The Sleepwalker

Media Nox — Midnight

The gold on the black nameplate on the desk in Louis's office read: Louis Satchmo Reveur, D.O./Ph.D. Alone in the empty office, he reflected that a hundred years ago when he had chosen that name he didn't like it nearly as much as he did today, light-years away from where he had been at the time.

Louis Reveur sat back in his looming red armchair, red like the blackened bricks of his semi-detached bay and gable, his Morpheus armchair. Morpheus, god of sleep, god of dreams. Then he wondered again how a client managed to schedule an appointment for midnight, but there it was in his schedule: "Prince, Leander — 12 a.m."

Prince Leander? You gotta be kidding me. Louis almost got up from his Morpheus chair and went home to sleep right then ... but something stopped him. Nervous and twiddling a ballpoint pen between ex-drummer fingers, Dr. Reveur twiddled a funny idea out of his head. Of course the name had been there a minute ago.

It was written there all day.

Princes. The lack of princes was what he liked about this place. No princes, no dukes, no kings, bards, squires, lords. No damn knights. Cutthroat corporate stooges trying to kill each other amounted to about the same, but at least no one expected Louis to bow when they entered a room. Or get up out of his seat.

If the words had only appeared now, he wondered what he had been doing in his office all night. He almost checked to make sure the bottle he kept in his desk cabinet wasn't empty.

Loosening his blackened red tie, Louis peered into the shadows in the corners of the room, expecting them to move. A luminous desk light suspended itself like the sun by nothing, a gravitational pull all to itself. It lit up an empty desk chair for visitors, three walls lined with textbooks, an empty charcoal fainting couch. Everything as it should be.

An avalanche of snow came past the window. Louis shuffled his weight around in the chair and twisted over its arm at the same second the snowstorm was set alight by more than moonlight; a white fork of lightning, however unlikely, cut through the blizzard. The white zigzag imprinted on his retinas along with a thousand brilliant snow flakes.

Lightning in a snowstorm?

A knock thundered at the door at the same time thunder clapped at the window. Louis bolted upright.

For a second he questioned what would happen to him if he didn't answer. "Come in," he said. Quietly. If Prince Leander didn't hear, maybe he would go away.

The silence smacked him. It hurt his ear drums. The seconds became long as Louis's heart palpitated, sprinting, his thoughts raced his heart beats, he swore out loud, though quietly, and called, "Come in, please, it's open."

The stranger who came in was so out of place that Dr. Reveur knew he was exactly where he should be.

The door closed itself behind the prince. Prince indeed. Despite a fine wool, precisely tailored, charcoal gray suit, at the moment Leander looked like the prince of the corner of 14th Street. Fabric wrinkled like the newspaper he may have slept on, subtle narrow notched lapels, a subdued gray chalk-stripe suit jacket long out of fashion and time — and above the breast pocket the fabric was torn in the shape of a bullet.

The blood was brown and congealed on the fabric, beginning to dry.

The stranger didn't appear to be wounded, however, so the uninformed would perhaps guess that Prince Leander had stolen the suit from the body of a rich time traveler.

Louis knew better. He himself had arrived with notched lapels.

"Well, Prince, if you're coming in, come in. Sit down."

He was pale. In the stranger's dead eyes, Louis saw his own. It was possible Louis had looked equally ghastly the night he himself had arrived after, well, dying.

"I'm not going to ask where you're from," said Louis. "It doesn't matter. You are here; soon I won't be. You're going to need a mentor. Is this your first time, Prince?"

The stranger didn't answer.

"Dying," Louis pressed. "Is this your first time dying? Are you going to answer or are you just going to stare at me for the rest of my prematurely ending afterlife?"

"I was shot." A vague hand went to the frayed hole over his heart.

"You going to let a little injury like that stop you?" Louis snapped. His patience was as short as the life he had left. Bullet through the chest. A little injury. Only temporarily lethal.

"I died."

Ah, yes. So he was new to this. Louis had done the tourist gig a number of times, but certainly the first had shocked him. In his first life, his death had been peaceful, if tragically early. Cancer, a sad ending surrounded by family. It hadn't been fair, there had been injustice, hospital bills, diagnoses made too late, distant relatives who hadn't made it to his bedside in time, feuds unresolved. In reflection he could think of it now as peaceful. Compared to some of the nonsense he had seen since.

Nothing could have prepared him for waking up in a new place; he'd expected some of that eternal rest he'd heard so much talk of. Instead, he had woken up, like out of a dream — as if his real life, as he had thought of it then, had been the dream.

And the worlds he found. On the brinks of blowing one another to bits, always with a finger on some button, whether tomorrow worlds with city planets and planet bombs or past worlds no farther along than cave men but still about to hack each other apart over who could harvest some fertile plain until nothing was left but unburied bones and decay. Worlds with weird physics, worlds with backwards evolution, worlds with magic right out of Louis's imagination. Every dream different.

This had been the only one so far where all people were squabbling over was who got to direct a damn company. Good for them. That was one other reason Louis liked it here.

Only now the end was near. He'd been through it enough times to know. Right before the next expiration, a replacement shows up. Leander here was the replacement, which meant that Louis was about to go sleepwalk some place else. If he was in a good mood, maybe he'd help his Soliari friends prevent that company takeover first. He had about a minute to decide.

From his chair, Louis told Leander, "I think of it like sleepwalking. Death is a lot like sleep. Ever wound up somewhere in the morning not knowing how you got there, did things in your sleep? Hopefully nothing too bad, I used to get a start on the laundry, ruined a few silk shirts that way. Now it's like you're sleeping all the time, and that doesn't mean you can't get some work done. There's a job for you to do, and in exchange you get to live just about forever. Except for the part where someone comes along and kills you — temporarily. Then you go sleepwalk somewhere else — indefinitely, for the rest of time.

"For now, you've been transferred, here. I'm going to ask you to go to . . . a friend of mine. To help him. Work for him. He's the director of Constellation Invernali. You will have to learn on the job, because I have maybe only sixty seconds left, and there's something I need to do." He stood up and continued, "In there," he pointed to the wardrobe in the corner behind the fainting couch, "you'll find suitable clothing. You cannot wear those lapels in this time period."

Louis bent to open the third drawer on the right side of his desk, roved through keys, disorganized notes, receipts, unframed photographs, a broken fountain pen, and the 13 ounce bottle of brandy, full, before he found the false back, which hid a locked compartment, to which he did not have a key.

He checked that Leander was dressed. The prince looked passable (in a black wide peak shorn wool jacket and aqua vest and tie, freshly creased pants and shiny black brogues) and ready to get gone.

"You've got to go now. Don't trust anyone but Mr. Potestas. The Soliari are puppet masters, and they get rid of anyone they can't attach their puppet strings to. Hence my current predicament. I need you to go to Mr. Ilan Potestas at Constellation Invernali. Remember the name. Ilan Potestas, Invernali."

"Pot-est-as, Invernally," said Leander over a clumsy tongue that didn't enunciate. Wild though it was, Louis found himself wondering if the prince was American. But what were the odds? Infinite worlds, and America hadn't had any princes. Not in Louis's time, anyway.

The boy wasn't moving. "Why don't you come with me?" Leander asked. Louis looked from the clock to the door and back again. Finally Leander had it. "You're going to be killed." It seemed like he was a little bit slow.

"And knowing doesn't change a thing — not when the universe itself sends in a replacement. That's the kind of fate no man can outmaneuver." A twinkle in Louis's eyes accompanied the explanation he'd given before, but not for a long time, but when he asked, "Understand?" Leander shook his head no. "You showed up here to replace me. Which implies that I need to be replaced."

"But they're going to kill you, why? Because they couldn't control you?" said Leander.

"That, and I broke a few laws."

For an entire moment, there was no sound, even the clock didn't so much as tick. Of course it didn't; the moment was less than a second, not measurable by heartbeat either because Louis's clattered a dozen times an instant like the four hoofs of a racehorse.

"Tell Potestas the Constellation Company will be taken over tomorrow, at the board election," said Louis. "He won't like that." He leapt back to the compartment in his desk and now its lock ticked open, as if he was just following destiny, doing what some sentient creator wanted him to do, determinism in action, and he retrieved a gun from inside.

Holding it out to Leander, he said, "Take this back to Potestas. Go through there."

Leander took the gun and looked up from it to see that what before had been the other half of the office was now, miraculously even to Dr. Louis Reveur, an expanse of dark snow in the night that stretched on forever. The spacious office was cut in nearly half vertically and led out into the world.

Across from Louis there came a commanding knock at the door.

"Guardia, open up!"

Leander had sharp eyes on the door and he wasn't moving. He held the gun still outstretched in his hand. He licked his lips and said with his dull accent, "Why do you want me to run? I can kill them."

"No," said Louis. "They cannot be killed."

"Anyone can be killed," Leander said, voice unwavering, post-mortem stress disorder speaking.

"But not everyone is an enemy," said Louis. Leander stayed, arm outstretched with the deadly weapon. His besuited silhouette was black against a backdrop of winter on one side and urban office on the other. A few snowflakes made it to Louis's carpet before melting.

"Go," said Louis. "Please."

Some thirty years ago, Louis had stood there like Leander did now — recently expired, not sure whether to consider himself a tourist or a ghost, the pain of a fractured gunshot wound to his head still tingling as if the blast that had fragmented his cerebellum were muted by oxycodone.

Back then, Louis had been the replacement. A dead man with a link to downtown Invernali at his back, just as Leander did, only Louis didn't go through it. Instead, he had watched the guardia execute his predecessor point blank. Louis didn't remember that man's name.

"Prince Leander," he said, "when you find Potestas, tell him you're taking over for me. Louis Reveur."

The stranger took his eyes from the door, and said, "It's not Prince Leander. It's Leander Prince." Then he nodded, and dashed into the snow in his brogues. The link downtown vanished, all but the ghosts of snowflakes on the floor, and the office was back as it should be, except for the guardia crashing against the door.

A/N Thank you for reading Stars Rise. If you had a good time, please leave me a star. The power of the stars fuels my magical world and helps me to grow stronger as a writer, and I appreciate each and every one.