Strange Tales of Secret Lives Read online

  From each dream, he wakes refreshed but with no memory of his adventures, while in the land he has left for the day, some creature dreams the details of his daily life with a similar amnesiac’s satisfaction.

  You could join a thousand circuses for a thousand years and never experience what Bowen experiences in his sleep, and which the cells, the blood, the flesh of his body still retain even if his conscious mind does not.

  Someday, Bowen will wake up during his dream, and his life will be more riotous with color and light than he could possibly imagine . . .

  THE SECRET LIFE OF

  RICH DEMARS

  Rich Demars runs a gas-driven power plant that uses landfill methane. Once a nuclear operator on a submarine near Corpus Christie, he is a man with a full appreciation for the uses of energy, and the application of those uses. There are stories he could tell about his life on the submarine, but he chooses to keep them to himself. No one would believe him anyway. But his submarine secrets are not the only ones he keeps from his friends and family. The other set of secrets would not be believed either . . . “except when their utter and devastating truthfulness shall be revealed in the fullness of time” as he sometimes mutters during the slow times at the power plant. “Then they’ll understand. They’ll all understand.”

  For, in his off hours, Demars works for a worldwide secret society dedicated to returning the Earth to the rule of an obscure sect of Mesopotamian magicians and priests. These priests and magicians have kept their bloodlines pure down through the trials of thousands of years, and kept their plans intact as well. It may be the most secret of all secret organizations in the history of the world.

  Using the library in his home town—specifically, that marvelous invention the inter-library loan—Demars has been instrumental in helping the society realize its goals. For it was Demars who discovered the location of the legendary Euphrates Tablet, with all that connotates. It was Demars who figured out the best cell phone plan and got the entire sect to adopt it. And it was Demars who came up with the idea of a monthly newsletter, which he now edits. (The newsletter has no bylines and no masthead; it has no name and it has no mailing address; it also has no English letters, as it is written all in cuneiform—thus ensuring that infidels and other undesirables cannot read it, although also ensuring that each newsletter is hundreds of pages long, for not only is cuneiform somewhat cumbersome in execution, but many members of the sect are ancient and insist on the use of large letters for their aged eyes.)

  As Demars looks out over the landfill, when he realizes what he has hidden under all of that waste, and what it will one day do . . . a glimmer of a gleam comes into his eyes. He has a well-defined sense of imagination. He can already see the transformation. For, when the sect’s work is complete, a vortex in time will open and the Mesopotamian past will seep into the American present, devouring it whole. The mighty Euphrates, twined to its twin, will barrel through and flood the land. What will happen to Demars then, he neither knows nor cares. Let the elders of that ancient river valley decide his fate, along with all the rest. It is entirely possible he will remain on as the editor of the newsletter, at the very least.

  THE SECRET LIFE OF

  TERRY TIDWELL

  Terry Tidwell is a builder, a bookworm, and a beer drinker. Of late, however, he has become obsessed with 18th-century automata.

  One night, out with friends, he bumped into a homeless man. A miasma of sweat, funk, and mustiness blew over Tidwell as he held the man in his arms, in one of those unplanned moments that permeate every life, one that to an observer might even look like a reunion of old friends.

  The man’s face, hidden by salt-and-pepper whiskers, imploded in an unmistakable grimace as he flailed to get free and as Tidwell held on long enough to make sure the man would not gain his freedom by falling.

  Released, the man stumbled to the curb as cars passed behind him, and glared at Tidwell.

  “Watch yourself,” he growled.

  As he took a step back, Tidwell noticed something peculiar about the man’s left eye. It was completely black, without a hint of white, and when the man blinked, Tidwell swore he could see ridges in his eyelid, as if the object lodged in the orbit was not an eye at all, but something entirely more mechanical.

  “Sorry,” Tidwell said, taking another step back, his friends waiting for him up ahead.

  He turned to go, a shiver of fear making him hurry, but the man came up behind him and caught him by the arm. His grip was as strong and implacable as that of a robot arm.

  “Vaucanson had a duck you know,” the man hissed in Tidwell’s ear. “He had a duck, and it broke. But it wasn’t my fault. You’d think they’d know that by now. Vaucanson. Vaucanson has a lot to answer for.”

  The man released Tidwell.

  Tidwell whirled around, stared at the man, opened his mouth to speak, but found he had nothing to say. He simply wanted to get away from the man as quickly as possible.

  One of his friends had walked back to help Tidwell and now said, “Do you want me to call the police?”

  Tidwell stared at the man with the impossible eye and the man with the impossible eye stared back.

  “No,” Tidwell said, “but let’s get the hell out of here.”

  “Vaucanson’s duck. Find it,” the man said, “and you’ll find a whole lot more. My time is done. I’ve nothing left to find it with.” A look of unexpected sympathy on the man’s face. “Good luck,” he said softly—and then as Tidwell and his friend looked on with bewilderment, the man ran down the sidewalk with almost preternatural speed and into the night.

  Much later, when he got home, he could still feel the man’s grip on his arm. That grip had left two uniform welts that took a fortnight to heal.

  As might be expected, Tidwell could not forget his encounter with the homeless man. He played it over and over in his mind. For one thing, the more he thought about the man, the more the man seemed familiar to him, as if he had once known him, but no matter how long or hard he tried to penetrate the fog surrounding that particular mystery, it remained a mystery for quite some time.

  So, instead, in his free time, Tidwell decided to find out about the duck and about Vawkansun, if either had ever truly existed. He would have liked to have forgotten about both the duck and Vawkansun, but since he dreamed every night of a magical duck and a shadowy man with a V monogrammed on his shirt, this was impossible.

  “You going out with us tonight?” one of his friends would ask and Tidwell would reply, “I’m not feeling too good tonight. I think I’ll just stay in.” And then he would go down to the local library to research “Vawkansun.”

  It didn’t take long to realize that such a duck and such a man, Vaucanson, had existed—in France in the 18th-century. In a moldy old book of facts, water-damaged and coffee-stained, he found the following entry:

  One of the most famous automata was built by a French engineer named Jacques de Vaucanson in the 1730s. His ingenious mechanical duck moved like a duck, ate like a duck, and digested fish like a duck. The duck had a weight inside connected to over a thousand moving parts. Vaucanson, by trial and error, made these parts move together to make the duck move and give it the illusion of life. It even had a rubber tube for its digestive track. The duck and other automata made Vaucanson famous, and he traveled for many years exhibiting his duck and other machines around Europe. Although he collected honors for his work, he also collected scorn from those who believed he had employed infernal means to create his duck. After a time, he fell out of favor and took a position managing silk-mills in the countryside. Most of his creations were destroyed in a fire a year after Vaucanson died, but the miraculous duck was spotted in 1805 by the famed poet Goethe in the collection of an Austrian antiques enthusiast. Shortly thereafter, the Austrian died and the collection auctioned off to pay his debts. The duck has not been seen since. Even in 1805, Goethe had reported that the duck looked mangy and had “digestive problems.” Strange sounds came from inside the automata,
and it is likely it ceased to function shortly after 1806, when it was sold to an anonymous buyer. Vaucanson’s relatives have often claimed that the duck was Vaucanson’s most prized possession and that he believed it held the key to solving several scientific mysteries.

  It would be wearisome to relate how Tidwell came to acquire the duck—the money he had to save, the journeys he had to make to various European countries, the bribes given to this curator to look up records from centuries past and that old grandmother who claimed to remember seeing it in her youth, or even to convey the sheer ferocity of desire it took for Tidwell to continue on his course. Suffice it to say that in due course, he did acquire the duck, even though he committed more than one crime to do so. All seemed forgivable if only the duck came into his possession.

  One rainy spring day, Tidwell came back from his final journey, holding a box. He wearily opened the door to his home, threw the box on the couch, and went to fix himself a drink. It had taken over five years to find the duck, and several times he was certain he would fail in his quest, dead end leading to dead end. But, finally, a wizened old man in a beret, sitting in a cafe in the wine country outside of Marseilles, had given him the lead that had led to the clue that had resulted in a box containing Vaucanson’s duck.

  Tidwell wondered idly if his family and friends would ever forgive him for his obsession. Probably not, but the damage was already done. He could not undo it. Nor, he thought as he drank down his whisky, did he think he would have wanted to. He was not the same person he had been before. He had picked up a dozen new skills in his journeys, discovered in dangerous situations that he responded firmly and well. The world had, no matter what came next, opened up for him in a different way than it had opened up for him in his previous life.

  Thus far he had glimpsed the duck only briefly—winced at its crumbled condition, one wing inoperable, the beak chipped, one foot half sawed-through, the feathers that had once coated its metal surface weathered or gone, so that Vaucanson’s duck looked as though it were half-plucked. A smell had risen from it, too. The smell of rotting oil, of metal parts corroding.

  Could it ever be restored? Tidwell didn’t know. But he lovingly took it from its box and set it out on the kitchen table. At some point, one of the duck’s many owners had tried to restore the duck to its former glory, with mixed results. Now one eye appeared to consist of faux emeralds, while the neck had a pattern engraved on it more common to paper doilies. The one intact leg had a similar design inflicted upon it. The duck should have been self-winding, but even the emergency wind-up mechanism, twisted and torn, couldn’t get the duck to work. Vaucanson’s creation had survived the centuries, but only as a corpse.

  Something wistful welled up in Tidwell as he sat at the table with his whisky and the mechanical bird. Something sorrowful.

  He remembered the words of the man who had started him on this path to either ruin or Enlightenment. He wondered now why he had taken them so to heart, why it had seemed at the time like a directive or a plea he could not ignore.

  Well, it was too late now for regrets. He sighed and went to get a screwdriver and some other tools. Almost from the start, he had decided to perform an autopsy on the duck should he ever get his hands on it. Between the homeless man’s comments and the remarks of the people he had encountered on his quest—including the descendents of Vaucanson—it had increasingly struck him that there might be something inside the duck even more important than its worth as an automaton.

  It took some effort to pry the matching halves apart and he was breathing heavily by the time he had finished. A flicker of deep excitement energized him, though, and it was with triumph rather than exhaustion that he finally peered into the mysteries of the duck’s innards.

  At first, he saw nothing of interest. Just gears and levers and rusted chains, the remains of a rubber tube that had served as the duck’s intestinal tract. But when he looked closer, he found, nestled deep in the bird, a compartment in which sat a round, grooved black globe the size of a human eye, and a corresponding empty space beside it.

  All the tension draining out of Tidwell, he sat back in his chair, arms behind his head, and began to laugh. This, this is what the homeless man had led him to. His journey had just begun. Caught. Afraid. Curious.

  After awhile, he began to weep, and then to reach out with a trembling hand for the black globe buried in the guts of Vaucanson’s duck, and then to pull back, as if from a flame. Reach out, pull back, reach out.

  For all I know, Tidwell is sitting there still.

  THE SECRET LIFE OF

  RAJAN KHANNA

  Rajan Khanna currently works as a data manager for Pfizer, the pharmaceutical company, in the New York-New Jersey area. Rajan writes short stories and novels in his spare time. His wife, Libbette Mahady, is from Queensland, Australia.

  Rajan is not religious, although, if pressed, he would say that his inclination runs more toward Eastern schools of thought, like Taoism or Zen Buddhism. Perhaps this inclination provides some evidence of a proclivity for seeing what is truly there.

  The first time Rajan came across a secret path, in Livingston, New Jersey, he was only eight, and did not recognize the significance of the event. He had drifted past the swings, jungle gym, slide, and sandbox, off toward the wooded area where he and his friends often incorporated a large concrete tube into their imaginary explorations of strange lands.

  On this particular day, Rajan was by himself, reluctant to return from a recess just ending, but reconciled to it. When he heard the teacher call to him and other stragglers, he started to walk back toward the school. Half-way there, he stumbled, moved a little to his right on his knees, arms out for balance, and then looked left because of unexpected light. He saw, in a moment that didn’t seem real, a slice of sun through the otherwise overcast sky, a hint of a breeze where none had existed, and, stretching out before him, a path of dried golden-brown leaves. The path wound its way up the lee of a slice of hill that had not been there before, and out of sight, always touched by the sliver of sunlight that seemed from some other place.

  Rajan inhaled with an audible gasp, mouth open, heart beating faster, and grasped the thick grass of the hill with both hands, as if to anchor himself.

  He blinked once.

  The path was still there. It seemed both tranquil and dangerous. The leaves upon its surface spun and whirled, but never blew away. The light upon the leaves had an unreal, hypnotic quality.

  He wrenched his gaze from the sight. He blinked again.

  The path, the light, the leaves, had disappeared in that instant of blindness. There was a ringing in Rajan’s head. No, not in his head. The teacher calling to him once again, in a shrill voice.

  Reluctantly, Rajan released the grass and ran up the hill through the cut grass smell, back into the safety of the school. The mangled stalks of grass in the fists of his hands felt much more real than what he had just seen.

  Soon, the memory of that glimpse into . . . into what? he did not know . . . receded into the morass of other childhood memories. It became more and more unreal, until it became a daydream, a vision, utter fantasy.

  But Rajan did not entirely forget, either. It was hard to forget an event like that, even if dismissed as mere epiphany. It became a kind of submerged memory. It came back to Rajan in moments of triumph, of ecstasy: the column of remembered sunlight like a manifestation of his personal happiness. And yet, a disturbing memory, so that in photographs of Rajan happy, experiencing happiness, there is a hint of a puzzled expression on his face, a hint of looking through the camera into some dilemma, some mystery.

  And that might have been the extent of the secret life of Rajan Khanna: a curious expression in family photographs, a sense in those who met him that at times he wrestled with some unanswerable question. It might have ended there, and simply lent him that attractive otherworldliness his wife secretly adored in him. But, for whatever reason, Rajan Khanna proved to have a talent for finding paths and roads, streets and
bridges, overpasses and tunnels, that either no longer existed or had never been there.

  The second time it happened—or, at least, the next time it happened and he could not ignore it or explain it away—Rajan was sixteen and walking with his friends in Manhattan, down a street clogged with pedestrian traffic. In the middle of a block, a sudden compulsion came over him, accompanied by an odd yet pleasant scent, as of fresh lime, to stop, step out of the bustle of people, and look to his left, at the solid brick wall of a bank . . . only, it wasn’t solid brick. Now, in the middle of a building he had passed dozens of time, a mews, or narrow alley, cut right through the wall and traveled off into the distance, buttressed by the dark suspicion of alcoves at irregular intervals to either side. There was a wavery quality to the edges of the brick where it met the open air of the sudden corridor. A suggestion of mirage, as when heat rises beneath from a manhole cover.

  Rajan frowned, tried to control the sudden acceleration of his breath, his heartbeat. That couldn’t be right. It just . . . couldn’t. The mews went right through the building, cut offices in half, created a sliver of blue sky in the middle of windows, and he could see people walking from one side of an office to another, disappearing as they passed through the area now occupied by the sky above the mews, and reappearing unharmed on the other side.

  “Rajan—c’mon. What’re you looking at?” one of his friends asked.

  “Just a second,” Rajan said, still staring.

  Rajan realized then that sometimes he existed in two worlds at once. He stood there and stared down the alley into that expanse of impossible blue sky and knew that if he chose to, he could walk through the building, that there would be no brick to stop him.

  But on that particular day, at the age of sixteen, Rajan chose not to follow the path, in part because he was with his friends. It wasn’t that he wasn’t curious. He was. But on that day, too, Rajan began to realize that he didn’t yet understand this “gift,” and that while it might seem wondrous, it could also be dangerous.