WOODSVILLE. AN EXCLUSIVE DEVELOPMENT of the kind you saw advertised in the back of shiny magazines, but never for real. He passed a clumpy-looking guy pushing a wheelbarrow beside the lush hedges. A place like this, even roadsides were planted with brilliant borders and kept trim and neat.
There were no gates. No dogs, either. Or only the sort that sat on their matrons’ laps and licked the cream from their coffee. No sign of any of the security guard’s colleagues, either, and Clark was just starting to wish he’d stopped to ask the wheelbarrow guy for directions when he saw a big slab of polished stone carved with the word Erewhon on a slope beneath a fuchsia hedge. He braked and turned up the steep drive.
The overheating Ford made it across the last of the gravel before it stalled. There were big bushes of bright flowers. There was cool dampness in the air which felt good on his face as he climbed out and unpicked his suit from off his back and around his crotch. The house was a Chinese puzzle in glass and brick, when he’d been calculating on mock Gothic or farmhouse French. But that was probably next door, and the one which looked like a Greek or a Roman temple would be the one beyond that.
Two cars were parked by the steps. One was a dark red Cadillac Series 90, the latest model with the V16 engine, and the other a rare and beautiful cream-colored French sports coupé—a Delahaye. His Ford Tudor, which was wheezing and ticking like an unsprung clock as it cooled, didn’t look like a machine which had been designed to serve anything remotely like the same purpose as these. The Delahaye was particularly superb. Its top was down. There were so many buttons and switches it looked like the console of an airplane.
Erewhon’s front door was smoked glass. The sides around it were angled, and of glass as well. Several dozen different versions of Clark Gable swam up to him as he climbed to the last stretch of marble and searched for a doorbell, or a knocker, or anything resembling a handle. Then came a small, electric hum, and the doors opened neither in nor out, but sideways into hidden recesses.
Stepping inside, he called hello. Seemingly with a will entirely of their own, the sides of the door hummed shut behind him. The huge, polished hallway shimmered with dark reflections like silent birds. Should have done what he often did when he first saw a client and wandered around back on the pretense of not being able to find the right entrance—which would have made perfect sense here. Or talked to the neighbors. Or the servants or the houseboys. Or that gardener, maybe. Anything, really, other than just charge straight in like he had. He’d got distracted by the beautiful roadster, and the way the sun had flashed and sparkled on that reservoir, and the security guard, and the eau de cologne-scented air.
The hallway opened into a kind of atrium. His voice echoed and was lost as he called hello again. There was glass above him. Clouds fractured where the edges of the panes met as if they’d been put together like some huge, moving jigsaw. He caught glimpses of antique sofas and rugs in empty rooms. Flowers everywhere. Some of them were real. Some were in paintings. With some he couldn’t tell.
He reached a corridor. It was long and wide and tall, set to the left with dozens of windows open to the gardens beyond. White curtains drifted, bringing in the scent of cut grass. Midway along it, something else seemed to be moving, although he took it at first to be the curtains’ shifting reflections caught in mirror glass.
Close to, he realized that this was something else. He felt a cool prethunderstorm prickle across the hairs on his hands and forearms and down his neck which even he, who rarely went to the feelies, recognized as coming from a Bechmeir field. But this wasn’t like the dusty grids which fizzed behind the projector screen in thousands of theaters in every town and city across the country. This field coiled like gusting snow—or a dust devil—in the space between a black plinth and the swan-neck which curved six or seven feet above it. Held between the two charged plates which this structure, elegant in itself, supported, the feelie wraith gave off a faint crackling as it shimmered and danced. The plinth looked to be made of solid marble, although he guessed that it wasn’t; you had to put all the electronics somewhere, and he presumed that it was in there. A brass plaque—or solid gold, for all he knew—was inset into the plinth. Finely engraved on it was the single word Muse.
This, he supposed, was what you got. What you got, that was, when you’d already got the house, and the Cadillac and the Delahaye and all those gardens and the walk-in closet you could get seriously lost in.
He felt a thickening in his throat and the imminent pressure of sound within his ears as he looked up at it. It really had been years since he’d been to a feelie theater, and he’d forgotten just how powerful the sensation was when you stood before the plasm of a Bechmeir field. And how unsettlingly weird. No use telling yourself that some tiny nub in your brain was simply picking up the amplified waves of a clever recording. No use thinking of wires and transformers. And here, unaccompanied by the usual moving images and soundtrack, the feeling seemed to be strengthened rather than weakened.
Instead of a shapeless blur, the swirl, the presence, of the wraith seemed to form itself into a misty amalgam. Translucent mouths smiled down at him. Limbs stretched out in chill embrace. He caught flashes of vanished laughter, dark whispers of lost lives. He blinked hard. He knew how easy it was to get drawn in by a Bechmeir field’s tawdry allure. But it didn’t feel tawdry. Not at the time. That was the damndest thing.
“You’re like everyone else who comes here, Mr Gable…”
He turned. Something was coming towards him from the far end of the corridor. It seemed for a moment to be dark and indefinite, and he felt a sense of dread. But then he saw that the figure was human, and that it was female, and plainly composed of flesh and blood.
“… that damn thing stops almost everyone in their tracks. I’m April Lamotte. You obviously got my letter.” She held out a hand. She smelled expensive and she’d recently put on some kind of hand cream, but the grip was hard and purposeful. As was the way that she was looking at him. “Have to say you’re not quite what I was hoping for, Mr Gable. No, not at all, really. But I guess you’ll have to do.”
“Mrs Lamotte…” He cleared his throat as she finally let go of him. “You have a very nice place here.”
She glanced around as if the thought had never struck her. “You don’t think it over-ostentatious?”
“I’m hardly equipped to judge.”
“But you wouldn’t want to live here?” “Not sure I’d know how.”
“There probably is a knack to it.” She gave a sharp laugh. Standing as close to the wraith as they still were, he tried not to shiver. “One I’m still attempting to learn…” She turned and headed back along the corridor towards the room from which she had emerged, glancing back as he followed in a way which he might normally have thought of as almost flirtatious. Here, he wasn’t sure. This really was a different world.