Clyde Umney was no more.
So long, shamus.
_______________________________________________________________________
VII. The Other Side of the Light.
All that was six months ago.
I came to on the floor of a gloomy room with a humming in my ears, pushed myself to my knees, shook my head to
clear it, and looked up into the bright green glare I’d fallen through, like Alice through the looking glass. I saw a Buck
Rogers machine that was the big brother of the one Landry had brought into my office.
Green letters shone on it and I
pushed myself to my feet so I could read them, absently running my fingernails up and down over my lower arms as I
did so:
So I left town, and as to where I finished up . . . well, mister, I think that’s my business. Don’t you?
And below that, capitalized and centered, two more words: THE END.
I read it again, now running my fingers over my stomach. I was doing it because there was something wrong with my
skin, something that wasn’t exactly painful but was certainly bothersome. As soon as it rose to the fore in my mind, I
realized that weird sensation was going on everywhere–the nape of my neck, the backs of my thighs, in my crotch.
Shingles, I thought suddenly. I’ve got Landry’s shingles. What I’m feeling is itching, and the reason I didn’t recognize it
right away is because–
“Because I’ve never had an itch before,” I said, and then the rest of it clicked into place. The click was so sudden and so
hard that I actually swayed on my feet. I walked slowly across to a mirror on the wall, trying not to scratch my weirdly
crawling skin, knowing I was going to see an aged version of my face, a face cut with lines like old dry washes and
topped with a shock of lackluster white hair.
Now I knew what happened when writers somehow took over the lives of the characters they had created. It wasn’t
exactly theft after all.
More of a swap.
I stood staring into Landry’s face–my face, only aged fifteen hard years–and felt my skin tingling and buzzing.
Hadn’t he said his shingles had been getting better? If this was better, how had he endured worse without going
completely insane?
I was in Landry’s house, of course–my house, now–and in the bathroom off the study, I found the medication he took
for his shingles. I took my first dose less than an hour after I came to on the floor below his desk and the humming
machine on it, and it was as if I had swallowed his life instead of medicine.
As if I’d swallowed his whole life.
These days the shingles are a thing of the past, I’m happy to report. Maybe it just ran its course, but I like to think that
the old Clyde Umney spirit had something to do with it–Clyde was never sick a day in his life, you know, and
although I seem to always have the sniffles in this run-down Sam Landry body, I’ll be damned if I’ll give in to them . . .
and since when did it hurt to turn on a little of that positive thinking? I think the correct answer to that one is “since
never.”
There have been some pretty bad days, though, the first one coming less than twentyfour hours after I showed up in the
unbelievable year of 1994. I was looking through Landry’s fridge for something to eat (I’d pigged out on his Black
Horse Ale the night before and felt it couldn’t hurt my hangover to eat something) when a sudden pain knifed into my
guts. I thought I was dying. It got worse, and I knew I was dying. I fell to the
kitchen floor, trying not to scream. A
moment or two later, something happened, and the pain eased.
Most of my life I’ve been using the phrasèÌ don’t give a shit.” All that has
changed, starting that morning. I cleaned
myself up, then climbed the stairs, knowing what I’d find in the bedroom: wet sheets in Landry’s bed.
My first week in Landry’s world was spent mostly in toilet-training myself. In my world, of course, nobody ever went