“Absolutely. I’ll marry you, if you’d just fetch your brother for me.”
Hannah frowned in disgust, “Pervert.”
The window slammed shut, and West was about to look for something else to throw, when another window opened.
“Hello?”
“Mr Beach, I spoke to you last night … I took up your offer, dragged my ass down here.”
The window started to close, “Mr Beach, it’s about the assassination. I can help.” West could still see David Beach’s distorted and shadowy form, standing at the window, so he forged ahead, “David, I know you didn’t do it, I know you weren’t involved, and I can help you. Please, it will only take a few minutes of your time, if you’ll just come down and talk to me.”
The window closed.
Half a minute passed, before the window opened again, “I’m coming down.”
David leaned against the door frame, peering tentatively through the glass panel at the side of the door. He couldn’t make out much, except for the same cleaning van that had been parked there for several days now, and the sight of it made his hackles rise. Homeowners weren’t permitted to park commercial vehicles in the neighborhood. Even the worst house clean couldn’t require that much attention. This, thought David … this was why this neighborhood was going to hell in a hand basket.
He opened the door, and stepped out onto the front step, closing the door gently behind him. Standing in the shadow of the Bleaker’s cherry blossom, David could make out the man whom he had spied from his bedroom window. The same man who had apparently phoned the night before. The same creep who had messaged him on reddit. As the man started to walk towards him, David felt his own unease rise through his body, tightening his chest, drying his throat. David stepped backwards, stumbling over the single raised concrete step as he retreated toward the safety of his front door. He tried to turn around to open the door, but too quickly he felt West’s hand on his shoulder and he shuddered with the shock of it, the hairs of his arms prickling.
“Mr Beach, I need to talk to you and in order to do so, we need to get away from your house for a few minutes.”
David turned abruptly, pushing the man’s hand away, “What are you going to do to me? I haven’t done anything for God’s sake.” The sound of his own voice, high pitched and faltering, came as a surprise to David. He hadn’t had many physical altercations, and in the calmer recesses of his mind, he liked to think that he could handle himself. Perhaps he needed to reassess.
West took a firm hold of David’s shoulders with both hands, and this only served to further panic David, who had already started to writhe and jostle against his grip. Focusing, slowing his breathing, West reigned himself in, concentrating on his strength before slapping David’s cheek with the back of his hand. Wide eyed, a picture of veracious fury, West glared at David. “Calm down man. Do you see the van behind me?”
“Yes.”
“Up until a couple of minutes ago, there were two FBI agents camped out in that van monitoring your home.”
David frowned, “There were?”
Unable to widen his eyes any further, West resorted to raising his eyebrows, nodding slowly.
“Where are they now?” David asked cautiously.
“To tell you the truth, they’re still in there, but they are no longer monitoring your house.”
David opened his mouth, then closed it again, then made another attempt, “Why?”
West bit his bottom lip, and exhaled through his nose, “Mr Beach, they are functionally incapacitated. They will stay like that for some time, but we don’t have all day.” David’s nose wrinkled in confusion, but West pushed on, “The point is, we can’t talk in your home, there are almost certainly monitoring devices in there, and I don’t have the time or equipment to check for them.” West started walking down the street away from David’s house.
“I can’t leave Stephanie alone!”
West turned to look at him, “There’s a woman in there.”
“Yes my sister, but I need to keep an eye on Stephanie”
West guessed that Beach just didn’t want to be alone with him, but he knew there would be little mileage in humiliating him on this issue. “Fine, is there somewhere we can talk?”
David nodded, “We’ll go out back, in the yard. I doubt they’d put any monitoring equipment out there.”
West was pensive, eyes traveling over the cracks in the pavement. He glanced at the van and thought about agents Carmichael and McMahon. He looked back towards David and nodded, “Lead the way.”
David sat on one of the swing seats, watching Stephanie in the den. She had protested that she wanted to come play in the yard, but David had insisted that this was grown up stuff.
“Mr … I’m sorry, I don’t recall your name.”
West stood facing David, legs apart, arms crossed, straight faced, “My name is West Yestler, although I didn’t actually get a chance to tell you that last night. After our little talk, I was inclined towards leaving you in your mire, to flail and fester in your own shit. Your situation is … odd. Good odd, but odd nonetheless. Still, I wasn’t sure you would be entirely worth taking a risk on, because right now, you are one of most dangerous men in the world. To talk to I mean. Obviously.”
David looked hurt, “What do you mean obviously? I could be dangerous.”
In the rat runs and oubliettes of his mind, West was heartened by David’s bravado, although his face did not portray even a hint of this. “David, I’ve thought a lot about what I would say to you. There were some questions I had, certainly, but for the most part, they have been answered simply by seeing you. I think two questions will suffice. Others may arise, but now, I need you to tell me two things.” David nodded, slack jawed wonder, swinging slowly, allowing his feet to trail in the mulch.
“When you received the phone call on march sixth, did the impostor tell you what to do with any information you discovered about Arctum?”
A lump caught in the back of David’s throat, because of the word impostor, and because this question had never been raised during his FBI interviews. When he recovered from that thought, another occurred to David immediately, “I don’t know you. For all I know, you’re part of the investigation! I’m a government employee. Discussing my predicament would involve divulging highly confidential information.”
West watched David’s legs swing out in front of him, “David, assume, for argument’s sake, that I know everything about your situation. Assume that I’m privy to the fact that you’ve been pulled in for questioning eight times in the past month, that you have been asked the same questions repeatedly, and that you are not responsible for any of the assassinations which took place on March tenth. Now, within those parameters, tell me, what did the impostor ask you to do with the information they requested.”
David plowed the mulch with the balls of his feet, leaning his upper arms in to the chains. “They didn’t tell me what they wanted me to do with the information.”
“Now David, tell me, what did you actually find on Arctum?”
David brought the swing to a stop, and stared into West’s eyes. He suddenly felt sick to his stomach, as the true absurdity of his situation hit him like a clown car. With less than four days to go till the meeting of the EUC, and marooned as David had been, in a vacation house with only a phone, he had found nothing about Arctum. He’d placed a few phone calls to planning, code, and records offices in New York, and he had actually called the building management company who were responsible for the upkeep of Arctum’s massive office complex, but he had soon resigned himself to the fact that he wasn’t going to be able to get anything solid. He was on vacation. He’d been pissed at Carlton for even trying to call in a favor during his vacation time.
“You know!” He could see it in West’s face, although nothing had changed there, no emotion, not even eye movement, but it was there. “You know that I didn’t find anything. How? Why haven’t they asked me this? What the fuck is going on with my life
?” David wiped his eyes with the back of his hand, slipping forward on the swing seat so the chain dug painfully into his armpit. West walked behind the swing set, and started to push David gently, the palms of his hands landing between David’s shoulder blades on the back swing, then launching him away.
“Your life Mr Beach, has become inextricably entangled with the day to day enterprises, industries, and affairs of angels and demons, the fey and the foe, the gods and the monsters of this world.” He continued to push David, his voice raising and lowering in pitch, as if the words were a lullaby, “Agents Carmichael and McMahon occupy a world within … an underworld, a subclass. You’ve written about these things, and talked about them, but you have never even come close to describing the true magnitude of that other world. You nurture a fascination with conspiracy. I know, you read about the Templars, the Freemasons, and the Illuminati, and you post your comments about the moon landing, and JFK.” He pushed David a little harder, stepping back to allow for the larger back swing, “Well here you are, finally in the belly of the beast David. You’re being devoured already, and you didn’t even notice the mouth closing behind you. You didn’t see the light emptying out of your world. Your sister compared you to Lee Harvey Oswald, and in some respects, the comparison is an apt one, because there was a very single minded attention to that man; however, he was found and arrested quickly, and murdered in plain view of the whole world. You’ve been questioned and monitored, and yet your name hasn’t come up once in the news, not because of your role within the government, but because they don’t know whether or not you were involved. They don’t know David. Do you understand how important that is?”
David couldn’t speak. He was embarrassed to admit to himself that he didn’t really understand, certainly not in that moment. He was too afraid to jump up from the swing seat, even though everything in him said that this was exactly what he should do. The voice went on, soft Doppler of doom, waves of insanity drowning out David’s capacity for reason, “I had thought at first that perhaps this was all part of Tiernan’s grand plan. Beyond De Somnio Mirifico, we can not know his designs for the world. It has become increasingly obvious that you represent an unknown quantity for them, something that lies beyond the scope of any plans of theirs. You are in grave danger.”
David felt the man’s hands on the small of his back, slowing the motion of the swing, but still pushing him, “I need you to do something for me, but before I ask it of you, I need you to understand that death is everywhere about you now. They will kill you without question or hesitation, and what is more, they will kill everyone you hold dear, and their wrath will not be born of malice, but of ignorance. In the van out front, Agents Carmichael and McMahon are not dead and it’s only a matter of time before they wake. Upon waking, their actions will be swift and unyielding, so you must steel yourself against questions of morality, or hesitations of the heart. They will murder you, they will murder your daughter, and they will erase every piece of evidence that you were ever part of this world. Do you understand me?”
A dry, crackling wheeze escaped David’s throat, and he nodded.
West smiled, “Good. Now David, you know of the cliffs at Calvert, the ones that overlook the Chesapeake Bay?”
And David listened, while West’s hands pushed him deeper into the belly of the beast.
CHAPTER SIX
Calvert Cliffs
Charlene was awake with the sound of the first birds. She hadn’t been woken by the morning chorus for the longest time and it brought a smile to her face. She had slept above the covers, the unbearable heat of the eiderdown making it impossible to fall into a heavy sleep. She sat up and stretched her arms and felt a dull, but pleasant ache running through the muscles in her shoulders and upper back. She swung her legs over the side of her Edwardian four post bed and felt the deep pile of the rug against the balls of her feet and her toes.
Her parents, both of them had visited her dreams, and as the memory returned to her, she felt a moment’s melancholy. She had spent the night weaving in and out of events throughout her life, in a way that she hadn’t experienced in years, and now that she was awake, it seemed almost sad to have to come away from all those cherished memories, even if experienced in that surreal mist of sleep.
She relaxed her shoulders, lowering her hands slowly, pausing to look at them, and she was fascinated and shaken by what she saw. She pulled her legs back onto the bed, and lay face down staring at her hands and arms up close, marveling at the millions of intricate changes that had been wrought through the night. She had grown familiar with the pits and valleys of veins and tendons over the years, the little whorls and wrinkles, the liver spots and calluses. She had worked eight years in a munitions plant, hands yellowing with oxides as she coughed up bile and evil every night. She had learned her way around a car engine when lack of money or a good man had necessitated it. Her hands bore no evidence, no mark of these small battles now, no sign of the callused palms of a woman who had lugged mail sacks in a depot for a year, listening to the coarse and curse laden ramblings of the other postal workers.
Where were the white lines of fibrous tissue, the scars which had run the length of her arms after her car crash in seventy-six? Those scars had run a more disastrous path across her body, the zigzag line drawn in flesh by the car door as it ripped and dragged across the skin of her chest. Charlene hunched up now on her elbows and pulled back the neckline of her long nightgown, and she sobbed deeply with an insane mixture of joy and confusion as she examined the pure, smooth skin.
When hunger finally drove her from the confines of her bed, Charlene walked to the kitchenette and looked in dismay at her refrigerator which was almost completely bereft of food. She had eaten a lot the day before, she knew that, but she hadn’t realized quite how much. She was desperately hungry now though, her stomach turning in knots. She thought about what West had told her the day before, his suggestion that she shouldn’t leave the apartment. How much harm could it really do to nip out and get some food? She walked to the bathroom to freshen up and at the first sight of her reflection in the mirror, she was reminded of the story of Narcissus, the hunter who was so enamored of his own reflection that he died gazing at himself in a pool. She was sure that if she didn’t leave the apartment to find food, she would certainly fall to a similar fate. Even though she knew the answer, she still wondered how she could have been so affected over the course of one afternoon and one night of restless dreams.
The bathroom had been fitted some years ago with a walk in shower, her joints too weak for getting in and out of the bathtub, but she had kept the bath as well. Even though the bathroom was barely large enough to accommodate both, she just couldn’t bear to part with the large copper bath which had been part of the makeup of the apartment since 1973. She eyed the bathtub now with an excited intake of breath.
“Double dare you, you old ninny.” She spoke the words aloud, as an incantation to give her courage and then she walked to the bathtub and turned the stainless steel knob with the ivory crest embossed with a black ‘H’. She allowed her lace embroidered nightie to fall to the floor of the bathroom, although it would take more than an incantation to summon the courage to look at herself fully yet. She leaned over the tub, picking up the chain attached to the plastic plug, allowing the plug to dangle into position and fall into place in its hole. As the hot water washed against her arm, she noticed a small bulge beneath the skin and it appeared to move towards the heat. Higher up her arm, a second bulge raised briefly under the skin of her forearm and it too moved. She sat on the side of the bath, holding herself steady with her left hand on the enameled rim.
Where the muscles of her left arm tensed, her attention was drawn now to the ripple of three more small bulging shapes moving beneath the skin and she watched as the skin of her arm seemed to pucker in slightly, being sucked subdermally by … What? Not that she would undo this magic, but there had been one leech and West had assured her that a glass of salt water would drive it
out of her system. Had he known? Had he left her to undergo this change, knowing how complete it would be? These were questions she didn’t know the answers to, but looking at what was happening to her body, she had little doubt; that single leech had somehow reproduced.
She felt the warmth coming up from the bathtub behind her and she leaned over and twisted the cold tap on full blast for a few seconds, then standing and leaning over the bath, she plunged her arm into the hot water and swirled it about before turning off both taps. Only then, as she climbed into the bath, did she allow herself to look fully and unabashed at her body. For sure, she thought as she lay down, this was not her body. She grinned, bent her knees and allowed her head to submerge in the delicious heat of the water.
For the first two miles of the drive to Calvert, it was conspicuously clear that David had never driven a van. Curbing the rear wheel at every corner, then over correcting and veering into the middle of the road, David was certain that he would be pulled over if he happened to pass a traffic cop. The cleaning supplies rattling around in the back of the van did nothing to help his nerves. Cleaning supplies he told himself, repeating the words over and over. Cleaning supplies … not unconscious FBI agents. Certainly not dark denizens of a heretofore unknown place of torment. Thump, crash went the brooms. David wiped the sweat from his forehead and rolled down the window, glancing at both side mirrors as he flipped on the turn signal.
David had been to Calvert Cliffs a couple of times before, fossil hunting with Stephanie. He had been hesitant to contradict West, but he was sure that his plan would be pretty much impossible. West’s instructions came with dire warnings that Carmichael and McMahon’s shift change was at eleven. He drove up and down a long stretch of Solomon’s Island Road, convinced he hadn’t gone far enough, when he finally saw the turn off for the neighborhood West had mentioned. Sure enough, there were several houses on plots of land with well-kept lawns, each of which presented a good runway from which to launch a van. He pulled up against the curb, turned off the engine, and sat looking out over the bay. The waters were calm, and the sun, still low on the horizon, bathed the bay in a warm glow. David could almost imagine that everything was right with the world.
Histories of the Void Garden, Book 1: Pyre of Dreams Page 8