He stood before the basin, waving his hands through the cool, cool water. He did not look up. There was a mirror there, and he was not yet ready to look into it. Was not yet ready, somehow, to meet its eyes.
Her voice, when it came, took him by surprise. It was as flat and as expressionless as a bullet shot.
“Doctor.”
He bent over the basin, looking at his hands.
You will not address the patient. You will not look the patient in the eyes. You will not...
“Yes?” he said.
“Doctor,” she asked him then, still in that same dead voice. “What's my motivation?”
Chapter Thirty-One
“Buying the Vowel”
I am a brother to dragons and a companion to owls.
—The Book of Job
•
One
Clean yourself up.
There was a buzzing in his ears, loud, insistent, and a pulsing tide of grey alternately obscuring and revealing his view of the sink against which he leaned weakly, turning his swollen wrist from side to side in the basin of cool cool water. He did not look up. He knew that there would be a mirror there—there always was; they always did that, put their mirrors right over their sinks—and he was not yet ready to see what was in there. Was still unwilling to meet its eyes.
“I heard.” The doctor’s voice, even from the opposite side of the closed door, even from the opposite side of the buzzing in his ears and the pounding in his head, seemed very close by, almost intolerably loud. “Where is he?”
“Don’t...“
“Where the fuck is he?”
Clean yourself up.
He turned his arm again, wincing at the wrench in his battered shoulder, then closed his eyes as the cool—cold would be better, but there was no cold, only cool—water slowly eased the pain of what he was almost certain was—
He checked.
Oh. Oh, yes. What was certainly a broken wrist.
“...care of it, all right? He understands the situation now. I think I just made the situation really fucking clear to him, okay? So...”
There was a small plastic cup on the counter next to the sink, sealed in some stiff poly-something substance. Sterilised, of course. For your convenience. For your comfort. For your safety. This was a hospital, after all. It crackled unpleasantly beneath his fingers as he picked it up.
“Fuck. If Hiram...“
“He won’t. He won’t, okay? Don’t worry about it.”
He fumbled with the cup, trying to unwrap it one-handed, pressing it first against his chest, and then against the counter, and then finally, snarling, ripping it open with his teeth and spitting the wrapper onto the floor. He tried to balance the cup under the spigot of the giant plastic jug of bottled water they had left beside the sink. It required both hands. He removed his swollen wrist from the water and levered the spigot down. He willed his hands to stop shaking.
After a few seconds, they did.
“Jesus. Should I...I mean, does he need...do you think I should go in there and take a—“
“No.” A pause, then she added, less certain: “I don’t think…” Another pause. “He’s fine.” Confidence restored. Oh, yes, how he did appreciate confidence in those who were sworn to protect and serve. “He’s fine,” she said again. “I’m just giving him a few minutes to, you know...”
To clean himself up.
“To get his shit together.”
Ah, yes. Of course. The vulgarity. Always the vulgarity.
He rinsed his mouth and spat into the sink, then repeated the process until there was no more blood. Fine. He was fine, she said. One broken wrist. Two cracked ribs. Clavicle—
He checked.
No. No, the clavicle was only bruised. Well, good. And the spleen was all right, and although the kidneys ached madly, he thought that they were basically okay, and neither of the ribs had actually been displaced. The lungs remained more or less inflatable. Nothing seemed to have ruptured, thankfully. But still. Still. Pulled stitches, loose teeth, broken bones...
Plus, she’d nearly killed him with that pillow.
Fine.
Amateur.
•
He had known, of course, that this was coming, had known it from the instant that he had seen her, her expression, the anger on her face, that morning in the Coroner’s Office. True, he hadn’t really expected her to set upon him in the hospital—that had been rather, well, startling, to tell the truth—but still. Still. He had known that this was coming.
But he had also known that she wasn’t going to hurt him all that badly. It wouldn’t be in her best interests to do so. She wanted him to leave town, after all, not to be laid up in the hospital for days mending. So what that meant was: no broken bones, no internal injuries, nothing that could kill or cripple or maim him. She wanted to frighten and to cow, not to incapacitate. So she was going to hurt him, yes. But she wasn’t going to hurt him badly. It would be nothing he couldn’t handle. He’d dealt with far far worse, in his time.
So he had curled under the blows, willing the muscles to relax, knowing that they would take less damage that way, allowing the body to jerk or writhe or cry out as the electrical impulses prompted it to, concentrating only on keeping its arms up, to protect its—well, his—face.
A reasonable strategy, one would think. On both their parts.
But anger doesn’t talk to strategy. He should have remembered that. He really should have remembered that. Anger does not talk to strategy.
It was only when she had broken the first rib that he had begun to realize what a terrible error in judgment this had been. She wasn’t even going for soft tissue. She was actually aiming for his ribcage, the damned fool, and she hadn’t padded that stick of hers nearly well enough for the degree of force she was using either. And...and...
And she actually hadn’t the slightest idea what she was doing.
Had she.
He had made a desperate lunge for the call button then, the room spinning madly in his vision—bed, chair, dead boy, window, Sheriff, door—thrown himself across the bed, and that had been when she had brought the nightstick down on his outstretched arm, only a glancing blow, fortunately, but still, it had slammed his wrist down against the side of the metal cage that surrounded the hospital bed, and he had screamed, clutching at it, and that was when he had seen her face and realized with a sick horror what was happening here. She was still angry; in fact, now she was even angrier; she wasn’t letting it go; she had been borne up up and away on some great tidal wave of aggression and instinct and spiking adrenaline. She wasn’t in control of herself at all. No one was in control here. She was going to beat him to a bloody pulp.
And that had been when he had realized, far too late, that he was in fact dealing with that most dangerous of all the creatures who walk the earth.
An amateur.
No, scratch that. There was an even more dangerous creature still.
An angry amateur.
•
Oh, he thought, eyeing his wrist and trying to convince himself that the swelling was going down, even though he knew full well that the water wasn’t really cold enough to help with that —oh, it’s just too ridiculous, really. Too, too absurd.
He found himself wishing very much that there hadn’t been a witness.
What must that dead boy have thought of us? he wondered.
He had only caught a few brief glimpses of the ghost who had watched them play their respective roles in the ludicrous farce they had just enacted in this room, but there had been something about his expression—intense, focused, almost studious, as if he had been charged with the task of committing the entire travesty to memory—that had made him feel obscurely ashamed, embarrassed for the both of them. The dead boy had left at some point—while he had been engaged in the unenviable task of voiding his breakfast, perhaps? Perhaps. By the time he had thought to look again after that, the boy had gone. He found himself rather wishing that the ghost were still in the room. He felt, for no reason that he could comprehend, a strong desire to apologize to him.
Who was that, anyway? he wondered. The boy had looked strangely familiar. He was almost certain that it was someone he knew—or had known, rather.
He sighed and shook his head. It would come to him. At any rate, the ghost had probably left in disgust. The pillow had likely done it. If he’d been a ghost in this room, the pillow certainly would have prompted him to leave in disgust.
That pillow, though…
Oh. The pillow had been bad.
She had nearly killed him with that fucki—
He caught himself short. He was not to use language like that. He was not even to think language like that. He had promised that to himself years ago: that no matter how far he might fall, no matter what other degradations he might find himself submitting to before this was finally over, no matter what else of their customs he might be forced to adopt, there was simply no reason at all for him ever to resort to scatology. He might have adopted their gendered pronouns, yes. He might sleep and he might drink; he might eat and excrete; he might engage in the copulatory act—or at least in certain variations thereof. But he would not sink so low as to use the terminology of any one of these repulsive habits in his day-to-day speech, or even his day-to-day thoughts. That was just not going to happen.
But still. She really had nearly murdered him with that...that damnable pillow.
Till human voices wake us, he had thought, inexplicably, when he had first realized that she wasn’t going to let him up, probably hadn’t the slightest idea how long the organism could safely be deprived of air, was blissfully ignorant of the fact that he was actually beginning to choke down there, was in fact likely only imitating something that she had once seen on some television program...
Till human voices wake us, he had thought, and we drown. And: It’s not the fluids that kill, you know. It’s the loss of oxygen. And then, just as his vision had begun to fail: Oh, my dear fellow! You weren’t really worried about that Blade, were you? Or for that matter, about being beaten with a rod? Have you really forgotten all the lessons of your people? It’s only those who live by the sword who need worry about dying by the sword, you know, and you, now—well! You’ve been living your life by a somewhat different principle these past few decades, haven’t you?
And indeed. Indeed he had been. By a somewhat different principle indeed.
•
“Clean yourself up,” she had told him, eyes cold, just before she had left the room, and under ordinary circumstances, he would not have dreamed of obeying such a command. Would have far preferred to simply lie there, moaning perhaps—and just let her deal with that, the ridiculous incompetent. She was the one who had made the mess, after all. She could clean it up herself.
But. But, but, but. The Manitou. They were still here somewhere, in this very building, and what, what if they decided to come back?
Oh, no. That would not do. That would just not do at all. He had still not looked up into the mirror, but he could imagine all too well what the thing in there must look like: one of its eyes already beginning to swell shut, and blood on its mouth, and vomit caked along one side of its face, in its hair, even, and on the lapel of the piece of useless rubbish that had once been one of its—of his, rather—favorite suits, and…
And no. It was simply unthinkable.
He absolutely could not allow them to see it, or him, or—oh, hell, either of them like this.
So he pushed the spigot to fill the basin again and bent low over the sink, hissing at what this motion did to his strained lower back and cracked ribs, splashing his face, scrubbing with handfuls of paper towels from the dispenser, trying his best to clean it up as best he could with only cool water to work with, hoping that he might at least make it marginally presentable. He washed hurredly, spurred on by the memory of the expression on their faces when they saw that he had been eating, by the thought of what they might then make of this, of this entire bloody mess. They would never understand it. They would never understand how he could possibly have allowed such a thing to happen.
There was a lot about it, about him, about what passed for his life these days, ever since his...well, his fall from Grace, that he didn’t think the Manitou would understand. Oh, they would understand parts of it, certainly. Parts of it. His eating had repulsed them, true, but all the same, they had understood it. They realized that he had no choice in the matter, that he had to eat, to drink, to breathe: they understood human needs, even if they did not share them. And understanding all of that, he supposed that they would also understand the need for contact, for pleasure, for release. They would understand that.
And they would certainly have understood the way he had first gone about it, some twenty years and untold forfeitures ago, before his capabilities had become so very limited, when the body itself had been much younger, and apparently frailer, and altogether prettier. Would have understood the instinct that had led him to flounce his way through just the wrong parts of St. Paul, waiting with a barely concealed grin for the sound of footsteps, the punch or the shove or the kick, the snarl—“Hey, faggot,” “Fucking queer”—oh, yes. Yes, they knew that game. It was, after all, their game, was it not? That was the game of his people. That was the game of the Manitou.
The game, yes. The game, the game, the game. The angry thrust, ripping, rending, hot, growing on itself; the slap of flesh on flesh, the pounding that only grows harder in response to cries or pleas or moans, the feel of the force behind it, thinking itself predator, thinking itself master, thinking itself Itself—but all the while forgetting that it is really doing nothing, nothing at all, but thinking itself into you. Taking it in then, swallowing, smothering, enveloping, incorporating. Subsuming. Feeling yourself fill with its essence as it in turn begins to fail, to flail, to wane: losing control, losing coherence, losing consciousness. Losing Itself. Becoming Not. Becoming Not, as the mind behind the thrust goes slack and dead, and you yourself now contain all that it once was: hunger sated, emptiness filled, you yourself made manifest at last by the simple virtue of having made the other Not Be. That flash of something savage, something unnamable: not joy, no; nor triumph, quite; nor even exultation—although that came close. Mastery, perhaps. Supremacy, even.
Or perhaps simply Being.
Being. Being. Being.
Yes. That was the game of the Manitou, and the game was good.
(“Well played,” he would whisper to them sometimes, when it was over. “Faggot.” And touch his lips gently to their sweating, trembling foreheads as they burst into tears, just as many years before he had always, always closed the eyes of the hunters he had left dead at the top of the mountain.)
Not, of course, that he was playing quite those games anymore. Not these days. Not under his current...limitations. Lord, no. He would end up in the hospital. Or, even more likely, in the morgue. But still, there were tamer versions, lesser manifestations: the gentle rocking, the soft sighs and moans, the occasional touch of lips to back. And the Manitou would understand that, too—or they would think that they did, anyway. They would think that they did.
They would think that they did, but they would be only half-correct. Because of late, the game had ceased to amuse. Lately, these past few years, he hadn’t really cared about the game at all. Lately he sometimes thought that all he really wanted was to know that there was something else there, so that when he awoke from one of the Montauk dreams, his heart pounding and the scream smothered deep in his throat, he might be able to reach out and feel something else, a something else that lived and breathed and felt and thought—but yet was most decidedly Not Him.
But even that, he thought, even that they would probably understand. They knew about hunger, and they knew about thirst. They knew about cold and heat and illness and fear. So perhaps they could understand what he supposed might really be nothing more profound than loneliness—that strange feeling of something hard and unyielding, something cold and heavy and dragging, the feeling that could only be alleviated by contact: the joke shared, the glance exchanged, the opinion communicated. The warm body in the bed.
But they would never understand the omelettes. Or the record collections. That he knew they wouldn’t understand. He wasn’t altogether certain that he understood it himself.
•
He always made them omelettes.
Well, if they would eat eggs, that is. Some of them wouldn’t eat eggs. They were so strange that way, when it came to their food. Some of them wouldn’t eat animal flesh, while others would only eat it so long as it had not once been a pig, or a cow, or any type of mammal; some of them would only eat it if it had once lived in the ocean, while others wouldn’t eat anything that had lived in the ocean; some of them wouldn’t touch fungus, and others wouldn’t touch wheat, and others wouldn’t touch sugar...so strange, really, that they should be so very particular. As organisms, they were exquisitely well-adapted to eat just about everything under the sun, yet half the time they refused foods for no other reason than that they did not like them.
Still. If there were eggs in the house, then he would make them omelettes. If there was coffee, he would set that to brew first, and then as the coffee-maker gurgled and dripped, he would chop whatever he could find that seemed fresh and suitable—chives sometimes, mushrooms, onions, whatever they had in the house—enjoying the smell of the ingredients, and of the percolating coffee, and of the mixed aromas of an unfamiliar home.
They wouldn’t understand that, the omelettes, nor the uncommon pleasure he took in wandering through the strange houses, reading signs of the minds that lived there in the books left lying on the coffee table, the prints on the walls, the ingredients in the kitchen. The record collections. He was particularly fond of the record collections. He never snooped, of course—that would be rude—but it really wasn’t necessary. They liked others to read them from their homes. They went out of their way to facilitate it. They had very little sense of privacy, really.
He would wander through the public spaces of their homes to peer at their books, their prints, their music, and he would wonder: why does this one read Anne Tyler, but not Alison Lurie? Why did he pick the Manet, and not the Monet? Why classical, rather than jazz? How do they know? How do they decide? How do they know how to choose?
It had really become the entire point of the transaction for him, that magic hour before last night’s would come stumbling down the stairs, or down the hall, or off the bed—rumpled, hair mussed, breath foul (but best just not to think about that, really)—to blink in a kind of wary appreciation at the freshly brewed coffee, the first sizzle of the omelette hitting the pan.
Appreciative, yes. But wary. Oh, so wary. “Oh, God,” they were thinking. “This aging queen. What was I thinking? He’s going to get all sticky now, isn’t he? He’s going to start calling me.” Heh. Yes. That was what they were thinking. He couldn’t Read people anymore, no, but he didn’t need to Read them to read them. He knew what they were thinking. But they needn’t have worried. He never called any of them. He rarely saw the same one twice.
And…and, no. That the Manitou would not understand. The sex, yes, and the companionship, yes, and even the warm body in the bed, perhaps. But not the omelettes. And not the record collections.
The warm bodies in the bed were all the same, after all. It could be anyone there, really. Anyone at all.
But every record collection was different.
•
He had finished with his—could he? No. No, he couldn’t possibly. Even he could not possibly call this a toilette. His ablutions, perhaps? Had finished, at any rate, cleaning himself up. He thought. Of course, he couldn’t really tell yet. Not until he looked. Not until he looked in the mirror.
He took a deep breath and looked up.
The battered face of the man he had murdered nearly two hundred years before stared back at him.
(Selkie. I am the seventh son of a seventh son, and I was born with the Sight...)
He looked quickly away, feeling a sudden rush of pity for poor Youngjack. It looked as if someone had really beat the hell out of the man. He had looked just terrible in there. And he was getting old.
At least I never touched his face, he thought indignantly. I never did that. I left his face the hell alone.
It had been pure chance that it had been wearing Youngjack that day, the day when it had happened, the day of its ill-conceived challenge, of its terrible fall from, well, Grace. It could have been wearing anyone, any of the forms it had pleased it to take back then: the blond child, or the green-eyed woman, or the regal old man. But it had been Youngjack. It had often chosen that form. No reason, really—except perhaps that it had always rather liked the look of the man’s hands, had found the graceful, tapering fingers pleasing. The hands—
He blinked, then frowned. He looked down at his hands: one of them damp but otherwise unharmed, the other puffy and bruised, swollen where the Sheriff had brought her stick down on its wrist when it had reached for the call button.
He had realized that she was an amateur, that she didn’t know what she was doing, that she very well might beat him to death out of sheer incompetence, and for a moment there, he had panicked. He had lunged across the bed, reaching for the call button, and in response, she had brought her stick down and broken his wrist. It had been an act of unconscious, unreasoning fear—of instinct, even.
He had gone for the call button, and she had broken the wrist of the hand that reached.
She had broken his right wrist.
He had reached for the call button. Unthinkingly, unhesitatingly, instinctively.
With his right hand.
He closed his eyes and moaned, leaning forward to press his forehead hard against the cool cool glass of the mirror over the sink.
•
Two
Terence Waitling slammed up against the wall outside the storage closet, gasping for breath, one hand clamped over his face.
Oh God, he thought. Oh God. Oh, fuck me.
His nose was bleeding. He felt the drip, warm and sticky on his hand, and for just a second was convinced that the blood must be coming from his eyes, or perhaps even out his very pores, that whatever they had just done to him in there was causing his entire head to burst into massive ruptures, causing it to literally explode, in exquisitely slow motion, just like something out of a Cronenberg film.
This must be what having a stroke feels like, he thought, even though he knew full well that having a stroke felt nothing like this. All the same, he thought, this was what having a stroke really should feel like. He tilted his head back and pinched the bridge of his nose, groping in his pocket for a tissue. Not that he had any, of course. Shit.
Oh God, he thought. Oh, Christ help us. The Malandanti. The Malandanti have come to Herschberg.
Men in dark suits brushed their way past him as he leaned there, moving in and out of the storage closet, carrying crates. He lowered his head slowly, wincing, blinking at them. They were taking no notice of him whatsoever.
Could they, he wondered, could they really all be, could all of them be…
But no. No, they were just minions, that was all. Tools. Or...or, no, that was completely unfair. They were just people, was all. People just going about their business, doing their jobs.
He let out a wobbly breath. What had they done to him back there?
“Agent Johnson,” the one had told him, and then, nodding at the other, “Agent Smith. We’re—“
And that had been when it had come: a wave of pure black malice that had reared up before him and hung there cresting for just a moment—just long enough for him to take notice of it, really—before it had come crashing down, breaking hard on his mind’s shore, hitting him with a massive tidal force, surging through his entire nervous system before it had flung him straight back through the door to slam up against the wall of this corridor, so much jetsam beached on salmon-painted cinderblock.
“Fuck,” he moaned out loud, and tried to stem the flow of blood from his nose with one of the lapels of his coat.
He knew, of course, that it hadn’t really happened that quickly. There had been plenty of time, actually, time to hear the man’s voice complete the sentence, each word seeming very distinct somehow, slow, individual, each word just another piece of jetsam being tossed about right alongside him in that surging flood of hatred. “Here.” “To.” “Retrieve.” “The.” “Samples.” “If.”
And then, all in one piece, “...you’ll wait outside,” while simultaneously that same voice, Johnson’s voice, had spoken directly into his mind, with a contempt that had been even worse, somehow, than the turbid wash of malignance in which he had been tumbling and lost.
Just walk away, Doctor. Walk away, and perhaps we’ll let you live.
And so what had he done then?
Why, he had walked away, of course.
Pathetic. Simply pathetic.
Coward.
No, the voice told him then, that voice that those who had given him his training, all the way back at Berkeley, had always encouraged him to think of as God’s voice, but which frankly, he tended to think of as his own—or if not his own, then his own as it could be, or as it might be. Himself in ten or twenty or thirty years, perhaps. An older and a more experienced him. A better him.
No, Terry, that voice told him gently. No. That’s just what they want you to think. They threw you through that door, threw you just as surely as if they had picked you up and tossed you bodily out, and the only reason he said that to you at all there, at the end, was to make you think differently. To make you think the way you’re thinking now. You do get that, don’t you? You understand that.
Yes. He did, actually. He wasn’t a coward. He was badly overpowered. What possible good would it do anyone for him to go barging back into that room? They’d only do the same to him again, if not worse—and if they did worse, he thought it possible that he really might suffer a stroke. No. What he should do here was walk away (just walk away), as quickly and calmly and quietly as he could, and then call Hoover. Hoover needed to know about this. Then they could work out some plan of action, a smart plan of action, not an idiotic one.
Fuck Hoover, the voice told him then—and you know, this was yet another reason that he had never quite been able to accept that voice as the voice of God? He was an Episcopalian (well…more or less), and according to the tenets of his people, God did not use the F-word.
Fuck Hoover. Forget that. Call Old Dan Gunner.
Terry blinked. Where had that come from? Call Gunner? That old guy at the feed store? What was he going to do, come galumphing down to the hospital waving around a stalk of fennel?
Couldn’t do much worse than you just did in there, Terry, could he?
Well, no. He guessed not. But still...
He gave his nose one final mop with his lapel, blinked in some amazement at the truly prodigious quantity of blood he had managed to get all over his coat—oh, and wasn’t that just going to inspire confidence among the populace as he walked the corridors of the hospital?—and then froze, listening.
From the other side of the door, he could hear the boy’s voice, cheerful, confiding, babbling on about his riders and his cave and all of the other details of his happy little undergraduate acid trip—PMD80, my ass.
Aw, fuck. He’d forgotten about the kid.
What, he wondered, could the Malandanti possibly want with a harmless little flake like that?
It didn’t matter. It didn’t matter. He couldn’t possibly just leave him in there with them. They’d...they could hurt him, or even kill him, and he was tripping on something—he couldn’t possibly—
I should be protecting him, he thought.
But this time, he didn’t need the voice to answer him.
Uh-huh, he thought. You walk back in that room, your brains are going to be leaking out your ears. And that won’t help anyone. Not you, not the cause, not the boy. No one. And besides, just listen to him, will you? Listen to the sound of his voice. Does he sound as if they’re hurting him in there? Does he sound frightened? Distressed? In pain? You don’t know that they plan on doing anything to him. You can’t tell. But if you go back in there, then they might. They could do it just to spite you. So think.
This above all else, he thought. Do no harm.
He took a deep breath and turned to (just walk away), to go and call...well, Hoover, he guessed. He really wasn’t going to call Gunner. That would just be...no. No. He turned, and that was when he heard it, one word wafting through the door to the storage closet.
“...Ashura...”
He froze in his tracks. The boy had been telling him—what? Something about the reservoir. The water, blessed by a unicorn. The same reservoir where Nigel Moore had been found that morning, in a state of hypothermia and extreme mental distress. Nigel Moore, who had been naked. And screaming. And who had attacked the paramedics with a knife...
Terry drew in a sharp breath, then trotted off to find one of the paramedics. That guy with the sandy moustache was probably around here somewhere. He’d probably know what had happened to it.
•
He had. It had been bagged and tagged and indexed, filed and formed, and then put in a big plastic tub slid onto on a very high shelf in the closet-sized room where all of the effects of the patients were kept up here on the psych ward. It seemed a very big tub indeed for Nigel Moore’s rather pathetic bundle of goods: one (1) shredded filthy bathrobe, and one (1) knife that...well, that might or might not be “a long-lost mystical artifact of no small repute.”
The knife had been wrapped up in a towel, not a hospital towel, but a pale blue terry-cloth hand-towel which for some reason had been deemed sufficiently unimportant to be itemized along with the rest. Terry found this very odd indeed as earlier, when he had been scanning the big record book for Moore’s possessions, he had come across entries for pennies, single socks, handkerchiefs, and even objects which the nurses on duty had apparently been unable to identify and which were therefore described in terms like “one (1) thin wire object with loop on top” (a fishhook? he wondered), “one (1) decorative object made of sticks and twine” (one of those dream catcher things, perhaps?), and—his favorite—“one (1) item which appears to be a cigarette butt, but to which patient ascribes very great importance and insists is actually nothing of the sort but instead a long-lost mystical artifact of no small repute.”
He just loved that one.
It did kind of make you wonder, though. Didn’t it?
•
He hadn’t planned on walking around with the thing in his pocket, of course. He had planned on putting it somewhere safe. But while he had been on his way to go and put it somewhere safe, first there had been that brawl to prevent over near where they were doing the blood testing, and then there had been that space to set up for the FBI’s scientists—why he had to be involved with that, he wasn’t sure, but there it had been—and then there had been the epileptic seizure, and of course he had to ditch his blood-splattered coat and find a clean one, and then there had been all of the worried citizens asking him exactly the same questions over and over again, and every time he had turned around, it seemed, that Phillips kid had been in his face, wanting more details about his friend’s surgery—and again, why ask him? he was just a GP, why not ask the surgeon?—and... And well.
Well, it really hadn't been the best of all possible days for a knife which might or might not be a long-lost mystical artifact of no small repute to have come into his possession. It really just hadn't been.
And so when he had seen Youngjack’s name on the roster of admissions from that morning, that really had been the very last straw.
•
It was after they had moved a little further away from the door to the room, so that Youngjack wouldn’t hear them talking about him, that the Sheriff said, in a flat empty voice:
“He’s old enough to be my father.”
Oh fuck, Terry thought.
Because that was just it, wasn’t it? Death. Instant death. He was doomed. She would never forgive him for hearing her say that. Never. With that one sentence, he had become that guy. The one who had seen her falter. The one who had seen her weak. If she were a different woman, a different person, he might have taken it as a sign of encouragement, but not with this woman. Not with this person. This was death, and he damned well knew it.
He cast about for something to say in response, and so of course, instead of something pleasant and normal and safe, something benign, something with the safety catch well in place, what he stumbled upon instead was:
“Did I ever tell you that I was once engaged to be married?”
She narrowed her eyes suspiciously at him.
“Her name was Catherine,” he began, thinking in fact, it almost certainly still is—but of course, there was a set formula you stuck to when you told this sort of story, and who was he to break with tradition? “She broke it off with me,” he explained, “on the day that I’d started my first internship. We had agreed to meet for lunch. I was a little naive about the time issues back then. I thought that interns actually got lunches. So it was eleven thirty or thereabouts, and I was beginning to get kind of hungry, you know, and was really looking forward to just getting out of there...”
She snorted. “You were naive.”
“Yeah. So. And this kid comes in, little kid, with his parents. He’d been in there before, he...well, that part’s not important. Anyway, he had this huge abscessed boil that needed to be lanced. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen...“
“Okay,” she said. “I get it.”
“What?”
“I get it. I see where the fucking story’s going. You just gotta lance the boil, you’re only being cruel to be kind, the bitch walks in, and she sees you there bent over some strapped-down little rugrat who’s screaming and howling and pleading, and you’re crouched over him like some sort of fucking maniac, with a knife in your hand and a gleam in your eye and blood and pus all over your face, and she has a fit, and she leaves you, and that’s the end of the story. But what she didn’t get was that you were only doing what had to be done for the kid’s own good. Right?”
“Um,” he said.
“Right,” she snapped. "Okay. Got it.”
Silence.
Not good.
“I made up the story,” he told her.
“You what?”
“I made up the story. It never really happened. I’ve never lanced a boil in my life, and while I was once engaged to a woman named Catherine, she broke it off with me for other reasons. Or I guess she did, anyway. I never actually had the slightest idea why she broke it off with me, to tell you the truth.” He thrust his hands in his pockets and shrugged.
She looked away, smiling slightly.
“She broke it off with you because you’re a total asshole,” she said.
•
Three
It was while he was still leaning there, his forehead pressed against the mirror, that he first noticed how very quiet it had suddenly become. He straightened slowly, frowning. Before, there had been the voices from outside the door, and even beyond that, the noise of incipient civil panic—worried voices, questioning voices, reassuring voices. There had been the clatter of a cart or gurney going by in the corridor, and the crackle of the PA system, and the hum of the flourescent lights.
And now there was…silence.
He looked up at the clock and waited, counting the seconds.
The minute hand did not move.
The Manitou must have delivered his message after all.
That had been fast.
He risked one final glance in the mirror (Selkie. I am the seventh son of a...), gave his hair one final brush with his fingers, not that it really helped, squared his shoulders to the best of his ability, and swallowed hard.
“I’m here,” he said softly, and turned to face the door. He was starting to tremble, his throat tight and small, tears already beginning to well up behind his eyes.
Stop that, he told himself. Just stop. You know how that only eggs him on. So just don’t.
He forced himself to pull the air deep down into his lungs, in spite of the pain in his ribs. Slow the breathing, the pulse will follow. Show no fear. Show no fear. Show no fear.
“Here, master,” he said. “Here.”
There was no response.
He walked slowly to the door and opened it, then looked out into the corridor at all of the people, frozen in place. The Sheriff was half-turned to face Terence, who slouched against the wall in that insouciant pose that he seemed to think was attractive—oh, hell, let’s be fair, shall we? It was attractive—hands shoved deep down into the pockets of his coat, hair falling over one eye, aw shucks, ma’am, ‘tweren’t nothin’. Irritating. But attractive. The Sheriff was half-turned away from him, one hand clutching the wicker tote bag she carried on her shoulder, a small smile tugging at one corner of her mouth—
Oh. Oh, now that really was intolerable. They’d been flirting out here. Hadn’t they.
One hand clutching the wicker tote bag that she had brought into his room earlier.
“You know,” he said softly, ignoring the pain in his swollen lip as his mouth slowly widened into a tight, tooth-baring grimace. “My dear.” He eased his good hand into the tote bag, felt the thick cloth, still damp, sticky even. Blood. His blood.
“There is,” he told her quietly, “a lesson to be learned here. One,” he added, drawing out her nightstick carefully, “which you might do well to remember in the future. Particularly, my dear, when you deal with my people. Namely…” He tossed the nightstick into the air. The thick yellow cloth she’d wrapped it in unfurled slightly before he caught it again, by the handle, and hefted it experimentally. Well-weighted. Good.
“Namely,” he told her, smiling. “That what goes around—”
His smile faltered. He glanced down at the...what had she wrapped this thing in, anyway? He had noticed before that it had been yellow, and a lurid shade of it at that, but what...what...
It was a quilt of some kind, he thought. One corner of the fabric had pulled away, revealing the reverse side, which was, well, bright. Colorful. It was a jungle print, all simple blocky shapes and primary colors, images of smiling animals—lions and tigers and bears, o my!—with bits of cotton batting stuck in the seams and the folds and...
He shook his head.
“Allow me,” he told her. “If you would be so kind, to demonstrate to you how this is properly done. You—”
No. Not cotton batting. Cotton balls. The kind you buy in a drugstore. She had, she had shoved cotton balls down the...
“What goes around,” he began again, but now he could see it, he really could, just as clear as day. Sheriff Jennifer Little Bear, stomping about that wretched little house she lived in, casting her eye about for something to wrap it in—and swearing furiously, no doubt. The vulgarity. Always the vulgarity. Grabbing this...this child’s quilt, for heaven’s sake, but reversing it so that the pattern wouldn’t show, because of course, that just wouldn’t do, would it? You couldn’t go beating someone with a jungle print. It wouldn’t have the right effect at all. It wouldn’t be intimidating in the least. It simply wasn’t done.
She had reversed the quilt so that the pattern wouldn’t show, and then, worried that it might not be enough—it was an old quilt—she had stomped into the bathroom and grabbed handfuls of the cotton balls that she used to take off her makeup...or, no. No, he’d never seen her wear makeup. Well, all right then, the cotton balls that she used to apply some astringent or cream that she used on her face...shoved handfuls of drugstore cotton balls down into the cracks and crevices, this...this amateur, this hopeless amateur, who was after all only a small town Sheriff, and not even a cop from some big city like New York or Los Angeles or, hell, even Minneapolis/St. Paul, and who therefore had not the slightest idea how one was supposed to go about wrapping a nightstick. Or delivering a punitive beating without breaking bones.
Cotton balls. Trying to pad it further. So that she wouldn’t really hurt him.
“Oh, for—“ He let out an exasperated sigh and closed his eyes.
So absurd. Just so absurd.
He shook his head slowly from side to side, then laughed, once.
“Oh, look,” he told her. “Let’s just forget about it this time, shall we?”
He slipped the night stick carefully back into her bag.
“Just... forget about it.”
He turned from her, preparing to walk away, then stopped, frowning at the doctor who stood leaning against the wall of the corridor, his unbuttoned coat askew. Even more askew than it should be, surely, even given the insouciant slouch? Very badly askew, because in addition to his hand, he had something very heavy there in the deep right pocket of his unbuttoned white coat.
“Well!” He raised an eyebrow, then winced. Mistake.
“Well,” he said, without the eyebrow this time. “What has it got in its pocketses?”
Whatever it was bulged at a diagonal slant, and he could just see the top of it—it, too, had been wrapped, in a pale blue towel—through the gap where the fabric of the pocket had been pulled down by its weight.
Please, he thought. Please don’t tell me that he’s got a padded stick in there as well. Please.
He reached for it, but even before his fingers made contact, he knew. He could feel it, the cold of it, its burning will to do him harm, radiating even through the towel in which it had been wrapped. He drew his hand back quickly and gasped.
“Oh, doctor.”
He glanced up and down the corridor. Nothing moved. Nothing at all.
“Is that a Blade in your pocket, doctor?” he whispered. “Or are you just happy to see me?” And then he began to giggle, helplessly, uncontrollably, in the silent corridor.
•
The tug of the call had begun while he had still been watching the students in the ICU Waiting Room, the students who alone in all that silent hospital were moving, speaking, unstuck in time.
He stood just outside the doorway, staring at them, wondering what on earth could have rendered them so immune.
That can’t be poor little Brittany doing that, he thought. Can it?
Oh, no. Surely not. Surely not.
He could see the Clairmont girl from where he stood. She was sketching absently in a notebook which lay open on her lap, but her face was turned away from him, towards the far wall. Just as well, really. The girl’s face was...unfortunate. Uncharitable of him, he supposed, to feel that way, but still.
“Like Youngjacks, don’t you know,” she said, and he blinked, startled. “And their missing fingers.”
He winced suddenly as a stab of pain shot through the knuckles of his left hand; his mouth went dry as dust, and the weight in the pocket of his shredded jacket suddenly felt almost as if it could not be borne. Dammit. Oh, damn it all to hell. He really had thought that he had done with that now. He closed his eyes, hearing once again the hiss of its severed larynx, trying to gasp out one last plea for life, and tasting once more the fear at the back of its throat, terror mixed with blood, with vampire blood. Filthy stuff, vampire blood—nasty, adulterated, alien, impure. Knowing exactly what it was and still begging for it, or trying to, anyway, because there just hadn’t been any alternative at that point. No alternative at all.
He shivered. Best not to think about it, really.
He flexed his fingers stiffly and peered again into the room. Actually, he could see now that they weren’t completely unstuck. They were moving, but far too slowly, and their voices were deeper than they ought to be, slightly distorted, difficult to make out. Brittany’s voice had been a deep, slow, throaty contralto, rather than her usual soprano, and when Flannery’s dear little cub jerked her head to one side, it was more of a glide than the swift motion she had obviously intended.
All the same, something had unstuck them. What had it been? Clairmont? Could it really be—
“Jesus,” the Clairmont girl muttered. Thickly, sluggishly. “Is that clock slow?”
He just couldn’t help but smile at that.
“Yes, my dear,” he whispered to her. “Oh, yes. Well spotted. Well done.”
Someone whistled for him.
He frowned. Oh. Oh, really. They were whistling for him now? What would come next, he wondered. A collar?
Nonetheless. He turned to answer the call, edging his way around Caulfield, who was laden down with armloads of potato chips, and—
Oh.
It’s Caulfield, he thought. Caulfield’s effusing, and for some reason she put that room under her protection.
But failed to protect herself? That was certainly...odd. But. Nonetheless.
Nonetheless. He edged his way around her and went to answer his summons, clearing his mind. No thoughts of Caulfield. No thoughts of Clairmont. And most importantly, not a single thought of the Blade of Ashura.
He’s not getting anything from me for free, he thought. Not one thing.
He had followed the summons nearly back to where he had started when he first heard the...hoofbeats?
A distant sound of...horses. Galloping horses.
Coming closer.
“What?” he cried, dismayed, only a second before throwing himself to one side as they thundered past, three of them, snow white and blood red and pearl grey, all of them glowing with the same lambent radiance, their breath curling out of their nostrils in swirls of steam. He stared after them, mouth open.
Lambent...radiance?
“Oh,” he said then, in a very small little voice. “Oh, blast.”
•
His knee was wrenched, and his thigh muscles had very little strength in them, and every breath ripped into his side, but nonetheless, he ran—
Headlong, straight into the cart that the candy-striper was frozen in the act of pushing down the corridor. It fell onto its side with a godawful clatter, and he tumbled over it, right onto his broken wrist, and he screamed, spots of black exploding in his vision, and then he stumbled back to his feet anyway and just kept running.
He had just enough time to think well, that’s really going to confuse the candy-striper when she comes unstuck...when he heard the hoofbeats returning, loud, so loud, and far too fast. He flung himself face down onto the floor, crying out, throwing his one good arm over his head.
The hooves pounded all around him, slowing, surrounding him. Stopping.
Nothing had touched him. He could sense them there, looming over him, and hear his own frightened gasping breathing.
One of the horses snorted.
“Well.” The light thump of a graceful dismount. “What have we here?” A boot nudged him in the hollow of his collarbone. Rather hard, actually. Trying to flip him over.
Spurning, he thought sickly. That’s called spurning. I’m being spurned.
“Up, dog,” it told him. “Let us take a look at you.”
He swallowed hard, then pushed himself off the floor with his one good hand, curling his legs beneath him, struggling up onto his knees.
“Lonshi.” He took a deep breath, forced himself to meet its gaze. “Peace be upon you, Lonshin, and upon all those who dwell in the Light.”
“Rorrim.” It was dressed in grey, and the sheen of its eyes was unpleasantly reflective in the fluorescent lighting of the corridor. “What do I see here? Did not one of your masters think to take you with them when they fled us? Do they value you so little, dog?”
“Oh, less even than that,” he assured it, smiling slightly. “You would be amazed. Less even than that. Go in peace, Lonshi. I seek no quarrel with the Great Lords of the Light.”
“Fine words,” the Sleeper told him. “From the assassins of the Egoroi.”
It made a sudden motion, its hand blurring at its side; he drew in a sharp breath and blurted:
“You seek the Benandanti.”
The Sleepers regarded him with silent interest. One of the horses stomped.
“The Benandanti,” he repeated. “The Good Walkers. You seek them. I know them. Spare me, my lords. Spare me. I will lead you to them.”
“A trap.” This one had taken the form of a woman, or at least the voice of one. It was behind him. He did not turn to look at it, continued to hold their leader’s gaze. “It seeks to betray us.”
“No,” he whispered. “No.”
“No. Even in their fallen state, the Rorrim do not break their word. We have your word, creature? This is a vow?”
“Yes.” He licked his lips. “Yes. A vow. A...a contract. In exchange for—“
“We make no bargains with the servants of the Dark.” It seized hold of him and he cried out, flinching, but it was only lifting him, hoisting him up, throwing him onto its horse. He gritted his teeth, holding his broken wrist in tight to his chest, thinking: I’m going to fall off of this thing the instant it moves. The Sleeper swung itself up behind him. No stirrups, of course. He’d never been able to figure out how they did that.
“You will lead us to the Benandanti,” it said. “Serve us well, and you may find that we are not without mercy.”
Terrific, he thought.
“My lord,” he said.
He waited, bracing himself for movement, but nothing happened. Oh. Right.
“You...” he began. “All right. First, you want to head down Route 32 towards Wilsonsylv—“ and then gasped as it grabbed hold of him again.
“You dare mock us, Rorrim?”
“I meant no mockery!” he screamed.
One of the horses—not his, thankfully—shied and bucked, and the hand let him go. There was a brief, startled silence.
He closed his eyes.
“Please,” he said. “Please. Forgive me. I have had a...a trying day. Allow me to rephrase. Outside of this structure, which is called a ‘hospital,’ there is a road, a path. This path is called by the name of 'Route 32.' We wish to follow that path east, in the direction of the rising—“
“We know east.”
Was that...could that really be truculence he heard in its voice?
Oh, no. Surely not. Surely not.
“We know east,” it said again. “Our steeds are swift, dog. If you do not wish to fall, then you will hold on tight.”
•
The Sheriff had been in there a long time, and Terry was beginning to get worried. He knocked on the door, thinking: I don’t have time for this. I really don’t.
“Sheriff?” he called. “Are you all right in there?” He had the door half-open even before he heard her call out:
“Don’t—“
He could see why she hadn’t wanted him in this room. She must have really beat the hell out of the man. There was blood in here, and vomit as well, and that smell that he associated mainly with patients whose prognosis was just not good. A smell of fear.
There was, however, only one person in the room, and that was Sheriff Jennifer Little Bear. She was standing at the window, with her back to him, and his blood ran cold.
“Oh, Jesus,” he said. “Did he jump?”
“Of course he didn’t fucking jump,” she snapped, in a tone that told him that she had been thinking exactly the same thing. “It’s three stories down, and I don’t see a splatter.” She turned from the window, pale and distracted, and her hand trembled slightly on the handle of her bag as she moved for the door.
“If he was still able to crawl when he landed...” Terry began, and that was when she turned on him.
“You know what, Waitling? Why don’t you just concentrate on your fucking job here, okay? And let me do mine. All right?”
Let the woman do her job, Terry, the voice of God told him. Do what you must. And let her do what she must.
“All right,” he said.
He walked back out into the corridor, past a group of students, one in a black cloak and lace-up leather boots, one in some gauzy Madras stuff that must have been cold as hell in this weather, one of them in the usual collegiate garb of jeans-’n’-a-t-shirt. All three of them wore pentacles around their necks. Of course they did. This was Herschberg University.
“It was just in my boot a second ago,” the cloak was telling the other two. “I mean, how could it just have disappeared like that?”
“Waitling, where have you been?” Carter loped up to him. “We have a situation. Up on the psych ward.”
And so, as things turned out, it was quite some time before he got around to calling Hoover.
•
•