The Year's Best Science Fiction, Volume 29

maitre.”

Avram sipped his own beer and coughed slightly; and I realized with a pang how much older than I he was, and that he had absolutely no business being a pinball—nor the only true adventurer I’d ever known. No business at all. He said, “The alternate-universe thing, that’s bullshit. Or if it isn’t, doesn’t matter—you can’t get there from here.” He leaned forward. “You know about Plato’s Cave, Dom Pedro?”

“The people chained to the wall in the cave, just watching shadows all their lives? What about it?”

“Well, the shadows are cast by things and people coming and going outside the cave, which those poor prisoners never get to see. The shadows are their only notion of reality—they live and die never seeing anything but those shadows, trying to understand the world through shadows. The philosopher’s the one who stands outside the cave and reports back. You want another beer?”

“No.” Suddenly I didn’t even want to finish the glass in my hand. “So our world, what we call our world… it might be nothing but the shadow of the Overneath?”

“Or the other way around. I’m still working on it. If you’re finished, let’s go.”

We went outside, and Avram stood thoughtfully staring at seven and a half miles of docks and warehouses, and seeming to sniff the gray air. I said, “My mother’s family set off for America from here. I think it took them three weeks.”

“We’ll do better.” He was standing with his arms folded, mumbling to himself: “No way to get close to the harbor, damn it… too bad we didn’t fetch up on the other side of the Mersey… best thing would be… best thing… no… I wonder.…”

Abruptly he turned and marched us straight back into the pub, where he asked politely for the loo. Directed, he headed down a narrow flight of stairs; but, to my surprise, passed by the lavatory door and kept following the stairway, telling me over his shoulder, “Most of these old pubs were built over water, for obvious reasons. And don’t ask me why, not yet, but the Overneath likes water.…” I was smelling damp earth now, earth that had never been quite dry, perhaps for hundreds of years. I heard a throb nearby that might have been a sump pump of some sort, and caught a whiff of sewage that was definitely not centuries old. I got a glimpse of hollow darkness ahead, and thought wildly, Christ, it’s a drain! That’s it, we’re finally going right down the drain.…

Avram hesitated at the bottom of the stair, cocking his head back like a gun hammer. Then it snapped forward, and he grunted in triumph and led me, not into my supposed drain, but to the side of it, into an apparent wall through which we passed with no impediment, except a slither of stones under our feet. The muck sucked at my shoes—long since too far gone for my concern—as I plodded forward in Avram’s wake. Having to stop and cram them back on scared me, because he just kept slogging on, never looking back. Twice I tripped and almost fell over things that I thought were rocks or branches; both times they turned out to be large, recognizable, disturbingly splintered bones. I somehow kept myself from calling Avram’s attention to them, because I knew he’d want to stop and study them, and pronounce on their origin and function, and I didn’t need that. I already knew what they were.

In time the surface became more solid under my feet, and the going got easier. I asked, half-afraid to know, “Are we under the harbor?”

“If we are, we’re in trouble,” Avram growled. “It’d mean I missed the… no, no, we’re all right, we’re fine, it’s just—” His voice broke off abruptly, and I could feel rather than see him turning, as he peered back down the way we had come. He said, very quietly, “Well, damn.…”

“What? What?” Then I didn’t need to ask anymore, because I heard the sound of a foot being pulled out of the same mud I’d squelched through. Avram said, “All this way. They never follow that far… could have sworn we’d lost it in Lagos.…” Then we heard the sound again, and Avram grabbed my arm, and we ran.

The darkness ran uphill, which didn’t help at all. I remember my breath like stones in my lungs and chest, and I remember a desperate desire to stop and bend over and throw up. I remember Avram never letting go of my arm, literally dragging me with him… and the panting that I thought was mine, but that wasn’t coming from either of us.…

“Here!” Avram gasped. “Here!” and he let go and vanished between two boulders—or whatever they really were—so close together that I couldn’t see how there could be room for his stout figure. I actually had to give him a push from behind, like Rabbit trying to get Pooh Bear out of his burrow; then I got stuck myself, and he grabbed me and pulled… and then we were both stuck there, and I couldn’t breathe, and something had hold of my left shoe. Then Avram was saying, with a calmness that was more frightening than any other sound, even the sound behind me, “Point yourself. You know where we’re going—point and jump.…”

And I did. All I can remember is thinking about the doorman under the awning at my cousin’s place… the elevator… the color of the couch where I would sleep when I visited… a kind of hissing howl somewhere behind… a shiver, as though I were dissolving… or perhaps it was the crevice we were jammed into dissolving…

… and then my head was practically in the lap of Alice on her mushroom: my cheek on smooth granite, my feet somewhere far away, as though they were still back in the Overneath. I opened my eyes in darkness—but a warm, different darkness, smelling of night grass and engine exhaust—and saw Avram sprawled intimately across the Mad Hatter. I slid groggily to the ground, helped to disentangle him from Wonderland, and we stood silently together for a few moments, watching the headlights on Madison Avenue. Some bird was whooping softly but steadily in a nearby tree, and a plane was slanting down into JFK.

“Seventy-fifth,” Avram said presently. “Only off by four blocks. Not bad.”

“Four blocks and a whole park.” My left shoe was still on—muck and all—but the heel was missing, and there were deep gouges in the sole. I said, “You know, I used to be scared to go into Central Park at night.”

We didn’t see anyone as we trudged across the park to the West Side, and we didn’t say much. Avram wondered aloud whether it was tonight or tomorrow night. “Time’s a trifle hiccupy in the Overneath, I never know how long.…” I said we’d get a paper and find out, but I don’t recall that we did.

We parted on Seventy-ninth Street: me continuing west to my cousin’s building, and Avram evasive about his own plans, his own New York destination. I said, “You’re not going back there.” It was not a question, and I may have been a little loud. “You’re not.”

He reassured me instantly—“No, no, I just want to walk for a while, just walk and think. Look, I’ll call you tomorrow, at your cousin’s, give me the number. I promise, I’ll call.”

He did, too, from a pay phone, telling me that he was staying with old family friends in Yonkers, and that we’d be getting together in the Bay Area when we both got back. But we never did; we spoke on the phone a few times, but I never saw him again. I was on the road, in Houston, when I heard about his death.

I couldn’t get home for the funeral, but I did attend the memorial. There were a lot of obituaries—some in the most remarkable places—and a long period of old friends meeting, formally and informally, to tell stories about Avram and drink to his memory. That still goes on today; it never did take more than two of us to get started, and sometimes I hold one all by myself.

And no, I’ve never made any attempt to return to the Overneath. I try not to think about it very much. It’s easier than you might imagine: I tell myself that our adventure never really happened, and by the time I’m decently senile I’ll believe it. When I’m in New York and pass Grand Central Station I never go in, on principle. Whatever the need, it can wait.

But he went back into the Overneath, I’m sure—to work on his map, I suppose, and other things I can’t begin to guess at. As to how I know.…

Avram died on May 8th, 1993, just fifteen days after his seventieth birthday, in his tiny dank apartment in Bremerton, Washington. He closed his eyes and never opened them again. There was a body, and a coroner’s report, and official papers and everything: books closed, doors locked, last period dotted in the file.

Except that a month later, when the hangover I valiantly earned during and after the memorial was beginning to seem merely colorful in memory rather than willfully obtuse, I got a battered postcard in the mail. It’s in the file with the others. A printed credit in the margin identifies it as coming from the Westermark Press of Stone Heights, Pennsylvania. The picture on the front shows an unfrosted angel food cake decorated with a single red candle. The postmark includes the flag of Cameroon. And on the back, written in that astonishing, unmistakable hand, is an impossible message.