Interesting Times (Interesting Times #1)

by Matthew Storm

He scratched Jeffrey absent-mindedly. And what was he going to do about the cat? Take him home?

  “Am I supposed to go home now?” he asked Tyler.

  Tyler glanced at Sally, concern flashing across his face. Sally shook her head. “Not yet. Artemis has asked to see you first.”

  “What for?” Oliver asked.

  “Debriefing.”

  “Debriefing? What am I, a spy?”

  “You’ve had quite an experience,” Tyler said reassuringly. “She just wants to talk to you and see that you’re all right. Talk about what you’re going to do next, and, you know, what you should say to people about where you’ve been all this time. We’d hardly be civilized if we just kicked you into the street after what you’ve been through.”

  Jeffrey nudged Oliver’s arm with his nose. “I don’t trust the dog,” he whispered.

  “I’m not a dog,” Tyler said.

  “You see?” Jeffrey asked. “He heard me with his dog hearing!”

  “We all heard you,” Sally said. “You don’t whisper very well.”

  Oliver thought about it. He liked Tyler, but he didn’t believe him, either. “She’s not really asking me to come, is she?”

  Sally smirked. “Artemis never asks anything.”

  Tyler looked apologetic. “It’s not a demand, but…”

  “It’s like when the Mafia asks you to do something? An offer you can’t refuse?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What if I do refuse?”

  Sally smiled at him. “Then I’m going to hit you,” she said sweetly.

  Oliver nearly pointed out that she had already hit him, right here in this room, and it hadn’t gone quite as she had planned. But he thought the better of it. There was no reason to start another fight. Besides, if he was sure of anything, it was that a meeting with Artemis would be inevitable. “I guess I should go say hello, then,” he said.

  “Aw,” Sally pouted. “You sure you want to go peacefully?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, truth be told, I’m starting to like you,” Sally said. “So I wouldn’t have hit you very hard.”

  “Do you ever solve problems without violence?” Oliver asked.

  “No,” Tyler said under his breath.

  “What would the point of that be?” she asked. She looked genuinely confused.

  “Forget it,” Oliver said. “Let’s get going.”

  “Can I come?” asked Jeffrey.

  “Why not?” asked Oliver.

  “We’re taking the cat?” Sally asked.

  “We can hardly leave him here,” Tyler pointed out.

  Sally shrugged. “He rides with you.”

  Chapter 23

  Sally said goodbye outside the time-house and drove away in her Miata. Tyler and Oliver left in Tyler’s Charger. Jeffrey stood up on Oliver’s lap, his front paws pressed against the glass so he could look out the window. “This is amazing,” he said, watching as they passed by other cars. “I don’t know how you people take this for granted.”

  “We’ve been in cars before,” Oliver said. “So have you, for that matter.”

  “I know, but it’s still amazing.”

  “You get used to it,” Tyler said.

  “You can get used to lots of things,” Oliver said. “Talking cats, for instance.”

  Jeffrey looked up at Oliver. “Yeah, I’ve been meaning to talk to you about that.”

  “I don’t know what I did to you or how to put you back,” Oliver said.

  “Oh, that’s okay,” Jeffrey said. “I didn’t like it at first, but now I do.”

  “Really?”

  “It comes in handy. I saw a guy eating a sandwich the other day and I said, ‘Hey, man, you better drop that sandwich!’ And he did! He dropped it and ran away!”

  “Oh.” Oliver made a mental note to discuss socially appropriate behavior with the cat at some point in the very near future.

  “It was a good sandwich,” Jeffrey noted. “Talking is good. And there’s the other stuff…”

  Oliver frowned. “What other stuff? What else have you done?”

  “Oh, it’s nothing bad,” the cat said. “I’m not sure how to explain it. It’s my brain.”

  “Your brain?”

  “I didn’t think like this before,” the cat explained. “I mean, I had thoughts, but I didn’t think. Not really. And I didn’t know things the way I do now. Or as many things. It was like I read the entire encyclopedia all at once, before I even knew what an encyclopedia was. Maybe that doesn’t make any sense.”

  “It makes sense,” Oliver said.

  Tyler glanced over at him.“It does?”

  “Sure,” Oliver said. “I wanted you to be able to talk,” he said to the cat. “But what would the point of that have been, if you’d had nothing to say?”

  “I don’t get it,” said Jeffrey.

  “What would you have said if you could have talked two weeks ago? If suddenly you had the ability to talk, but nothing else had changed?”

  “I’d have said, ‘Whoa, this is really weird!’”

  Tyler laughed. “No, you’d have said, ‘eat, eat, eat, pee.’”

  “More or less,” Oliver said. “It wasn’t enough that you gained the ability to speak. That wouldn’t have done much of anything, really. In order to talk, to make conversation, a lot more about you had to change. In a way, you aren’t a cat at all, not anymore. You’re something unique.”

  “Eat, eat, lick balls, sleep,” Tyler continued.

  Jeffrey thought it over. “Screw you guys,” he said finally.

  The cat went back to looking out the window. After a while Tyler said, “Hey, Oliver.”

  “Yeah?”

  “We had some fun, didn’t we?”

  “Did we?” Oliver asked. Assassination attempts, vampires, and lizard people didn’t seem all that fun to him.

  “Kind of, right?” Tyler asked. It seemed important to him. In a strange way, Oliver thought, it sounded like Tyler was trying to say goodbye.

  “I guess we did,” Oliver admitted. “It’s certainly been quite an experience.”

  “Try to remember that,” Tyler said. Then he turned on the stereo and Hawaiian music came over the speakers. Oliver kept expecting him to say something else, but he was silent.

  They were driving east toward the Financial District. Oliver wondered which building their “base” was in. He expected they operated out of some kind of mysterious underground lair, like the Batcave, maybe. Or maybe the penthouse floor of a skyscraper downtown, someplace that overlooked the entire city and had a helipad so they could rush off to…wherever…at a moment’s notice. Oliver was sure that whatever it was would be impressive.

  Instead Tyler turned the car into Chinatown and pulled up in front of a run-down restaurant called “Sang Min’s Double Happiness.” Oliver looked at the sign skeptically. “Are we stopping for lunch first? You sure you want to eat here?”

  “We’re not eating,” Tyler said. “This is the last stop. Come on.” He got out of the car and waited for Oliver on the sidewalk.

  Jeffrey was still seated in Oliver’s lap. “Why don’t you wait out here?” Oliver suggested.

  “Why? I could eat. I’ll get me a little dim sum, a little rice…”

  “I’m not sure what’s going to happen now,” Oliver said slowly. “But I’m not sure I’m ever coming out of there.”

  Jeffrey gave him a worried look. “Then why go in at all?” the cat asked, putting a paw on Oliver’s chest and looking him in the eye. “Hit that fool dog in the head and let’s get out of here.”

  Oliver shook his head. “I’m going to see this through,” he said.

  “Why?”

  “Because I’ve been running for days and I don’t want to live like that. And honestly, I don’t know what else to do.”

  Oliver stepped out of the car and placed Jeffrey carefully on the sidewalk, stroking the cat once along the back before following Tyler into the restaurant. He had thought the place might be abando
ned, but there were a few people dining inside, and a waiter was taking a tourist couple’s order a few feet away. Nobody was acting as if anything were amiss.

  Artemis was seated alone in a distant corner booth. She raised a hand and motioned Oliver over. Today she was wearing blue jeans and a t-shirt with a cartoon monster on the front. Oliver was sure he had seen it before, from a children’s television show. “Pikachu?” he said as he reached the booth.

  “Yes. You seem surprised.”

  “I’m just surprised you like Pikachu,” he said. “Seems like kid stuff, and one thing I’m sure of is that you’re not a kid.”

  “Everyone likes Pikachu,” she said matter-of-factly. “Have a seat.”

  Oliver turned but Tyler wasn’t joining them. He’d taken a seat on the other side of the restaurant and was speaking to the waiter. No doubt ordering five or six courses, Oliver thought. As an appetizer. Oliver sat down.

  “So this is your secret base?” he asked the girl.

  “No,” she said. “This is a restaurant I like.”

  “Oh.”

  “Is this what you imagined a ‘secret base’ would look like?”

  “No. Not really.”

  “Well, then.” There was no food on the table, but there was a teapot and two small handle-less cups. She poured tea into one for Oliver, then refilled her own. She took a sip of hers and sighed contentedly. “That is very good,” she said. “It’s hard to find good tea.”

  “Tea all tastes the same to me,” Oliver said. She stared at him disapprovingly. “I guess I just haven’t tried enough,” he offered.

  “It doesn’t matter now,” she said. “So. How are you?”

  “Fine, thanks. How are you?”

  “No,” she said firmly.

  “No?”

  “I have no tradition of small talk, Mr. Jones,” she said. “When I ask you how you are, it is because I am interested in the answer. So once again, how are you?”

  Oliver shrugged. “I’m tired. Even though I slept for as long as I did, days I guess, I’m still tired. I’m still confused about all of this, but not like before. I feel this…I don’t know…resignation. Is that the right word?”

  “No,” she said. “The word you are looking for is depression.”

  “Oh.” He considered that as he took a sip of the tea. “Yeah, you’re right.”

  “Your exhaustion is entirely natural, as such things go, given the amount of energy you expended without any practice.”

  “Practice?”

  “Rather like if you decided to take up jogging, and on your first day out ran a marathon. It’s a lucky thing the stress didn’t kill you.”

  “I feel like you’re telling me how the story ends and skipping the beginning,” Oliver said.

  “Oh?”

  Oliver looked the little girl in the eyes. “How did I do it? What am I?”

  “Oh, I see,” Artemis said. She took another sip of her tea. “It took me a while to put that all together. Too long, really, but in my defense it is an exceptionally rare thing. And the truth is, I don’t know. Not exactly. In a manner of speaking, I can tell you the symptom, but not the disease.”

  Oliver sighed. He had been hoping he was finally going to get some answers, but that was looking less likely now. “All right, then. What’s the symptom?”

  “You change reality,” the girl said simply.

  “I…” he stared at her. “Change reality? Are you making a joke?”

  “Do I strike you as someone who makes jokes?”

  “No.”

  “Then it is not very likely that I began doing so just now, is it?”

  Oliver opened his mouth, shut it, then opened it again. “I’m going to need a little more than that,” he said.

  “I have little more. I have only heard stories about it, back when I was very young. You have the power, or perhaps I should say the ability, to alter reality. Using only this,” she said, tapping her index finger against her temple.

  “That’s obviously not true,” Oliver said. “If I could change the world at will I’d…I’d be rich, for one thing. And taller.”

  “You certainly would, if you had any control over it.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “It’s clear to me that everything you are capable of doing occurs on an almost entirely subconscious level. You didn’t will for any of the strange things that have happened to happen, did you? Did you say, ‘Oh, poor me. I’m so lonely, I wish my cat could talk.’”

  Oliver considered making a rude remark, but decided against it. “No.”

  “No, you did not. You wanted a companion, and suddenly your cat spoke to you. Did you wish for the Kalatari to be wiped out of existence?”

  “No.”

  “What did happen?”

  The memories were hazy, but Oliver knew the answer. “I’d been hit in the head so many times I couldn’t control my mind anymore,” he said. “I thought I was hallucinating. I thought I must have brain damage and that everything that was happening was a fantasy.”

  “And?”

  “I convinced myself that none of it was real. That it wasn’t happening. Lizard people aren’t real,” he said.

  “And as such, they are no longer real,” Artemis said. “There are none left.”

  “Yeah.”

  “You may have committed genocide, Mr. Jones, but it would be fair to say that you did it by accident. I think without the drugs and head trauma, you could never have pulled it off. Perhaps that will help you to sleep at night.”

  Oliver blinked. “That’s supposed to help?”

  “Why not?” the girl shrugged. “I myself was surprised to learn that the Matriarch did indeed have the gift of prophecy. Of course, it was that same prophecy that led directly to her ruin. If the Kalatari had left you alone, they’d all be alive today. Or at least until their natural extinction, which wasn’t far off anyway.”

  John Blackwell had given the Kalatari another hundred years, Oliver remembered. “But doesn’t all of that make me…”

  “Unbelievably dangerous?” the girl asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Yes, it does,” Artemis said. “You may be the single most dangerous person on this planet.”

  “Oh.”

  “And not in the least to yourself. You willed the Kalatari out of existence, albeit unwittingly. What is to say that you couldn’t do the same thing to yourself?”

  “You can do that?”

  “I can’t,” Artemis said. “You could.”

  The waitress appeared with a fresh pot of tea, whisking the old one away. Oliver wondered if food was coming. He wasn’t sure how long it had been since he’d eaten. Had they fed him intravenously while he had slept? He hadn’t noticed any equipment for that in the room.

  “So,” Artemis said. “What are we going to do with you?”

  “Do with me?”

  “I suppose you could return to your life,” Artemis said. “Go back to your house. We cleaned it up for you. Got rid of the bodies and fixed your window, even. You could go back to work tomorrow.”

  “How am I going to pull that off?” Oliver asked. “The last time I was at my office…”

  “It would take me exactly one phone call,” Artemis said. She looked directly at him. “Do you really doubt I could do this?”

  “No,” Oliver said.

  “So then. Back to your old life. You’ll have Jeffrey, of course. He seems attached to you. But everything else will be just like it was. You’ll work on those spreadsheets of yours all day and then go home to eat Lean Cuisine.”

  “I don’t eat Lean Cuisine,” Oliver lied.

  “Of course you don’t,” Artemis said. She sighed. “But it does occur to me that perhaps you’d like to do something more with your life.”

  “Such as?”

  “Well, you’re smart. You’re capable. You have some experience now with the paranormal. For that matter you are the paranormal, and you’ve dealt with rapid changes in your life fairly well. A
man with a lesser mind would have required institutionalization by now.”

  “Thanks.” Oliver still wasn’t entirely convinced that he wasn’t really lying unconscious in a bed somewhere, while all of this around him was a fantasy.

  “What I’m saying is that I could find a place for you on my team. I think you would be an asset.”

  Oliver blinked. “You’re offering me a job?” he asked.

  “I thought I had made that clear,” Artemis said.

  “But…even though I can’t…” Oliver wiggled his fingers in the air. “Go ‘woo woo’ and make things appear?” He wondered what good he could possibly be to her.

  Artemis rolled her eyes. “Yes, Mr. Jones, in spite of the fact that you can’t go ‘woo woo,’ I’d like you to join us.”

  Oliver considered it. This was all moving very fast. “Can I have a few days to think about it?”

  “No,” Artemis said. “You already have all the information you need to decide right now. Either I’m going to find a desk for you back at our ‘secret base,’ or I’ll thank you for your time and Tyler will drive you home, never to see any of us again.”

  Oliver opened his mouth, intending to refuse, but then he caught himself. Just a few days ago he’d been lamenting about how dull his life was. Then all of this craziness had happened. He’d been chased by an assassin. Drank wine with a vampire. Been bitten by another vampire. And he’d annihilated an entire species of lizard people, although in his defense they had been trying to murder him at the time.

  Life didn’t have to be dull. There was so much more out there in the world, and he had to admit, he wanted to see more of it.

  “I’m in,” Oliver said.

  “Oh, thank god,” Tyler said from behind him. Oliver turned his head. Tyler had crossed to their side of the restaurant unseen, and was standing adjacent to the booth just behind them. More disconcerting was the sight of Sally Rain, who had seemingly appeared from nowhere and was now standing directly behind Oliver. She held a sinister-looking syringe in her hand, pointed directly at his neck.

  Sally capped the syringe and put it in her jacket pocket with god knew whatever else she kept in there. “Welcome aboard,” she said.

  “Great job, buddy,” Tyler said.

  Oliver turned back to Artemis, full of shock and anger. “What was that?” he asked. “You were going to kill me if I said no?”