Читать книгу Baptism Of Rage - James Axler - Страница 7

The warm autumn sun played across Doc Tanner’s back, but the cold Nebraska air behind it was heavy with the threat of approaching winter. Tanner didn’t mind. There was something enlivening about that chill, the very essence of what it was to be alive seemed contained therein.

Dr. Theophilus Algernon Tanner was a tall man, striking and handsome in his own way. His hair reached down past the collar of his crisp, white shirt, and bright blue eyes peered inquisitively from beneath his high forehead.

He was a man of great learning, with two degrees to his name and a tea chest in his attic that was filled with diplomas and certificates that he had never bothered to display. Tanner knew that the proof of learning couldn’t be found in degrees, wasn’t awarded on slips of paper. Learning was about understanding, about the application of knowledge in new and interesting and remarkable ways.

Even now, Tanner’s mind was working over a hypothesis that one of his colleagues had been discussing with him earlier that day. He had been presented with a theory of time movement, his colleague proposing the ability to actually travel through time as though it were a road with way stations and stop-off points. The theory struck Tanner as preposterous, the stuff of science fiction, and yet he found himself turning the concept over and over in his mind as he made his way along the streets back to the cozy, two-story home that he shared with Emily and his children, Rachel and Jolyon.

Whether possible or not, Tanner realized, the idea of traveling through time held untold fascination. Imagine going back in time to the days of Pompeii or Atlantis or Our Lord Jesus Christ. Imagine if one could go back and halt the crucifixion. Wouldn’t that be a quandary for Pastor Richards when the Tanner family listened to his sermon on Sunday at the local church?

Tanner smiled at the thought, before pushing it to one side. No, traveling back in time was fraught with danger; the potential to generate a new history, to create a paradoxical situation, was simply too hazardous. Better perhaps to travel forward, follow the road into the future to see the wonders that man would bestow upon himself in a hundred years or more.

Pushing open his front door, Theophilus Tanner smelled the wondrous cooking aromas coming from the kitchen. “Emily?” he called. “I am home.”

A moment later, as Tanner hung his jacket over one of the hooks beside the door, his wife appeared, her long skirts swishing about her as she trotted along the gaslit corridor to meet with him.

“How was your day, my darling?” Emily asked, her voice as soothing as a lullaby.

Tanner nodded. “It was…” he began and then checked himself. “It was but a mere precursor to the wonder of seeing your beauty once more, my heart.”

Emily was abashed, waving away his compliment. “You only say that because you smell what’s cooking,” she chastised him. Even so, she stood on tiptoes and kissed him gently on the cheek.

“Pot roast?” Tanner asked as Emily’s lips brushed against him.

“Yes, and it’s almost ready,” Emily assured him. “Mayhap twenty minutes before it is served. Time enough for you to shave those whiskers.” With that, she turned and made her way back to the kitchen to check on the simmering pot roast.

Tanner reached up and stroked his hand along his jowls, feeling the rough stubble that was forming there. Emily had never liked to kiss him when he had evidence of a beard, and so he had always remained clean-shaved for her. He checked his pocketwatch, tilting to see the time in the dull gas-lamplight of the passageway. A quarter of seven. Yes, he could quickly run the razor blade over his forming beard before they sat down to their repast.

Shortly thereafter, Theo Tanner took a boiling kettle of water to the bathroom at the rear of the house and filled the basin there. His shaving equipment, the blade, strop and soap, were held in the cabinet, well out of sight and reach of children’s curious eyes and wandering hands. Tanner pushed the mirror to one side and reached for them.

As the water steamed in the basin, Tanner closed the bathroom cupboard door and stood the mirror back in place before it so that he could see himself to shave.

His face looked much older. It was his face, still, but aged, so terribly aged. It wasn’t the face of a man in his early thirties, it was the face of a man of perhaps sixty. And, as Tanner watched, his face aged further, the skin tautening around his eyes and mouth, his bony cheeks sinking, becoming dark and hollow beneath the glare of the bathroom lamp, his hair thinning, pulling back from his already high forehead. Tanner watched in horror as the skin on his cheeks showed liver spots and began to rot, and then he could see the inside of his mouth through those cheeks where holes in the flesh—his flesh—had split open.

I am losing my mind, he realized as the face in the mirror continued its ceaseless entropic march. It was the only possible explanation. People didn’t age like this, young to old in a matter of seconds. It was impossible.

His bright blue eyes seemed beady now as the hollows around them sunk, almost as though his face was pulling away. His nose had elongated somehow, but perhaps that was an optical trick, a result of his face’s withering and receding. Tanner raised his hands, pushing them against his face to try to hold everything in place, to keep from getting any older. But when he looked in the mirror he saw that his hands were just bones, the fingers of a skeleton.

“Am I dying?” he asked. “Is this dying?”

The door opened behind him, and Tanner watched over his shoulder in the mirror as Emily walked in, a vision of youthful beauty to his ancient decrepitude. “Dinner’s almost ready, darling,” she said, seemingly oblivious to the change in him.

Tanner turned, his skeletal hands still pressed against his rotting face, a picture of entropy. “My dearest,” he said, his voice sounding like dried leaves to his ears, “I fear I may be a little late.”

Emily saw him for the first time then, the change in him, and her eyes widened as she looked at her husband.

And then she began to scream.