His sweater still looked damn familiar, but she couldn’t figure it out until she looked at her glass Ikea coffee table and saw the open DVD case. Right on the front was the brooding, almost-handsome star of a tawdry tragedy based on one of those tearjerker novels. The guy was in that same blue sweater, the one worn during the scene where he almost drowned saving the heroine. This…thing, this hallucination, was wearing the same boots, too.
I’m dreaming. I have to be. Except if she was, wouldn’t realizing that wake her up? And wouldn’t this guy look more like Ontario Cowboy than…whoever he looked like? You couldn’t see faces in dreams you’d never seen before. It was science.
“I wonder…” He stood, unfolding gracefully, and turned to regard her. “You still look frightened. There is no need to be.”
I’ll decide that, thanks. Em searched for words. None seemed to apply. She hugged her knees a bit tighter, staring at him. If not a dream, it was a hallucination—there was no doubt about it. Maybe from the liquor, or more likely from this guy slipping her something while she slept. All she had to do was keep him away from her for long enough and the effects would wear off.
“It was easier last time,” he said, his dark gaze roving the apartment as if looking for something. “Then, they knew what they were seeing.”
This guy’s fucking crazy. “So, uh…” Her throat was dry, and her head still wasn’t happen even though the aspirin had kicked in. “So what am I seeing?”
He spread his arms a little, palms out. Even with his shoulders not quite wide enough, if he hadn’t been bugfuck nuts, she could even see glancing at him twice in a bar. He looked serious, just on the edge of homely, but there was a certain something around the mouth that might have almost been worth finding out about.
He had a shadow. The floor made its regular sounds when he stepped from carpet to linoleum and back. Someone peering in through the French door leading to her tiny slice of balcony overlooking the parking lot would think that maybe he was a real person instead of a hallucination. Or that he was a friend of hers, telling her a story that required standing up and pacing to make it coherent.
Something obviously occurred to him, his dark eyes lighting up and his shoulders stiffening a little. Two quick steps took him to the books, where he bent and ran his finger along the second-to-the-bottom shelf. “Ah. This might help.”
He dropped the book on the couch next to her, and a snap of his coppery fingers—a crisp, authoritative sound—made it flop open, the pages riffling. She flinched. Not possible. That’s not possible, my God.
It was the Sunshine Book of Fairy Tales, left over from childhood. She’d rescued it from her mother’s great purge of the attic five years ago, maybe on a whim, maybe because the illustrations had once upon a time given child-Em hours of fascination. They were all familiar—Sleeping Beauty, a Rapunzel story where the prince had his eyes clawed out by brambles, Rumpelstiltskin and his big cauldron ready to boil the queen’s baby, Jack the Giant-Killer…and Aladdin, whose Princess was swindled by a sorcerer crying new lamps, new lamps for old!
He leaned down, apparently not noticing her flinch, and tapped the illustration once. It was the teenage Aladdin in watercolor, his face a mask of fear, rubbing the magic lamp. Swirls of fluorescent glitter zoomed around him, the magic garden deadly as it was beautiful, and that was partly why it had never been her favorite tale.
Poor old Aladdin just looked too damn scared.
“Yours is no lamp, but a ring.” The guy smiled, kindly enough. This close you could see the corners of his eyes crinkle, and a faint shadow of stubble. Surely no hallucination could be this detailed? He retreated, again spreading his hands again as if he was trying to appear harmless. It looked like a habitual movement. “I am your servant, Mistress. In all ways, until you are dead or the ring is taken from you.”
“Oh, Jesus,” Em whispered. “You are so nuts.”
Another helpless little gesture. He had a large stock of them, it seemed. “What would it take, for you to believe?”
Em rested her forehead on her knees. “Can I wish I never bought the damn ring?”
“You could. The side effects might be…unpleasant. Time is not to be meddled with lightly.”
Her fingers began to crawl over each other. Warm metal, the flat glassy stuff over the slice of agate or whatever it was, the way it fit her finger. It was even comfortable to sleep in, for God’s sake, she didn’t feel like she’d swelled around it.
She tugged at the setting, at the bottom of the loop, trying to slide it off her finger.
It wouldn’t move. She tugged harder and harder, but the ring didn’t budge. It wasn’t precisely stuck, it was just like trying to yank her own skin off.
All of a sudden, his hands closed over hers, and she flinched. His skin was very warm, and very different than hers. Rougher, but his hands felt…human.
Her stomach turned over, and the thought that she was going to vomit water-laced bile all over him was only faintly embarrassing. She could still smell the coffee, with its faint cooked undertone that meant it had been in the pot for a while. Her legs prickled a little; she hadn’t shaved since Thursday morning.
He squeezed, gently. “You will harm yourself, Mistress.”
“My name is Emily,” she whispered.
“And you may call me Hal.”
Paul Simon began playing in her head. Not a bad earworm, but it fucking sucked to have the radio in her head turn on when she was struggling to figure out just how long she’d have to wait for the drugs to wear off, for the…
It was like thinking through mud, but she gave it a try. “Can I wish you away?”
His face changed. Em pushed herself backward, her heels digging in, but he just let go of her hands and stood, arms dangling loose at his sides. Even the cabled knit of his sweater was too detailed to be imaginary. “You may return me to my resting-place until you have further need of me.”
Well, that sounds promising. There was a rushing noise in her ears, making it difficult to think or talk. “How do I do that?”
“Simply dismiss me.”
“How do I do that? I need details.”
His eyebrows—very dark, his hair was like ink, really—drew together. His shoulders lifted a fraction. “Have I somehow displeased you?”
“Look, dude, I don’t know what you slipped into my drink, but I don’t like it. You can go wherever you like, just leave me alone.”
His mouth turned into a thin line. His eyes flashed, and chin set stubbornly. “Is that a command?”
At least he hadn’t gotten violent. This was edging over to “hallucination” instead of “drugged-out nutbar,” which was a relief. But still. “Sure. You can go do whatever you want, but leave me alone.”
She wasn’t prepared for the result. There was a tiny pop of collapsing air, and the hallucination vanished. A soft breeze, redolent of cardamom, touched her cheek and her tangled hair, riffled the pages of Sunshine Fairy Tales. Em actually started and let out a tiny, undignified squeak. She rubbed her face, peeking through her fingers every few moments as if he would come back. She tugged on the ring again, decided it was probably stuck because she was alcohol-bloated and she could get it off later.
For right now, though, she slowly, cautiously uncurled. Gained her feet, trying to look everywhere at once. She flipped the battered book of fairytales closed, swept it off the couch, and kicked it so it slid underneath. Once it was out of sight, she felt a lot better. She could have imagined the whole damn thing. Everything, from the blue sweater to the tiny sound the pages made when the book opened on its own, all the way to the floating waterglass.
“Never drinking again,” she whispered. “Never, ever drinking again.”
She marched into her kitchen, and took a long look at the glass on the counter, still full of tapwater. It sat there as if it had never intended to move, as if the morning’s fun and games were just that: a momentary blip in an otherwise well-ordered schedule. After a few moments of deep thought
, her cheek twitching a little like her mother’s when exhaustion or irritation had reached monumental levels, she dumped it out and dropped the glass into the trashcan. She had half-a-dozen more, she could tell herself she’d broken that one and forget the whole episode ever happened. She poured out the cooked coffee, too, but she couldn’t afford to put that in the trash. She could, however, tell herself she’d set it last night in a fit of drunken preparation and “accidentally” slop a lot of it down the shower drain while she soaped.
That was her plan, and it was a good one.
Now, what did a woman who just dispelled a hallucination do? What was normal and sane?
A shower next, Em decided. Her head throbbed, but after she stood under some hot water she could pretend she’d just gotten up, make some fresh coffee, and order some burritos. She could watch a little TV and just chill, like any normal, healthy-minded woman.
Okay. That was her plan.
She dropped the shampoo bottle twice. Her hands refused to stop shaking.
Not Outright
Cloaked and hooded in black, the men gathered. A low humming of expectation filled the circular room, and candles in waist-high, branching holders coyly fluttered their flames. Electricity didn’t like the sort of work performed down here, and after the first few instances with shattered lightbulbs, the wiring had been removed. The entire affair had been expensive, and there had been trouble afterward, too. The old man didn’t understand that you couldn’t just make people disappear after they did your remodeling, not when they were licensed and bonded.
Of all the times Peter had seriously considered taking a drastic step, that one had been the second-closest. In retrospect, it was a good thing he’d refrained. It didn’t pay to be hasty.
The walls were oak, the ceiling vaulted and painted with squiggles that looked random unless you were initiated. Then, you could see the invisible lines connecting the painted bits, and the illustrations moved slowly between ceremonies. The Bull, the Serpent, the Rat, and the Vulture watched whatever occurred underneath them, and sometimes their expressions were almost…well, almost sentient.
Lines and circles grooved deeply into the marble below Peter’s feet, the great double circle and its smaller orbiting symbols subtly vibrating. They could be moved, too, holding the configuration of the last Work performed within them or sliding into place once the ceremony was started. For that reason alone, there needed to be trained anchors in the orbiting symbols.
“Are you sure?” Henry Maggs said, again, scratching at his hairline under the hood’s capacious shadow. He looked like a waddling friar, mostly because the knot on his velvet-rope belt was sloppy. He was in Nikes, too, instead of ceremonial boots, and his spray tan had deepened.
Peter said nothing. He simply assumed his place inside the circle at the pole—one of the points of the interlocked triangles deeply cast into the smooth concrete flooring.
It was the safest place possible, for once.
“Peter?” Moss piped up, next. “I hate to ask, but—”
The narrow door leading to the stairs opened, its hinges whisper-soft, and everyone froze.
The old man, his robe swaying softly, stepped through. With his hood back, his lank hair scraped back into a ponytail, and his hazel eyes wide and dancing, he looked like a fellow who felt young again, with a bounce in his step and a song in his black little heart.
Maggs gasped audibly. Grosvenor stiffened, his robe rippling, and Moss shut his mouth so fast the click of his teeth meeting was a good billiards crack.
The bulb on the tip of the old man’s nose twitched, once. His strong yellowed teeth showed in a wide smile, the expression of a man contemplating something he had paid for and couldn’t wait to use. His old, glove-soft leather boots, custom made a few years ago by a master cobbler in Spain who demanded a tracing of horned, stub-toed feet and a truly staggering fee, were freshly polished. He was, Peter thought, probably naked underneath the yards of soft black cloth.
“Good evening, gentlemen,” he said, and minced past a bank of candles as the door quietly, in defiance of all logic and rationality, closed itself.
And locked.
The map, brushed carefully free of broken glass, was stretched on the desk in the study at Peakes End. Its inked lines trembled, and there were spots all over the faithful rendering of the modern city where the interference was too high. In one of those spots, the new owner of the fantastical thing that kept the old man alive was hiding. The thing bound into the ring—and by now, Peter was cautiously believing some of the old man’s wilder stories—would no doubt be reflexively cloaking its position now that it was active.
Where there was a will, though, there was a way. The old man had finally calmed down enough to pull a thick tome bound in discolored leather from the shelves and flipped through it, muttering, then told Peter to call the inner circle.
“Good evening, sir.” Bruce Vance was quicker off the mark than anyone else. He executed a little half-bow, and the old man beamed pacifically in his direction. Now they could see what he was carrying—a somewhat antique birdcage, its bottom almost rusted through. Inside it, fur quivered and a single dark eye blinked once before the three rats—black, brown, and white—huddled even closer together, as if they sensed what was about to occur.
Vance’s small movement may have changed the old man’s mind about a critical part of the ceremony. “You, you, and you.” One spidery pale hand pointed at Moss, Maggs, and Sampson. “Take the inner triangle tonight, and each of you with a chalice. Peter, you will hold the pole. The rest of you, find your places.”
They fairly leapt to obey, except Peter, who had arranged himself inside the smaller circle at the pole already. The old man set the cage in the very center of the circle, on the low stone plinth mostly used for charging objects with invisible force. The candleflames flattened, recovered.
Practice made the energy-charge larger. When you carried enough, all sorts of strange things could happen, the world arranging itself around you in patterns like iron filings around a magnet. It took a lot of work to keep the levels up, so to speak, another reason why this sort of thing was left to men of leisure. Only the most naturally gifted of nine-to-five drones could manage even a weak charge.
The old man, of course, had nothing else to do all day but practice. And watch the History Channel, and drink.
Peter quelled the urge to slide his hand through the slit in his robe and touch the cold hilt at his side. All that extra material covered all sorts of bulges, and the hood would shadow his expression. He pulled it up further, settling it against his hair. A small, icy prickling slid down his back.
One of the rats, braver than his cohorts, lifted his narrow pink nose, sniffing distrustfully.
“Somnis,” the old man whispered, spreading his left hand over the cage, and the creature subsided, sinking into a slack, furred heap.
“Never been inside the circle before.” Moss sounded very jolly, his cheeks quivering a little. He hadn’t taken off his watch, either. The Rolex gleamed as he spread his hands, his eyebrows coming up. “Ooooooh!” A childish bit of clowning around.
Peter’s lips stretched into an approximation of a smile. Though he didn’t know it, he looked very much like his great-great-great grandfather in that moment. The hood dipped lower, keeping him safe.
No, you couldn’t make people outright disappear anymore. Not pillars of the community, active in the Sophics or the Masons or the Chamber of fucking Commerce.
Not outright.
But you could drain a modern person past belief, past sanity, and implant a suggestion to have them dispose of themselves. Nice, neat, tidy—and something Peter was very good at. He had already earmarked replacements for after this night’s work. It would have to be handled delicately indeed. Which meant Peter’s own position was relatively safe.
Until the old man got his hands on this ring.
Oh yes. There were other plans to be made. Peter sank his heels into the marble floor, inhaled dee
ply, and shook his hands out. Once the chanting started, none of the men inside the middle circle would be able to move. They would be struck dumb, able only to breathe as the work bore down on them.
Beasts to the slaughter. They didn’t even suspect.
Far Less Comfortable
Do what you like. Just stay away from me.
How many times had Hal dreamed of this very independence? He was a bird, wheeling over this great stone-colored city, the spines at its heart higher than even the loftiest cathedral spire, the mortals zooming in their metal chariots or hurrying along damp, chilly streets of paving or poured stone—concrete, he reminded himself—that even the Romans in their arrogance might envy. The palaces that had seemed so fabulous last night were now, as he understood, relatively simple homes. The city spread, and sprawled, full of color and vitality, gigantic metal trucks nosing up to its buildings and disgorging every manner of goods, ateliers on every corner, for every conceivable service.
The bounty was not shared equally, even though there was enough and to waste. The poor are always with you, the prophets always remarked, for no other reason than it was true. There was a vast underclass clinging to respectability and the large glowing screens they used to numb themselves, and an even lower class of rejects and castaways, immigrants and laborers. Then, there were the beggars, picking at the edges and living wherever they could hide.
For all that, they did not reek as the poor had during his last sojourn here. Cavanaugh’s time had not been as foul as, say, Rheims in the time of his fiftieth bearer—or was it the fifty-second? They had changed so frequently in those days.
The Inquisition saw to that.
He could walk alongside them, peering through their fantastical windows at the shapes and colors on display. He could pass unseen, if he wished, plunging through the large buildings and drinking in small doses of their lives, their joys, their fears, their anger. He could summon one of the metal chariots and learn its use and construction. He could plunder their libraries, their museums…