“I don’t need trouble.” This was a peculiar sentiment for anyone involved with Jenny Frost to express, in my opinion. “The two of you gonna be a problem?”
I smiled, despite myself.
“I’m no trouble at all. Not compared to her.”
Jenny leaned on the door impatiently.
“C’mon, Neil,” she cajoled. “Let us in. Cold out here, ya know?”
Neil pondered the issue, scratching at the pre-established sores on his neck.
“Come on, asshole,” Jenny said, leaning close. “You wanna make me mad?”
For some reason, he looked to me for help.
“She’s right, Neil,” I advised. “I’d do it.”
“See?” Jenny blew a bubble, and then popped it in front of Neil’s face. “Everyone agrees, Neil. Open the damn door.”
He nodded reluctantly. The door closed, and another chain rattled, and then the door opened for real. Jenny strode in before it was even halfway open, shoving the door and forcing Neil to scramble aside. I followed after with an apologetic nod.
The place was dump. The wallpaper peeled off in strands, stained from water damage. The floorboards were warped and mangled, the slats uneven and creaking. The air was moist and dense with mildew, body odor, cannabis, and cheap tobacco. I wrinkled my nose, but didn’t say anything. If Jenny noticed, she made no remark.
“This way.” Neil locked the door behind us, and then motioning for us to follow him down the hall. “Be quiet, okay? People are trying to sleep.”
Jenny laughed.
“Not likely.”
We passed two rooms throbbing with synthesized bass. Organic scents of unwashed bodies and moldy carpet cut with something reminiscent of bleach or gasoline. I shared Jenny’s suspicion that no one in this house held aspirations for a good night’s sleep.
Neil’s room was at the end of the hall. He had to unlock and unbolt it, which said something about his housemates. I followed Jenny inside and closed the door quietly behind us.
It was a small space, likely a guest bedroom, one big window hidden behind a cut section of flannel. A bare lightbulb hung from the remains of ceiling light fixture and provided the sole illumination. A paint-splattered desk, one side resting on a squat antique safe, occupied nearly half the room, while a bed with rumpled, fusty sheets took up the rest. A girl curled in the blankets on the far end of the bed, watching us with wide, glassy eyes, but she remained eerily still as we walked in, and no one else acknowledged her presence, so I went along with that. We sat down on the other end of the bed, a low glass table, and a generic printed rug separating us from Neil.
“So?” Neil raised one heavily plucked eyebrow. His greased hair was bleached at the ends and thinning. “What do you want?”
Jenny tutted and shook her head.
“Customer service isn’t your strong point, Neil.” She grinned, and he blanched. Should never have opened the door. “Set me up, okay?”
Neil looked at us warily.
“You do have money, right?”
“He does.” Jenny leaned over, searching through the mess of empty cans and crowded ashtrays piled on the ground beside the bed. “C’mon, asshole.”
He gave me a pleading look, but I didn’t really feel bad for Neil much, so I didn’t respond one way or the other. To be fair, I did not intend to pay.
Neil sighed, like a man only midway through a day of personal impositions, then bent and spun the wheel on his old safe. I got two out of the three numbers, but missed the final digits when Jenny found whatever she was looking for on the floor, yelling out in triumph. She placed a slightly scorched glass tube on the table in front of her. I cast an uneasy eye on the girl wedged behind us on the bed; she continued to stare at nothing. I wondered if maybe she was dead.
The safe had two shelves. The top had two regular sandwich bags cinched with twist-ties, and a whole sheaf of tiny plastic bags in bundles of ten. Neil took one of these from the safe and extracted a small bag from the bundle, Jenny’s greedy eyes tracking every movement while she tied her hair back with a glittering silver cord.
“C’mon,” Jenny chided, nudging Neil’s bony knee. “Don’t fuck around with me.”
Neil winced and took a second baggie from the bundle. He made sure to put the remainder back in the safe and spin the dial before he did anything else, so I had to give him that much. His hands shook as he attempted to tease open the tiny bags, skin sallow and jaundiced from malnutrition. I knew ghouls who looked healthier than Neil. Really.
Jenny fiddled with a small butane torch, adjusting the finger of blue flame it produced until she was satisfied, and then applied the torch to one end of the glass tube. Neil spilled small, pinkish-white crystals on the glass table. The contents of the two baggies made a small pile, which Neil attacked with an encrusted safety razor. Jenny grinned absently while the end of the glass pipe heated a dull red. With surprising deftness, Neil chopped the crystals into a single fat line. Jenny watched with undisguised avarice, licking her lips. Neil straightened and nodded at her wearily, his hands trembling from accumulated nerve damage.
Jenny placed the unheated end of the glass tube in her nostril, plugged the other with a finger, and bent over the line, her sweatshirt riding up to expose the damp skin of her lower back. She dipped her head like a bird intent on feeding. I watched in macabre fascination, the heated tube hovering just above the line of the crystal as Jenny inhaled. The majority of the powder was vaporized immediately, but some of the solids must have survived the temperatures and were inhaled, because Jenny reeled, clutching the top of her nose and sputtering as she fought a potentially catastrophic coughing fit.
“That was…what the fuck was that?”
Jenny exploded into a red-faced, spit-flying coughing fit, exhaling foul smelling chemical smoke with each cough. Neil gave me a wane, barely-there smile, exposing irregular teeth beneath a thin brown crust of gunk. I leaned way the hell back and did my best not to retch.
“Hot rail,” he said, as if that explained anything. “Some of the crystal is vaporized by the hot glass, the rest…you know. Right up the nose.”
“I’m very sorry that I asked.”
“Shut up, Preston,” Jenny croaked, shaking her head and spitting on the carpet. “Don’t be an idiot.” Jenny gave me an exaggerated, frenzied smile, and wiped her leaking nose on the arm of her hoodie. “Fucks you right up, though.”
“You are such a bitch,” I said, burying my head in my hands. “I can’t believe you dragged me here.”
Neil looked aghast at my reaction, and then gave Jenny a suspicious glare.
“What the fuck?” Neil pointed in my direction. “Are you sure about this guy?”
“Nah. Preston is an asshole,” Jenny grumbled, taking a handkerchief from her back pocket and then blowing her nose loudly. “Neil, I want you to tell Preston what you told me.”
Neil’s mouth hung open wide.
“The blue pills, Neil?” Jenny rolled her eyes and snuck the safety razor out from between Neil’s fingers. “Tell him.”
“Yeah?” Neil didn’t look convinced that he understood. “I guess. They’re five milligrams each and I can sell you five for…”
“He doesn’t want to buy them, idiot,” Jenny said curtly. “I want you to tell Preston about that customer you were telling me about. The one who comes once a week to buy the blue pills from you. Remember?”
Slow realization crept across Neil’s pockmarked features like the dawn after a long night.
“I’m not saying anything,” he decided, eventually. “I don’t trust this guy.”
“You don’t trust Preston?” Jenny appeared delighted. “I don’t blame you.”
“Look, you have the wrong idea,” I said, not sure what the idea was. “I’m nobody special.”
“Whatever. I’m not saying shit until I know he isn’t a cop.”
Jenny rolled her eyes and tittered.
“Okay,” she agreed mildly. “Give him some Azure, then.”
“Wait, wait,” I said, holding up both hands. “What the hell is that?”
“You see?” Neil cried out. “This guy doesn’t belong here, Jenny.”
“Preston, shut up!” Jenny snarled, kicking me beneath the table. “Neil, give him some Azure. Then we can all trust each other.”
She smirked at me, daring me to disagree. Neil shook his head for a very long time, and then turned back to his desk, availing himself of a waiting pile of purple-green ground herb.
“Jenny, what the hell?” I whispered, leaning close to her. “What is this shit?”
“You need to know what he knows,” Jenny said vacantly. “And Neil has to trust you, first.”
“But what the hell is Azure? I don’t want drugs, Jenny.”
“Relax. It’s like pot or something,” she said contemptuously. “Boring. You can handle it. Makes you sleep.”
“Makes you dream,” Neil corrected, offering me a small stone pipe, shaped like a coffin, the bowl packed with ground herbs. “Only way to dream, in the Nameless City.”
It was distinctly possible that Jenny was screwing with me. I wondered if it would be simpler to beat it out of Neil, and glanced at Jenny pleadingly, but she was having too much fun. She gestured for me to go ahead, while Neil watched suspiciously.
I hit the pipe and then coughed for a solid minute. Jenny whooped with laughter and pounded me on the back, while Neil cackled and helped himself to the pipe. I waved Neil off when he offered me a second hit, my eyes watery and my lungs well seared.
“The story,” I wheezed. “Tell me the story.”
“Story?” Neil blinked and looked confused. I considered strangling him in a moment of passing mania, the Azure worming its way into the back of my mind like an uninvited guest sneaking into a party. “What do you…?”
“The customer,” Jenny prompted, laughing. “The one who buys blue pills.”
“Oh yeah,” he said, running his hands through his extensively coifed hair. “That guy. I forgot you bumped into him, Jenny. He’s a weird one.”
“Yeah,” Jenny agreed, grinding her teeth with agitation. “Tell him the story you told me.”
The telling took a few minutes, and a great deal of assistance and prodding from Jenny. It wasn’t a linear thing, and I can’t say for sure exactly how much of it I believed. Braced for the worst, I relaxed gradually as the effects of the Azure failed to set in more dramatically than a barely noticeable pressure in my temples and occasional bright spots in my vision.
Neil sold stimulants for a wide variety of clientele. A substantial portion of his business came from the sale of prescription amphetamines – the blue pills – to students, office workers, and the Nameless City’s countless librarians – particularly those unlucky enough to be assigned to Derelith Manuscript Collection, every piece of which is purported to be unreadably dull. Naturally, the Carter Academy accounted for a notable percentage of those sales, given the stressful academic environment, the rigorous study and exam regimen, and the near constant threat of the summer reading list driving the reader mad. Neil didn’t seem to find his role in their distribution any different than that of an average doctor, and from experience, I was inclined to agree.
A regular customer dropped by unannounced a few weeks earlier, interrupting a desperately needed nap. Not long after he grudging allowed the man into his room, Neil noticed that beneath a heavy overcoat that he refused to take off, the clothes his customer wore were liberally splattered with something that looked an awful lot like blood to our friendly neighborhood amphetamine addict.
“How could you tell it was blood?” I didn’t raise my voice, and I waited for one of the long pauses in his monolog, but Neil still reacted as if I had lunged at him unexpectedly. “It’s not easy to tell, is all I’m saying.”
Neil stammered and pointed. It took a minute for him to regain the ability to speak.
“It dripped,” he muttered, his swaying from side to side in a little unconscious dance. “On the floor and on the comforter. You can still see it.”
I stood up and checked the spot beneath my thigh where he was pointing.
It was blood, all right. Smeared and dried, days old at least. Could have been from a nosebleed or a bad period, for all I knew, but it was the real deal.
“Okay. Go on.”
“He would have, if you’d just shut up.” Jenny grinned at me and went back to restoring the remains of the line her coughing had scattered across the glass table. “Let him talk.”
Neil gave us the look of a child pained by his parent’s argument. The image was so grotesque I couldn’t help but laugh.
The regular wasn’t just apparently wearing blood-covered clothing – he was excited. Not about the blood or its potentially nefarious sources, or even about the drugs he came to buy, or even the drugs that he was obviously under the influence of at that very moment. He was excited about a mask.
The customer was a student at the Academy, and also worked for an eccentric rich old lady who lived somewhere up Prospect Hill. He worked long hours and often stopped by Neil’s in the early morning, and was generally taciturn, only occasionally making vague and ominous statements about the nature of both his work and study. I got the feeling that Neil didn’t care much for this regular, even before he left blood on his bedspread. This particular visit, though, he was animated, full of enthusiasm. He had rendered his employer a service, the customer explained, patting a leather messenger bag cradled against his stomach, one that he was certain she would appreciate.
“Drugs? There were drugs in the bag, right?”
“Shut up, Preston.”
Neil never found out what was in the bag. The customer wasn’t that forthcoming. What he did discuss, at some length and to Neil’s obvious impatience, was his new tool, a reward from his employer.
“What the hell?” I gave Jenny a hard look, but she was too busy trying to gather every single miniscule grain of poison on the glass. “The Pallid Mask? I think I heard that before, somewhere, but I don’t really remember…”
“One more detail, and you’ll understand,” Jenny said, with a contradictory yawn. “Neil; tell him the customer’s name.”
Underneath the dirt and grease, his skin got pale, and his eyes narrowed.
“I can’t do that, Jenny.”
Apparently satisfied with the reconstituted line, Jenny tapped the safety razor against the glass, and then proceeded to run the flat sides along her tongue, her eyes fixed on Neil the whole time. He ran his hands through his oily hair, stammered, and then repeated the gesture a moment later.
“You told me already, asshole.”
“But I didn’t mean to!” Neil was sweating profusely, hands clasped as if in prayer. “I was wasted, okay? That was a mistake.”
“So? Make the same mistake twice. I do that all the time.”
“Listen, Jenny…it’s nothing personal, it’s just…”
“You sure?”
“Jenny…”
“You’re totally sure, right?”
“I can’t! It’s just business!”
Jenny’s free hand darted out, seizing one of the laden ashtrays from the bedside table, a heavy ceramic piece with indentations in the shape of a child’s fingers, and hurled it. The ashtray struck Neil on the forehead with the sound of a cask being tapped, followed by a moan as he covered the point of injury. Jenny leapt across the table, obliterating her hard work on the way, and tackled Neil, knocking him from his chair to the floor.
She landed her elbow on his midsection. Neil groaned and doubled over, his face white as cotton. Jenny pinned his arms beneath her legs as she settled comfortably on his chest.
“Tough business you’re in,” Jenny hissed, running the safety razor along his cheek. “How many eyes do you think you need to deal, Neil?”
“Jenny! Stop! I’m sorry, okay! I’ll…I’ll tell! I’ll do it!”
“’Course you will.” Jenny looked surprised. “What else you gonna do?”
I t
hought about voicing objections, but decided I wouldn’t be fooling anyone in that particular room.
Neil struggled ineffectually, slapping Jenny’s legs with his partially immobilized arms while she bent over his face. The position was nearly erotic, with stray strands of her straw blond hair trailing across his face and getting caught up in his open mouth as he bucked and struggled desperately beneath her. Jenny grabbed his face open handed, palm against his nose, and slammed it against the floor. Neil’s cries of pain and fear were muffled by Jenny’s grip, her other hand raised, a crazed smile on her crude features.
I felt the bed shift behind me, heard a creak of springs, and turned, but not fast enough.
It’s hard to say how long the girl in the bed had been awake. Maybe she opened her eyes at the most dramatic moment, but judging from the speed of her movements, she was probably awake for a while. She was a blur of bleach-damaged hair and cocoa-colored skin barreling across the room, maybe fifty kilos worth of drug-addled anger and hot pink acrylic nails. She hit Jenny in the back with a perfect football tackle, creating a frenetic jumble of swearing and struggling limbs.
I waded in a few seconds later. Bed girl had a handful of Jenny’s hair, her teeth sunk deep inside of Jenny’s neck. Jenny lashed out wildly in response, hitting Neil as often as the girl who was attacking her. The safety razor was nowhere obvious, and Neil’s upper half was invisible beneath the ongoing catfight. The girl gave my arm a good scratch when I attempted to pry her off Jenny, followed by a sudden and unappreciated elbow to my crotch. Enraged, I hauled back and hit her in the side of the head, sending her sprawling across the room. I clutched the skin dangling from my wounded arm, and didn’t feel particularly good about myself.
Jenny snarled and swayed to her feet. Her lip was split, bruising forming around her left eye, and the bloody imprint of the girl’s teeth clearly evident on the side of her neck. One of her hands dripped blood steadily on the floor.
“You stupid bitch!” Jenny howled, advancing on the prostrate and semi-conscious girl. “Look what you made me do!”
I didn’t get it at first, until I realized that Neil hadn’t moved at all since he was freed from Jenny’s grip. I took a closer look, and realized that the safety blade was embedded in Neil’s throat. The blade was buried in tissue to the orange plastic hilt, surrounded by a generous welling of blood. Neil sounded as if he were drowning, each cough wetter than the last. His hands hovered near his violated throat, as if afraid to touch the injury, his eyes pleading for some type of aid.
The Mysteries of Holly Diem (Unknown Kadath Estates Book 2) Page 13