The Live-Forever Machine (2 page)

“You got it,” said the other man. “I’ve been busy. You look old, Alexander, very old. Aren’t you getting tired of it all?”

Eric still couldn’t make out his face. Turn around a little so I can see you, Mr. Dressed-in-Black.

“It was scarcely a surprise, of course,” Alexander was saying. “I was certain it was you. You proclaim your presence in unmistakable fashion: the belligerent and odious bellowing of a vandal.”

Eric shook his head. This was getting very
weird. He hadn’t ever heard anyone talk like that, except his father when he was reading from an old book. Who
were
these guys?

“It was so easy, these last two,” said the man in the black jeans as he began walking deeper into the gallery, with Alexander following a few steps behind. “Flames are best for old things, aren’t they? They burn so easily. They didn’t have what I was looking for, so …”

Eric pivoted slowly on his heels, keeping the two men in view. He caught a good glimpse of the one in black. Pretty ordinary, he thought: nondescript features and short, dark hair, cropped close at the sides. Nothing special. Could have been anyone.

“… maybe you’re next, Alexander. Thought about it?”

Alexander said something that Eric didn’t understand. He’d never heard anything like it, a harsh clashing of consonants.

“Stop!” the man in black said harshly, and Eric thought there was panic in his voice. Then, more calmly, he said, “In English now, old man.”

“Have you forgotten the others so soon?” Alexander inquired with a hint of mockery.

“There’s nothing to forget.”

“All of them, then. It is unthinkable to me. Even Latin?”

Latin? No one spoke Latin.

The other man said nothing. His face, Eric noticed, had the hardened, sculpted look of a mask.

“Why do you insist on returning?” Alexander asked tiredly. “Is there no remorse in you for the irreparable damage you’ve done over the years?”

What the hell were they talking about? Eric raged silently. He waited impatiently for them to say more, but a small cluster of visitors had come into the gallery and the two men fell silent. The visitors took a perfunctory look around, and one of them shot off what sounded like a whole roll of film without stopping. In a few minutes they were gone.

Eric fanned his hands out on the gravel to keep himself from tipping over. His long, skinny legs were beginning to ache and the right knee of his jeans had finally ripped open. Stupid pointy knees, he thought.

The two men had stopped almost directly in front of Eric. The one in black looked around as if noticing the display for the first time.

“This is very nice,” he commented. “You’ve been working hard.”

He stepped over the railing on the opposite side of the passageway and walked lazily to a
soldier in chain-link armour who stood with sword and shield raised for combat.

“It’s only a matter of time, old man, and time, as they say, is on my side, yes it is …” He moved his hand carelessly over the intricate tracery on the shield, then flicked it disdainfully with his fingernail. “Very nice.” He tapped the soldier’s plaster face with his knuckles.

Who did this guy think he was? To just walk into the display and start poking at old, valuable things as if they were junk.

Without looking at Alexander, the man in black said, “Why don’t you just give it to me?”

“No.” Alexander stepped over the railing now as well.

The younger man pushed almost playfully against the soldier with his hand. It rocked slightly. Eric could feel his heart quickening in anger. Why wasn’t the other guy doing anything to stop him? Why didn’t he call for one of the security guards?

“I’ll make you an offer you can’t refuse, Alexander.” Pushing against the soldier, rocking it back and forth.

“Leave now.”

The soldier teetered over and went crashing to the ground. Eric almost cried out, but bottled it up before he gave himself away. His heart
clattered in his chest. A huge crack had opened in the soldier’s neck, and the sword and shield had been wrenched out of his broken fingers.

The man in the dark outfit turned to face Alexander. Eric couldn’t look away. He felt as if he were watching some kind of hypnotic shadow play. Then, with a suddenness that made his breath snag in his throat, the two men came crashing together, arms lashing out, each one’s hands straining for the other’s throat. They were locked together for three, four, five seconds before they broke, moving apart, dark shapes heaving for air. Then they were back in their fighters’ embrace, fighting almost silently except for the shuffle of their shoes against the floor and the whisper of clothing against clothing.

Something quite small fell out of Alexander’s pocket, and Eric could have sworn he heard it land—as if every other noise in the room had been blocked out, leaving only the single, amplified sound of the object hitting the gravel. And then his eyes were pulled back to the two men. Alexander doesn’t have a chance, he thought.

But then they pushed away from each other and stood at arm’s length, panting.

“… forgotten how much I hated you,” the younger man whispered in contempt, his breath ragged with exertion.

“Of course you did.” Alexander snapped bitterly. “This is not surprising to me in the least. You forget everything.”

The man in the black jeans suddenly whirled around and seized the sword from beside the toppled soldier.

Eric began to rise. This guy was crazy! But Alexander was standing still—wasn’t he even afraid? What was wrong with him? Run! Eric wanted to shout.

“Useless,” snapped the tall, stooped man. “Have you forgotten that too? In any event, you doubtless do not recollect how to use it.” He coughed again, a violent rattling deep in his chest. One hand went out to the railing for support.

“It’s here somewhere,” the other man whispered viciously. “Any hiding place, I’ll find. And, Alexander, there are machines—real machines that have to be seen to be believed. You can’t imagine the power of them. They’re beautiful. When I walked out of the Louvre that day, everything else … before … all a dark dream. These machines are the power and the glory, the way of the future, Alexander. You can’t stop them. This is my time. Yours is over.”

“Go, go,” said Alexander, his voice a tired croak.

The man in black threw the sword to the ground and turned.

“The way of the future,” he said again. Without looking back, he stepped over the railing and walked out of the gallery.

Eric watched as Alexander stooped over the toppled soldier and tried to stand it upright. But it was apparently too heavy and he lowered it gently to the ground. He picked up the sword and shield and examined them carefully. Then he stood up, looking around the armoury. He seemed alert, as if he were listening.

Eric pressed his hands hard against the ground and tried to remain absolutely motionless. A trickle of sweat ran down over his ribs. Whatever that was, he told himself, you were not supposed to see it.

Alexander stood a moment longer, his head tilted attentively. Then, holding the sword and the shield, he turned and moved deeper in the display, further and further back. Eric squinted after him. Where was he going? The shadows closed around him and he was soon just a dark outline, and then, nothing at all. He’d disappeared. Must be a door back there somewhere.

Eric let out a deep breath. All he wanted to do was get out, fast, but he made himself wait a few more seconds before painfully pushing himself out of his crouch. He walked quickly to
the railing and hopped over onto the tiled floor. Then he hesitated. There. It was still there, just at the edge of the display.

He took one quick look around the gallery and then bent down and reached out his hand. His fingers closed around it.

He held it delicately in his trembling hands, as though it might disintegrate. It was an oblong of dark-grained wood, about the size and weight of a micro-cassette tape, though much thinner. Even though he was alone in the house, he had closed the bedroom door, and he sat on the edge of his bed, his heart still racing, his mouth dry.

What was it? He ran his thumb softly around the bevelled corners. It was old. He could tell. I
felt
old. There was a hinge along one of the longer sides, and he put his fingernail between the two paper-thin halves and carefully prised them apart.

It opened like a book. His breath caught in his throat. On the right side was a tiny oil portrait of a woman. She sat in profile in front of a large open window, and in the painstakingly detailed background were a series of rolling meadows,
the church spires of a town, and beyond that, the ocean, extending to the horizon.

But it was the woman’s face that held his attention. Her dark eyes seemed to crackle in the painted light. She looked almost fierce, with her heavy eyebrows, strong, straight nose, and mane of reddish-brown hair brushed back in thick waves from her high forehead. But her full mouth was vulnerable and gentle. She held her head high, gazing imperiously at something beyond the picture frame. He looked at the left panel. A name had been carved into the wood in a swirling script, and below that, a date:

Gabriella della Signatura
A.D. 1445

He swallowed hard. This strange, beautiful object was more than five hundred years old, and he had taken it out of the museum. It was probably part of one of the displays. But why had it been in the worker’s pocket? The question throbbed in his mind for a few seconds. It didn’t matter, he told himself. He’d have to return it. But then his eyes returned to the woman in the painting, and he looked at her for a long time. He gently closed the panels and slipped the wooden locket into his desk drawer.

“Fall of the Roman Empire.”

“400
A.D
.,” Eric replied automatically.

“Battle of Waterloo.” His father hurled out the next question without a pause, shutting the front door behind him.

“1815.”

“Discovery of the electric battery.”

“Umm, 1800.”

“By?”

‘‘Alessandro Volta.”

“Magna Carta signed when?”

“1200. No, wait. 1215.”

“Good. Discovery of King Tut’s tomb.”

“1922.”

“Name of the archaeologist.”

“Howard Carter.”

“Sinking of the Titanic.”

“1912.”

“Be more exact.”

“April 12, 1912.”

“Yes. First printing press.”

Eric shook his head in defeat. “Don’t know.”

“Gutenberg press, 1440s. How could you forget the Gutenberg press? Without it, we wouldn’t have any of these, not a single one.” Mr. Sheppard waved his hand at the crammed bookcases as he crossed the living room. “In all, though, not bad.”

It was a game they had always played,
historical dates and facts, and his father would start it up without warning, while making dinner, walking down the street, reading a book.

“How was your day?”

“Well—”

But before Eric could go on, his father had sat down at the table and was hunched over the ancient typewriter, glaring at the piece of paper that curled out of it. He struck clumsily at the keys, cursed, and reached for the bottle of correction fluid. The fan was going full blast. Cans of tomato soup kept his tidy piles of handwritten notes from blowing away.

“There,” he said after a few moments. “Had that sentence banging around in my head all the way home.”

He shrugged off his conductor’s jacket and let it fall to the floor beside the chair. His shirt was rumpled and damp. He yanked his tie loose.

Eric watched him staring intently at the typewriter, oblivious. Gone for the duration, Eric thought wryly, shaking his head. Eric had been waiting eagerly for his father to come home so he could tell him what had happened in the museum—waiting half the afternoon, damn it! But now it looked as if his latest story had him in the usual headlock.

Eric looked down at the book he’d been flipping through listlessly for the past hour.
Museums
of the World.
He was only looking at the pictures. It was too hot to do anything else. His T-shirt was plastered against his back, and he was sure his dark hair was collecting the heat, storing it like solar coils. He pushed his hands through the thick curls and grimaced. He needed to get it cut.

He restlessly brushed away some bits of plaster that had flaked off the wall onto the cushions. The heat had been making it worse. It was an old house, long and narrow, with hardwood floors and crooked doorways and radiators that clanked noisily. It had been slowly falling apart for more than a hundred years. It was one of the last farm houses in the city, and certainly the only one downtown. It had been left to Eric’s father years ago by
his
father—Eric’s grandfather. Now it was sandwiched between two luxury highrise apartment buildings, and the side windows had been boarded up because they looked out onto concrete foundations.

“Damn!” his father said, reaching for the correction fluid again.

Eric thumbed through a few more pages of his book, unable to concentrate. Since he’d come back from the museum, he’d been trying to piece together the conversation he’d heard in the medieval gallery. But all that came back to him were unconnected phrases and sentences,
puzzle pieces that didn’t make any sense. He’d been thinking about the locket, too, or at least the woman in the painting. Why couldn’t he get her face out of his mind? He glanced over at his father. Eric always felt guilty interrupting him when he was writing.

“I saw something really weird in the museum today,” he finally blurted out.

“Tell me,” his father said without looking up.

Eric waited for him to stop typing before he started. He told his father everything but stopped before the part about the locket. His father would want to see it, hold it, and Eric didn’t want to share it with anyone.

“They were fighting right in the medieval armoury display?” his father asked.

“Yeah.”

“That’s a ridiculous place to fight,” his father remarked. “They could have caused a lot more damage than they did. It’s lucky they knocked over only the one soldier.”

“No, Dad,” Eric said, impatience creeping into his voice—he knew his father hadn’t been listening very carefully. “The guy in black pushed it over on purpose. It happened before the fight.”