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13. THE SEVENTH HOUR
"Had enough?"
"Huh?" Arthur turned from his contemplation of the rock 'n roll clock and saw a white taxi at the curb. Its sides were dented and spattered with mud.
At the wheel sat Cuphandle, dressed in a slouchy proletarian cap, sweater, dark jacket, and brown corduroy pants. He had on heavy hiking books and looked unshaven. "Get in," he told Arthur.
Arthur climbed into a torn, uncomfortable back seat. Its black plastic covers were torn, and one seat spring seemed to follow his rear end no matter how he wriggled to get comfortable. "I can't bear anymore."
"You have five hours left in which to make up your mind about whether you want a new life or not."
Arthur pulled his coat lapels up with both hands and held them over his cheeks. It was freezing cold as the cab pulled away from the curb. He shivered and trembled, thinking of what he had just seen, and he dreaded that there might be worse to come. If his children hated him so, what must Gretchen think of him? Not the happy Gretchen , mother of small kids, but the woman who had to endure the increasing cantankerousness of her husband. "I'm afraid to see anything more."
"Oh but you must," Cuphandle said. He seemed to be the perfect taxi driver, negotiating tough traffic with ease while chatting with his passenger. Arthur had a snapshot glimpse of him under a street light: driving with one hand while keeping an arm draped lazily around the front passenger headrest, head tilted back in an expression that said he was king of the road. "I insist," Cuphandle said. "How else can you make an intelligent decision?"
"I don't want to."
"It's part of the deal, pal."
"Don't make me."
"You've left yourself no choice. See, all those years, you made decisions that affected yourself and everyone around you, and you can't escape the results of that anymore than you'll be able to escape the results of your decision about starting a new life. You still remember who these people were that you just met?"
"Yes." Arthur thought about it. "Barely." It was true-the awful memories were slipping away. "I'm ready to move on," he said. "I want to go through with it."
"Are you sure? Just want to escape? And learn nothing? And repeat the same mistakes in your next life?"
Arthur was silent. After a while, the car pulled into a kind of tunnel. It reminded Arthur of any big-city traffic tunnel going under a river or through a mountain. It had a round, barrel-vaulted roof glittering in white tile under glass-hooded, bluish lights. The road surface was wet from rain and snow, but gradually seemed to become dry the deeper Cuphandle drove into the tunnel. Oddly, there were no lanes marked on the road, and there was no sign of another car. Not even one. They were driving alone into some sort of abyss.
"Where are you taking me?" Arthur said. He kept his hands in his pockets, shivering with cold, but his face glued to the window in growing apprehension as the road went deeper into the darkness. At least there were still lights overhead. Cuphandle did not immediately answer but kept driving at a steady pace. Arthur could see, in the stabbing headlight beams, that the road surface ahead grew sandy. There still seemed to be asphalt, but increasingly there were drifts of sand laid out in frozen waves, as if a wind sometimes blew through here and then abated. "Where are you taking me?" Arthur asked again, and still Cuphandle did not answer. Soon enough, the sand grew so deep that the car began to slough sideways and lose traction. That was where Cuphandle stopped, put the transmission in Park, and got out. "Here we are."
Arthur climbed out and looked about. Cuphandle walked around the still-running car, whose headlights added light to the wan illumination of the bluish lamps high up under the barrel-vaulted ceiling. "Here you go," Cuphandle said. "This is where your journey really begins."
"What is this place?" Arthur pinched his collar close and stamped his feet. His breath escaped in ragged puffs of vapor, and the cold hurt his nose.
"This is neither heaven, nor hell, nor earth," Cuphandle said. "This is Time itself, or I should say this is one of the infinitely many tunnels through which Time has flowed. Don't worry, it gets a little warmer further in, closer to the Future. That's where you will find your new life."
"I can't wait to get going!"
"Well spoken," Cuphandle said. "I have to go back to the Present and do my job."
"The clock," Arthur said, suddenly remembering his house and his kitchen and his bank and his money. Memories came and went like the patchy vapor breath that escaped from his lips. He slapped himself lightly on the temple several times to try and jog his mind. Then he rubbed his nose to keep it warm. "I can't quite remember my life now, except for little particles of this and that."
Cuphandle stood with his hands in his pockets and nodded. "That's how it's supposed to work. You're doing fine, old man. Come on, I'll walk a little way with you."
They walked together down the huge tunnel, which was wide enough to bear eight lanes of traffic, but it was choked a third of the way high with sand. There were lumps and humps in the sand, too, Arthur saw as they walked. He began to see the tips of things sticking out: the corner of an old car roof, with a bit of windshield glittering in the bluish light. He saw a child's doll sprawled on the sand as if it had floated here on a tide and been deposited by receding water. He saw a wheelbarrow on its head, a couple of hard-bound books. He picked up one book that seemed to have a particularly fine leather cover, and flipped through its heavy pages, but the print was in a foreign alphabet and seemed to fade to sheer white as he looked at it, so he dropped the book. They came to a mass of steel that twisted up out of the sand. Upon close inspection, it looked to be a railroad track. Some enormous force had broken several of the ties, but one red signal light still winked on and off on a leaning steel pole further along. Cuphandle and Arthur came to a great black locomotive that sat trapped in sand up to the tops of its wheels. The locomotive leaned sideways and askew, and clearly would never run on its rails again.
"My God," Arthur said, "this entire place is filled with desolation. It looks as if the world was dumped here and abandoned."
Cuphandle stood with his arms akimbo, surveying this domain. "You're sort of right, old fellow. We are in a space between worlds here. Better put, we are in a time between times. Don't try to understand it-our minds can't wrap around it, and we see it all as metaphor anyway. The real construct is many more dimensions deep than you or I need to know about, or can know about. Think of it this way. Time flows in great rivers, always forward, but through infinitely many channels. It never comes the same way twice, but it leaves a huge mass of debris. Ever wonder about those socks you lose, or that key you're sure you had in your pocket, or those pencils that forever disappear from that glass on your desk?"
"Not to mention all the pens I lose," Arthur muttered.
"Precisely. Time rips through these tunnels in powerful flood, not of water but of a kind of dust like the arms of a hurricane, and what's left is this sand and debris. You may even find a stray skeleton or two. Of course, the people living in time don't know this is going on. They just go shopping or drive home or make dinner or call each other on the phone, and put up with the usual minor chaos and turbulence in their lives, because their entire universe is moving in unison relative to all of its parts. Think of it this way. You're on a planet moving through space faster than a speeding bullet, but you can lie down on a summer meadow and maybe at most you'll see those big puffy white clouds slowly rolling around in a blue sky."
"I haven't lain in a meadow like that since I was a little kid," Arthur said. A felt a tear sting his eye. "I feel that I've really missed out in life."
Cuphandle shrugged. "Well sure, so have we all. Too busy to stop and smell the honeysuckle." He clapped Arthur on the shoulder. "Do you really think you'll do better in a second life?"
Arthur shivered. "I think there's no way but up for me."
"Okay then." Cuphandle bent over to pick up a discarded walking stick poking out of a small sand pile. The stick looked worn, but had a nice ivory handle carved in a wolf's head. "Late Ice Age, I'd say," he said while holding the stick in both hands and turning it to examine it. "Nice workmanship. Aurignacean." He leaned on it. "Feels nice." He walked briskly across the landscape of sand dunes, toward a portal-like opening overlooking a starry night sky. "I want to show you one thing before I leave you." They walked to the top of a sand dune overlooking a white snowy landscape. The tunnel snaked on to their left. Here, in its side, was an opening about 100 feet high and 200 feet wide, semicircular and without definable edges: the tunnel wall simply stopped at the edges of the portal, and a whole world was visible outside the tunnel. Cuphandle pointed with the stick. "You could wander out there. There are lots of such world-openings in these tunnels of time. You can go out if you wish, but if you do, remember this. The opening begins to close as soon as you pass through, and within less than an hour you won't be able to get back into the tunnel." He pointed to their left, where the tunnel snaked around a bend and continued. "That's where you need to go, to your new life."
"How will I recognize it?"
"You'll feel it in your heart. Not only that, but it will be daylight there. Don't go into any portal where it's night."
Arthur quavered: "And you're leaving me alone here?"
Cuphandle gave him the walking stick. "I have a canteen of water in the car if you'd like. I think you'll need it."
Arthur followed the djinni, who walked briskly back the way they'd come. The white, dented taxi was a distant speck at the edge of this tidal shore of sand, but the djinni made their journey one of only ten or twenty steps. In a few swift, flashing motions, they were back at the taxi. "Do I have far to go?" Arthur asked.
Cuphandle leaned inside, pulled out a round gray felt-covered canteen with a shoulder strap, and handed it to Arthur. It felt heavy as Arthur accepted it. Cuphandle said: "It's just far enough, and you can make it, but you'd better get started."
"Will we meet again?"
Cuphandle shrugged. "Maybe." He offered his hand, and Arthur shook it. Then he said: "Be off with you now, and good luck." He reached a hand to his opposite shoulder, and made a sweeping motion, so that his hand circled before his chest and stopped behind him. It was a flinging motion, and Arthur-in one blink of the eye-found himself standing back on the sand dune where they'd been together a few minutes earlier. The taxi was a distant speck again, and a tiny figure waved to him. Then he heard the sound of a motor starting up far away, and the taxi turned and vanished into the distance.
Arthur glanced at the world beckoning below. He saw a distant village with a church steeple and smoke coming from several farm houses. The place looked vaguely familiar-almost like-yes! His childhood town in the heart of the country, the little hamlet where he'd lived the hard years of his early existence. Picture perfect as it seemed, he remembered it through the patina of years with a veil of pain. Turning his back on the dark forests with their patches of white snow and prowling wolves, and the cozy looking hamlet on the horizon, he resumed his long trudge down the tunnel. The watch in his pocket seemed to stir.
Behind him, from the church in the valley, he heard the long-ago, tired pealing of a single bell. It struck again, and again, echoing up the dale and into the tunnel onto his back. On the seventh stroke, it fell silent, leaving only a faint echo for a second or two. The eighth hour had begun.
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