Chapter Eighteen
“Genealogy Lessons”
•
Act I: The Problem
(“Sarah, Can You?”)
The girl flopped on the gurney like a landed fish.
She was a very fat girl, and she had been stripped to the waist. One of her arms had fallen off the edge, but none of the men who surrounded her, their faces pale and indistinct in the weird half-light, had bothered to put it back. Rolls of flesh wobbled like gelatin as she settled back to rest, and her pendulous breasts swayed from side to side. The men swarmed around her like flies.
Chris didn’t know the girl, and he didn’t like seeing her like that, helpless, with all of her sad fat body exposed. He tried to look away, but found that he could not: he had no head to turn, no eyes to avert, and that was when he realized that he was dreaming.
"Shit," a voice, one of the men, said. "Again. Clear."
But now the fat girl was fading, receding into the haze. In her place was a different young woman, slimmer, much prettier, dressed in a white lab coat that looked too big for her. She was standing by a test tube, talking to someone Chris could not see.
"It’s a toxin," she was saying. "A poison, Lisa."
Who’s Lisa? Chris wondered, but now he was back with the fat girl, or at least, he thought he was. He couldn’t see her anymore, but the light was the same, and he thought that the man he was looking at might have been one of those who had surrounded her before. The man had a sandy moustache and he looked exhausted. He nursed a cup of coffee, shaking his head and glancing, repeatedly and somehow pointedly, at the clock on the wall behind him. The clock’s hands stood at eighteen minutes past six.
"Once more," said the voice, the same as before. "Again. Clear." But now he was drowned out by a rising tide of women’s voices, all babbling at once, repeating themselves.
"This shit is dangerous. It’s erratic."
"It’s a toxin."
"It can lie dormant in the system for days, weeks, months..."
"It can also be quite lethal."
"...whether it’s some kind of hormonal signal for release..."
"A poison, Lisa."
"...or some random factor..."
"It’s a toxin."
"—blam, out of nowhere..."
"...lethal..."
"...dangerous...erratic..."
"A poison, Lisa."
And over it all, the same phrase, repeating itself endlessly, mindlessly, in a voice like nothing even remotely human: cold, sexless, impersonal, inexorable:
...THERE WOULD BE NO MORE DEATHS IN THE TOWN OF HERSCHBERG UNTIL THE WINTER SOLSTICE...THERE WOULD BE NO MORE DEATHS IN THE TOWN OF HERSCHBERG UNTIL THE WINTER SOLSTICE...THERE WOULD BE NO MORE DEATHS IN THE TOWN OF HERSCHBERG…
Chris moaned and tossed uneasily in his sleep, and now the fat girl was back, her flesh grey and unresponsive, eyes half-opened, unblinking.
"Fuck it." The voice, thick with defeat. "Fine. Call it."
"Time of death," another voice replied. "Six thirty...what the fuck is that?"
A dark shape now rising from the body of the girl—or no, not exactly dark, and not exactly a shape, either, but a wrongness somehow, a—
Chris’ point of view swiveled wildly, like a tracking shot gone hideously awry, as the indistinct background and the weird light trembled, shuddered, gave way.
No.
Perception itself twisted beyond all recognition, shrinking, warping away from the thing spreading out from the girl on the gurney, not even a thing, really, not a thing at all, a not-thing, a non-thingness that—
No!
And then there was nothing to see anymore at all, nothing to hear, nothing to smell or touch or taste or feel or think or be, no thing, no thing-ness, nothingness, not, no, not—
No!
Chris sat bolt upright in bed, mouth opened in a soundless scream, feeling the heart pound so painfully in his chest that for a moment he wondered if he were the one dying of heart failure. He stared wildly around the room. All seemed as it should be, and yet somehow, he knew. Whatever that was, that he had seen in his dream, it was happening. Tonight.
Eyes wide, he reached for his alarm clock, turned it around to face him, although he thought that he already knew what time it would be.
He was wrong. It was only seventeen minutes past two. It had been less than an hour since Brittany had left him.
("‘Till human voices wake us," he had concluded, "and we drown." And then there had been the longest silence, as Brittany had just sat there, looking at him, that strange and indefinable smile on her grotesque face, and suddenly Chris had wanted very badly to take her glasses off, to get a better look at her eyes. But then, as if reading his intent, she had shook her head slightly and pushed her last, unfinished Tom Collins away. "Good night, Christian," she had told him firmly, and rising to her feet with the over-deliberate care of the extremely drunk, had left his room, presumably to stagger her way home to Hiawatha Towers.)
Less than an hour. Chris hadn’t remembered going to bed. And indeed, looking around once more, he saw that he was still dressed, the glasses unwashed, his desk lamp still on. He must have fallen asleep shortly after she had gone. He guessed maybe he’d had a little too much to drink as well.
From somewhere below him, there was a thump, followed by a moan. Elsewhere, someone was giggling. Chris shivered. This was a bad night. Something was happening out there. Something bad. That thing he had seen in his dream...
He stared again, hopelessly, at the clock.
What you have seen has not yet come to pass, a familiar voice told him. It was a silvery voice, cool, a voice of running water and dappled shade and the wind in the leaves. But it will. It will, if you do not act soon, and act quickly.
Chris moaned and covered his eyes with his hands.
He was just getting so tired of the Arb talking to him.
This was, he knew, hardly unusual. It was, in fact, expected. Perhaps even inevitable. People like him always struggled, and struggled long and hard, against their destinies. Chris had read many, many fantasy novels, and he understood such things.
Now, my child, the Arb urged him. Now, and quickly. Before it is too late. The fate of all may depend upon—
"But, why?" Chris asked it. "I don’t understand. This doesn’t even make any sense. Who was that girl? Who was she, that so much should revolve around her death?"
Have you learned so little, in all these years? the Arb rebuked him. It is so often thus, that all must hinge on the most seemingly incidental of lives. All are part of the Great Chain, my child. It—
"Oh yeah, yeah, yeah," Chris muttered, pulling on his lace-up boots. "I know. I know."
Not for the first time, he found himself wishing that the genre in which he seemed fated to dwell were just a tad less...preachy.
He grabbed his special things—his Ethiopian salt shaker, his quartz crystal, his Zippo lighter with the turquoise insets—and crammed them into the pockets of his trench coat. Then he looked up and froze.
Outside of his window, the trees. Waving wildly, madly, in the still of what Chris was almost certain was a windless night. A branch scraped against his window, and now he could hear them out there, muttering, groaning, creaking: a rising tide in the darkness.
Yes, the Arb said, its voice tinged with compassion. And with something else: could it be fear? Our enemies are strong tonight, on this of all nights. They have gathered, the forces of the Dark. You must be very brave, my child, and very strong. I may not be able to help you, once
The voice was cut off abruptly, as if by a knife. Somewhere outside, Chris thought he could hear a thin, whickering laugh. He trembled violently, staring at the window.
"But I don’t know what to do," he said plaintively. There was no reply.
Chris swallowed. Then, setting his shoulders, he crossed his room to his bed, knelt beside it. Slowly, very slowly, he reached beneath it and pulled out a mahogany box. Dangerous as it might be for him to be seen with it tonight, he would need its power. He lifted the lid and pulled on one corner of the silk, allowing the weight of the object wrapped within it to roll itself free and land heavy at the bottom of the box. He took it up and turned it from side to side, watching it gleam in the light from his desk lamp.
The Herschberg PD, who had searched long and hard for this item ever since they had examined the body found in room 413 of Saki dormitory, would have been very interested to see it here. So would the FBI. And so, for that matter, would a number of beings in Alaska, most of whom believed it to have been destroyed some seven centuries ago.
Chris turned it this way and that, mouth dry, watching the light play along its blade. It was clean now, not the way it had been on that dreadful night of the Ides of November, when obeying the command of some wordless instinct, he had found it under the bushes outside of Saki, wrapped in a stiff and bloodied towel.
He ought to have turned it over the police immediately. He knew that. But that would have involved explaining just how he had come to find it so quickly, and why he had loaned it to Jill the day before, and...well, and it just would have looked bad. Even if they hadn’t arrested him for murder, they would probably have decided that he was some kind of Satanist or something—this was rural Minnesota, after all—and found something else to charge him with. And even if none of that happened, they would still have seized the knife as evidence, and then Chris wouldn’t have got it back for ages, if ever. And it was his, and it had been in his family for generations, and...well, and he needed it.
He never should have loaned it to Jill. He knew that, too. But she had been so scared, and he had really owed her, all things considered, and he had honestly thought that maybe it would protect her. He never would have guessed in a million years that it could be used to commit murder.
Chris held it before him, desperately hoping that all of his purification rituals had been sufficient to cleanse it. He focused his energy, breathing deeply.
"Please," he called to the Arb. "Help me. This one last time. I need to know how it can be stopped. What I need to do. Please."
He flung his energy towards the Arb, lending it his strength, willing it to rouse itself, to overcome the Dark forces opposing it, to answer him.
Faintly, ever so faintly through the rising snarls and mutterings of the night, he heard its voice.
It told him what it was that he needed to do.
"Oh, right," Chris moaned in desperation. "And where am I supposed to find one of those in Herschberg?"
There was no reply save soft, mocking laughter from the trees outside.
Slipping his athame into the top of his boot, Chris took a deep breath and ran out the door.
•
Cecil Graves watched the hands of the clock on the wall refuse to move and tried to concentrate on what Dave was telling him.
"So the roommate’s the obvious suspect. It’s just so clear. Means, opportunity, and she skips town the instant the body’s discovered. Not only that, sounds like she even led the Phillips kid to the corpse. Waited down in the lobby and sent him up alone to the room. Then panicked and split. A lot of them do that, Cecil."
It was true. They did. It was like some of them had this irresistible urge to return to the scene of the crime, or maybe it was just that the waiting got to them, after a while. But they didn’t want to be themselves the ones to discover the body—thought it would look suspicious or something, God only knew why—so they led other people to them instead. Murderers were funny that way. Well, funny peculiar, that is. Not funny ha-ha. Although Cecil had known one or two of them who were that, too. With tremendous effort, he tore his attention away from the clock.
"Motive?" he croaked.
"She’s even got one of those, although it’s weak. Seems like her boyfriend used to date Mankevich. Maybe it was still going on, she finds out, gets jealous..."
Cecil made a non-committal noise. It sounded awfully weak to him. These college students fucked like bunnies, and they swapped partners all the time without anyone getting murdered over it. Just part of the good old college experience, even in these days of AIDS, the stupid kids. And besides, surely if the roommate had done it, she would have done it right there in the room, and that would have been a right mess, with a slit throat. But forensics had said that the room had been clean. Clean of anything they could pick up, anyway.
Not for the first time, Cecil cursed that disappearing wall. He’d have felt a whole lot better about "Jill A" if he’d ever had the chance to see the crime scene. Or to touch the body.
"Or could be she’s a fanatic," Dave continued. He really had a bug up his ass about this roommate theory. "Finds out Mankevich is getting an abortion and flips out. Or maybe she just got tired of Jill putting her shoes on her side of the closet. Who the hell knows? We don’t know squat about Joplin. And we’re not going to, unless..."
Cecil’s attention swung back to the clock as if drawn there by some magnetic force. They had taken him off of the morphine drip two days ago. Now a nurse came by every four hours to give him some pills that no way in hell lasted for four hours. He had fifteen minutes to go before his next dose.
Click. Sixteen minutes to go.
Clunk. Fourteen minutes to go.
The clock on the wall was of the sort often found in classrooms and government offices. Every sixty seconds, the big hand jerked backward click, before leaping forward to mark the passing of another minute with a hollow clunk. This had the nauseating effect of making it sometimes seem as if time itself were running backwards. Cecil had had a few bad moments in the past couple of days when he had become morbidly convinced that the clunk would fail to follow the click, and that he would therefore have to sit through three and a half hours of time running in reverse before the nurse would come in to give him his pills. He closed his eyes and tried to ignore his nausea and listen to Dave, who was still nattering on, something about that roommate theory of his or something, no matter.
"...but every time I try to bring it up, everyone gets this weird vague look, and their auras go all funny and orangey, and they change the subject on me, or just stop paying attention. There’s definitely something strange going on with Joplin, Cecil."
"Uh." Cecil tried to think about this, but instead found himself returning to that vision he’d had last week, while dangling from his balcony in his bathrobe. Back in the good old days. When he’d been in shock. Doc Shriever, telling them about Body A, the knifed girl, the one Dave was babbling on about, being pregnant. And that other girl, the one who had broken his nose after he’d patted her on the fanny outside of Feinstein’s dorm room. And some connection, almost seen, half-viewed, between them.
He should never have touched that girl. Not only had it been grossly unprofessional—actionable even, particularly in a political climate like Herschberg’s—but he also felt, irrationally enough, as if it had jinxed him somehow, as if all of his current troubles had grown organically out of that single, ill-considered act.
This made no sense at all, of course—his neck had already been broken when he had patted that girl on the ass—but nonetheless, he found the notion eerily compelling. A disappearing wall, after all, could happen to anyone. And it had—to Leif Olafsen and Trudy Dringenberg, compared with whom Cecil supposed he had got off lightly. But everything that had happened to him since then, since that girl had broken his nose, had felt...different, somehow. Malicious. Retributive. And intensely personal. For God’s sake, did a little harmless lechery really warrant such harsh punishment?
I angered the Goddess, Cecil thought sickly, as Dave nattered on and on. I angered the Goddess, and now I have to pay. And pay and pay and pay, and keep on paying, because She is not forgiving, the Goddess.
"...?" Dave had just asked him something. He yanked himself back to attention.
"What?"
"I asked how your interview went. The one with the girl your weirdo neighbor, whatshername, some soap opera name..."
"Clairmont. Brittany Clairmont."
"Yeah, that’s it. The interview with the girl that she said you should talk to. Whatsername."
"Schreiber. Matilda Schreiber."
"Yeah, that’s it. So how’d it go?"
"Oh, okay, I guess. Not much there."
Cecil hoped that Dave would leave it at that, and that he wasn’t reading his aura or anything right now, because he was lying through his teeth. There had definitely been something there. The girl had been nervous as a dog...no, no, he meant a cat. But Cecil didn’t want to admit that he simply hadn’t been up to finding out what she had been hiding. His interview with Matilda had taken place on the first day they had taken him off the morphine drip, and it had been all he could do to carry on a conversation without whimpering like a kicked puppy. The third or fourth time that the girl’s face had loomed moon-like over him, to ask him if maybe she should ring for a nurse, or if perhaps he’d like a drink of water? it had become far too humiliating, and he had just given it up, thanked her for her time, told her she could go. She’d been so relieved she had bolted from his room as if the hounds of hell were after her.
Definitely something there, and Cecil hoped to God it wasn’t murder, because she had seemed like a real nice kid. Had even sent him some flowers the next day, lupins or some damn thing, he didn’t know shit about flowers. No, there had been something there all right, but Cecil knew he didn’t stand a chance of sweating it out of her until these pills started to work properly. And that could take months.
"There is something weird about that girl," Dave said. "She has a funny smell."
"That’s called patchouli," Cecil told him.
When he had tried to explain to his doctor about the pills not being strong enough, the little bastard had gone all patronizing on him, explaining to him in a tone of voice suitable for a four-year-old all about the dangers of morphia addiction, and how it just wouldn’t be responsible of them to leave him on the drip any longer. And about how he knew that it would be hard at first, but not to worry, because it would get better. With time.
Condescending little prick. It was all well and good for him, Cecil thought bitterly. He wasn’t the one spending what amounted to three hours out of every twenty-four suffering. He wasn’t the one who couldn’t get any work done, or who could never even get more than three hours of sleep before waking up sweating and nauseated and incapable of doing anything but stare at the clock, as if if only he could stare hard enough, he might actually will the nurse to appear with his next dose of medication. Cecil thought that it might be rather nice if his patronizing little doctor were to wind up in this hospital himself one day, preferably with a lovely leaking gut wound, or perhaps fifty percent third-degree burns, just so that Cecil could visit him and ask him how he was enjoying finding out what happened to you when you were fool enough to anger the Goddess.
So where did you get this Goddess shit from? Cecil asked himself.
(dont worry about that sarahs just got misery on the brain thats all so just hush you know sshh and pretend these are italics okay?)
Cecil blinked, then decided to ignore this stray thought, more reminiscent of his weirder morphia dreams, actually. No, really, he thought: why a Goddess, for Christ’s sake?
Oh. That was right. He had been thinking about how everything had seemed jinxed for him ever since that girl had broken his nose, and...
...and you thought of a Goddess, a voice far more like his own concluded for him, because that girl was pregnant too. Just like Mankevich was. You knew it the instant you touched her. Don’t you remember?
Yes. He did remember now. He had been irritated by her snooty expression, and her stupid punk hairstyle, and her rich kid disdain, and suddenly overwhelmed by a class resentment that he hadn’t even known he possessed, he had given her a good swat. And known, the instant he had touched her, that the poor kid was knocked up. And that had been when she had turned around and slugged him, much much harder and more competently than rich girls were supposed to know how to do—maybe he had been wrong about her; perhaps she was on a scholarship or something; she hadn’t even shaken her hand afterwards—and the sudden pain of broken nose and jolted neck, not to mention his astonishment that she had actually punched him, had driven the thought right out of his mind. And out of his memory. Until now.
Cecil suddenly noticed that Dave had stopped talking. Instead, he was just sitting there looking at him. In a kind of cross-eyed way. Reading his aura. Shit.
Pain was never pleasant, but being in pain in front of Dave was something that Cecil particularly disliked because he strongly suspected that Dave came from one of those God-awful places where you proved your manhood by eating broken glass, or rolling around on hot coals, or having sharpened slivers of bone rammed under your fingernails, or something equally atrocious and National Geographic-y. And the tact thing not being Dave’s strong suit, Cecil just knew that eventually Dave was going to tell him to stop being such a goddamned baby, and then launch into some endless anecdote about the time that he—Dave, that is—had been captured and flayed alive by the Wumblie-Jumblies of East Backofnowhere, and about how he had just grinned all the way through it, thus proving himself a true warrior and winning the adulation of the entire fucking tribe, and—
"Hey," Dave said suddenly, and surprisingly gently. "I’m sorry. This isn’t a good time. You’re tired. I’ll come back tomorrow, okay?"
"Yeah," Cecil croaked. "Okay."
"Hang in there," Dave told him, and left.
After a moment’s consideration, Cecil decided that actually, on the whole, he far preferred Dave without tact.
He stared longingly at the clock and felt the sweat pour down his back and wondered what it could possibly matter if that girl who had punched him had been pregnant. Who cared?
There’s more to it than that, though, the voice in his head told him. And you know it.
Cecil did. But it just wasn’t something he wanted to think about right now. It wasn’t something that he could think about right now.
But Cecil Graves, for whom pain was, in spite of what he had told Dave a few days before, actually a much better enhancer of intuitive power than morphine would ever be, did little but think about it. At least for the next four minutes. Until the nurse came with his pills.
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