflage bag and walked past the sign, wincing whenever she
stepped on her left foot, where a blister had burst on her heel.
Gillian desperately wanted a cup of coffee, and downtown looked very far
away. She stopped at a bench on the side of the road and looked at the schedule
nailed there. A bus would be along in a few minutes. She sat down to wait,
wondering if the sky would open up and drench her, if she should muster the
necessary motivation to get the poncho out of her bag. A good cold rain would
wake her up as well as a few cups of coffee, but she couldn’t afford to risk getting
pneumonia. Opening the bag would mean looking at the cowboy hat again, though,
and that would bring back too many bad, bizarre West Virginia memories. Plus,
there’d be the temptation to put the hat
on
, that dangerous urge against selfinterest
that Edgar Allan Poe called the “imp of the perverse.”
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M
ICHAEL
J
ASPER
, T
IME
P
RATT
, G
REG
VAN
E
EKHOUT
Her chin dropped to her chest the moment she allowed herself to relax. She
promised herself she wouldn’t nap, that she just needed some mental downtime.
Feeling herself begin to nod off, she snapped her head up, and found the lady
sitting next to her on the bench.
“You again,” Gillian said.
The lady smiled. “Me, always. And you’re still doing the hobo thing, I see, my
little bindlestiff. Are you eating well? Getting enough vitamin C?”
“I’m doing okay.” Gillian ran her hand over the rough wood of the bench. The
texture was so real. So present. Everything in these dreams with the lady always
seemed so right and normal, except for the lady herself.
Gillian had first encountered the lady while still in school, in the balcony of her
college’s largest lecture hall. The lady had whispered mysteries and promptings in
her ear while Gillian dozed to the drone of an anthropology lecture. The next day,
acting on urges as inexplicable as they were irresistible, Gillian had left school and
become a wanderer. She’d seen the dreamlady half a dozen times since then, while
watching her clothes spin around in a Laundromat, or drinking hot chocolate alone
in the booth of an allnight diner, or waiting out the heat of the afternoon in a small
town library reading room. Gillian could never quite remember their conversations
afterwards, but she always woke with a renewed urge to
move
, to put distance
between herself and the site of the latest dream.
Today, the lady wore a green raincoat and a big lighthouse keeper’s hat. She
could not have looked more regal had she been wearing erminetrimmed robes and
a diamondencrusted crown. “Wander as you will, my pea blossom,” she said. “All
roads lead to me. I’ve enjoyed the chase, but you can’t run forever. You belong in
my story.” She reached out to stroke Gillian’s cheek.
A hiss of air brakes woke Gillian, cutting the dream short.
A gleaming white and blue bus waited in front of the bench. Gillian tried to
shake off the sleep, pulling herself to her feet. The world spun for a second, and
Gillian had to grip the bench to keep from falling.
The bus doors opened, and an old man in a denim ball cap with “Dearborne”
emblazoned on it in bold black letters nodded to her from behind the wheel. He
didn’t bat an eyelash at her peroxidestreaked black hair, or the six silver rings all
around her ear and the one in her eyebrow, or her mostlyshredded jeans. Definitely
a college town, Gillian decided.
She dropped a dollar in the fare box (trying not to think what percentage of her
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ILLIAN
U
NDERGROUND
total wealth that constituted) and sat down on a hard blue seat. The only other
person on the bus was a ratlike man in the back. He wore a shapeless brown sweater
and clutched a dirty canvas tote bag with bits of yarn and wire spilling out. He
stared fiercely at the floor and didn’t look up when Gillian got on.
“Staying in town for spring break?” the driver asked, friendly.
He’d mistaken her for a student. Well, she had managed a shower at a truck
stop a couple of days before, so she wasn’t as roadgrimy as she might be
otherwise. She didn’t bother to correct him.
“Yeah,” she said. “I, uh, haven’t ridden this route before. Do you go near a
coffee shop?”
He looked at her in the wide mirror over the dashboard for a moment, and then
said “We stop down the block from Virgil’s Caf
é
. I think they’re open over the
break.”
“Great,” she said. “I’ll get off there.”
Gillian looked out the window with interest. The bus turned down neatly laid
out streets, past thrift stores, pawnshops and usedbook emporiums in old brick
buildings made sadlooking by the cloudy skies. The historical district, she
gathered, probably the college part of town. The streets were mostly empty. The
tourists would come in force during ski season, she figured, and in autumn to watch
the leaves change, and in summer retirees would stream in to escape the Florida
heat.
She’d arrived at a real downtime, especially since the students were all living
it up on beaches far away. She couldn’t decide if she liked that or not. There
wouldn’t be any good parties or shows, and it would be harder to find friendly
strangers to crash with, but it could be pleasantly peaceful.
The bus stopped at a corner, and the man in the back of the bus stood up.
Gillian glanced at him. He wasn’t much taller standing up than he was sitting down.
“See you tomorrow, Rufus,” the driver said. Gillian thought his jovial tone
sounded forced now...
Rufus paused by Gillian and peered at her. He smelled of dry rot, and he was
fumbling in his bag for something. Gillian wondered how long a person would have
to go without bathing to smell like that.
“From the lady,” the man whispered.
He had her attention now. Gillian sat up and the small man shoved something
into her hand. “How do you know the lady?” she said, but as soon as he let go of
the object, he hurried off the bus. She started to follow him, but the bus lurched
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M
ICHAEL
J
ASPER
, T
IME
P
RATT
, G
REG
VAN
E
EKHOUT
forward, rocking her back in her seat. She looked out the window, but the little man
was nowhere in sight.
“Hope he didn’t bother you too much,” the driver said, looking at Gillian in the
mirror. “Rufus is like that sometimes.”
Go after him
, she told herself. But then her thoughts bounced back to the West
Virginia bar, the white cowboy, and the hat in her bag. She quickly lost the urge to
pursue further oddities. Instead, she remained still, staring at the object in her
hands.
The driver frowned. “What’s that he gave you?”
Gillian held the object up for the driver to see in the mirror.
His eyes widened. “He gave you
that
? The radio?”
“Radio?” The object was little more than a ball of tangled copper wire, some of
it with candystriped insulation, most without. Two thin wires stuck out, like insect
antennae. “It doesn’t look like a radio.”
“Well, it’s not supposed to be an actual radio, miss. It’s just analogous to a
radio. Sort of.” The bus drifted to the curb and jerked to a stop with a pneumatic
squeal. “It can be useful, but... well. It’s not my place to meddle.” He passed her a
folded bus schedule. “I can’t break my schedule, but if you ever find yourself on
my route, and the timing works out, the ride’s free.”
“Um. Thanks?”
The driver nodded. “Least I can do, miss. Though you shouldn’t have fibbed
about being a student. I know you aren’t from around here. Sort of by definition
you aren’t from around her.” He pulled a lever and the doors parted. “Virgil’s is
just down Knight Street. I’d take you right up to the door, but I can’t break my
schedule. My advice is, have yourself a good cup of coffee, get some nourishment,
and see if you can tune your radio.”
Gillian hefted her backpack and exited the bus. Once down on the sidewalk,
she turned to face the driver. She gestured with the wire bundle. “Does this thing
actually... do anything?”
The driver’s eyebrows went up. “I daresay. It lets you talk to the lady, not
through the fuzzy wall of dreams, but directly.” He snapped his fingers. “Oh,
almost forgot. Drink your coffee black, miss. Drink it black.”
He gave her a smile—a lovely smile, Gillian thought, grandfatherly and warm
and so, so sad—and pulled away in an oily cloud of diesel exhaust. Gillian watched
the smoke dissipate like a fading memory. She waited a bit to see if this was also a
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ILLIAN
U
NDERGROUND
dream—why else would the bus driver’s talk of the lady have seemed so natural?—
but when she didn’t wake up, she moved on.
Virgil’s Caf
é
squatted between a twochair barbershop and a coinop laundry,
one block off the main drag. Its cinderblock face was painted with a faded mural of
a forest, the trees whimsically bulbous, like something from a Yes album cover.
The whole street had the kind of charmingly druggy 70’s vibe that Gillian had
encountered in at least a dozen different college towns during her wanderings. But
she’d never seen one so empty of life. Spring break had turned this place into a
ghost town. Even the birds in the trees seemed to chirp in whispers. The silence as
she approached Virgil’s made her own footsteps too loud, and she was relieved to
find the caf
é
open.
After buying a large mug of the house drip from the gnomish, stubblechinned
woman behind the counter, Gillian contemplated the condiment bar. Coffee was
something she liked in large quantities, provided she could suppress any hint of
coffee flavor with liberal additions of cream and sugar and cocoa powder and
cinnamon and vanilla and anything else she could find. But reaching for a thermos
of halfandhalf, she paused.
Drink it black
.
“Girl,” said the counter woman. “You left this.” In her yellowish mummy claw,
she held the wire “radio.”
“Oh, right,” Gillian said, frowning. Hadn’t she put it in her pocket? “Do you
know what it is?”
“Looks like a wad of wires and crap to me,” she said, handing it back to
Gillian.
Gillian nodded, taking the radio. The antennae were different, now, wound
around one another in a knotty spiral, where before they’d stuck up straight. Had
they gotten twisted in transit? Did it matter? Maybe it
was
just a bundle of wires
and crap.
Gillian tucked the radio into a pocket went back to her coffee cup. She took a
sip and winced. It was thick and bitter, like it had been sitting in the pot for the best
part of the day.
“Sorry the coffee’s so shitty,” the counter woman said. “I own this place, but I
don’t usually do any of the prep work, and I’m no good at it. My staff’s all out of
town, though, so I’m all you get. Just be glad you didn’t order an espresso. I always
burn it.”
“As long as it wakes me up, I’m happy,” Gillian said, taking another sip.
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