It was full of dancers. Ana looked at them, and closed her eyes, and looked again. She could hear Rico singing over the noise of the crowd.
“I’m still a pirate king,” she whispered to herself, weaving her way in between dancers and trying to find the stage. She dodged the dancing things, and bumped into some, and passed through the shimmering substance of others. She saw colors and antlers and sharp teeth in strange places.
She found the stage. She found her brother. He sang, and the language sounded a little bit like Spanish but not very much. Nick played a red guitar, acoustic and covered in gold ivy. Julia played a yellow-grey flute. Both of them were even taller than they usually were.
Rico saw her, and Ana saw a lot of white around the edges of his eyes when he did. He nudged Julia, and she started a flute solo, and he got down off the stage and pulled Ana behind it. She opened her mouth and he shushed her.
“Okay, don’t eat or drink. Whatever else you do, don’t eat anything and don’t drink anything. Now tell me what you think you’re doing.”
“Looking for you,” Ana said.
“I’m impressed,” he said, biting on his lower lip. “I really am. But this is very, very bad and I’m not sure how to fix it.”
“What’s the problem?” Ana asked, folding her arms and looking at him as though she were the older one.
“Okay,” Rico said, taking deep breaths. “Do you see those guys over there? The ones with the tattoos?”
“They’re the gang?” Ana asked.
“Yeah. Sure. Kind of. And this is supposed to be my last task for them, and then after the concert I’ll learn how to sing up every chrome piece of a motorcycle and ride it from town to town, stopping only to hum the fuel tank full again. I’ll learn how to sing hurricanes and how to send them away. I’ll learn how to sing something people can dance to for a full year and never notice the time passing.”
“Sounds like fun,” Ana said.
“Sure. The catch is that this crowd has to be happy and dancing until the dawn light comes. If they stop before then, I fail and I have to serve the guys with the tattoos for at least a hundred years. So you should either go, right now, however you came here, or else hide somewhere and don’t eat or drink or talk to anyone until dawn. And don’t do anything distracting, because the crowd might stop dancing and that would be very bad. They like children, here, but they care about music a lot more than they care about kids.”
Ana looked up at Julia and her yellow-grey flute.
“I have go back onstage now,” Rico said.
“Okay,” Ana said.
“Hide,” he said.
“Okay.”
He went back onstage. Julia finished her solo, and Rico sang. He was good.
Ana thought she saw her backpack scamper between someone’s hooves. She followed. Then she saw Garth, or at least she assumed it was Garth. He had started to eat people near the Western Arch.
“Crap,” Ana said. He was distracting the crowd. Some of them weren’t dancing anymore.
She ran back to the arch and slipped through. She looked everywhere, kicking up leaves. She found her walking stick and used it to poke through the leaves that were dark and wet and sticky. Then she found one golden gauntlet. Blood pooled underneath it. A small, silver tusk sat in its palm.
She picked up the silver. It was very sharp. She ran back through the arch and followed the screaming.
Garth was gnawing on a severed antler with his long wolf-muzzle. Some things in the crowd were shouting, and more were laughing, and most were still dancing but not all of them were.
“Hey, perro muerto,” Ana said. She threw her walking stick at him. It got his attention. He dropped the antler, bounded forward and knocked her to the ground, slavering.
Ana grabbed one of his furry ears with her left hand and shoved the tusk through it with her right. The skin of his ear resisted, stretching a little before the silver broke through.
Garth rolled over and howled. Ana got to her feet and looked around her. The crowd danced. Even those who were bleeding from the fight with Garth were dancing again. She took a deep breath, and she didn’t get a chance to let it out all the way before someone’s hand took her by the elbow and pulled her towards the stage.
She looked up at the arm attached to the hand. It had green and red letters tattooed all up and down its length.
Rico, Julia and Nick bowed to the sound of applause and unearthly cries. The sky began to lighten above the branches, grey and rose-colored and pale.
The owner of the green and red arm pushed Ana forward in front of Rico. “What’s this?” Rico asked.
“Your last initiation,” said a very deep voice behind Ana. She didn’t want to turn around. She looked straight ahead at her brother. “Sing her to sleep. Let her sleep for a thousand years, or at least until another glacier passes this way.”
“I’ve already finished my initiation,” Rico said. “They all danced until dawn.”
“Yes,” said the voice. “You held them, most of them, and they were deer in headlights highbeamed by your song. Those you lost you gained again as they danced bleeding. It was good. But it was not your last task. The last requires a ten-year-old.”
“Crap,” said Ana.
Rico took her hand, pulled her closer, and tossed red and green colors into the air between them and the crowd. Colors settled into the shape of his tag. Ana still couldn’t read it.
“Home,” Rico said. “I’ll follow when I can.”
“You have to tell me what it says,” Ana told him, but he just smiled and pushed her through.
Their parents were as frantic as one might expect. Ana managed to slip into her brother’s room and find green and red spray-paint hidden behind the couch before her mother and father and Deputy Chad came in to look for clues to Rico’s whereabouts. Ana kept the spray-paint hidden under her own bed.
It took a long time for Ana to get back to the high school, because her parents kept closer tabs on her after Rico disappeared. Bertha had already sandblasted the graffiti, and Ana couldn’t find the forest path, and she didn’t know where Garth was. She hoped he wasn’t dead, or something very close to dead. She walked home, and listened to three nervous phone messages from her mother on the answering machine. Ana called her back and told her she was home, and that everything was fine even though it wasn’t really.
She went up to her room, and found her backpack sitting on her bed. She gave it a hug. It purred when she scratched behind its ears.
“I’m really, really angry at you for leaving,” she said. It kept purring.
Inside she found three pages torn from her notebook. They were folded in half together, with “Ana” written on the front.
The first page was in Rico’s handwriting. I’ll see you as soon as I find a way out of a hundred years of servitude, it said. Don’t worry, I’ll manage. DO NOT COME LOOKING FOR ME. Keep a pinch of salt in your pocket at all times, and stay out of the woods, and DO NOT keep following me around. I’m serious.
Ana snorted, and turned the page. It was her seventh drawing, with a note written underneath: This is my name, dumbass.
She turned to the last page.
This is yours.
Ana looked at it, and saw that it was.
She took out her magic markers and practiced marking her territory on the back wall of her closet.
NOTHING PERSONAL
PAT CADIGAN
Pat Cadigan sold her first professional science fiction story in 1980. She is the author of fifteen books, including two nonfiction books on the making of Lost in Space and The Mummy, a young adult novel, and the two Arthur C. Clarke Award-winning novels Synners and Fools. Pat lives in gritty, urban North London with the Original Chris Fowler, her musician son Robert Fenner, and Miss Kitty Calgary, Queen of the Cats. She can be found on Facebook and Google+, and she tweets as @cadigan.
Detective Ruby Tsung could not say when the Dread had first come over her. It had been a gradual development, taking place o
ver a period of weeks, possibly months, with all the subtlety of any of the more mundane life processes—weight-gain, greying hair, ageing itself. Time marched on and one day you woke up to find you were a somewhat dumpy, greying, middle-aged homicide detective with twenty-five years on the job and a hefty lump of bad feeling in the pit of your stomach: the Dread.
It was a familiar enough feeling, the Dread. Ruby had known it well in the past. Waiting for the verdict in an officer-involved shooting; looking up from her backlog of paperwork to find a stone-faced IAD officer standing over her; the doctor clearing his throat and telling her to sit down before giving her the results of the mammogram; answering an unknown trouble call and discovering it was a cop’s address. Then there were the ever popular rumours, rumours, rumours: of budget cuts, of forced retirement for everyone with more than fifteen years in, of mandatory transfers, demotions, promotions, stings, grand jury subpoenas, not to mention famine, war, pestilence, disease, and death—business as usual.
After a while she had become inured to a lot of it. You had to or you’d make yourself sick, give yourself an ulcer or go crazy. As she had grown more experienced, she had learned what to worry about and what she could consign to denial even just temporarily. Otherwise, she would have spent all day with the Dread eating away at her insides and all night with it sitting on her chest crushing the breath out of her.
The last ten years of her twenty-five had been in Homicide and in that time, she had had little reason to feel Dread. There was no point. This was Homicide—something bad was going to happen so there was no reason to dread it. Someone was going to turn up dead today, tomorrow it would be someone else, the next day still someone else, and so forth. Nothing personal, just Homicide.
Nothing personal. She had been coping with the job on this basis for a long time now and it worked just fine. Whatever each murder might have been about, she could be absolutely certain that it wasn’t about her. Whatever had gone so seriously wrong as to result in loss of life, it was not meant to serve as an omen, a warning, or any other kind of signifier in her life. Just the facts, ma’am or sir. Then punch out and go home.
Nothing personal. She was perfectly clear on that. It didn’t help. She still felt as if she had swallowed something roughly the size and density of a hockey puck.
There was no specific reason that she could think of. She wasn’t under investigation—not as far as she knew, anyway, and she made a point of not dreading what she didn’t know. She hadn’t done anything (lately) that would have called for any serious disciplinary action; there were no questionable medical tests to worry about, no threats of any kind. Her son Jake and his wife Lita were nested comfortably in the suburbs outside Boston, making an indecent amount of money in computer software and raising her grandkids in a big old Victorian house that looked like something out of a storybook. The kids emailed her regularly, mostly jokes and scans of their crayon drawings. Whether they were all really as happy as they appeared to be was another matter but she was fairly certain they weren’t suffering. But even if she had been inclined to worry unduly about them, it wouldn’t have felt like the Dread.
Almost as puzzling to her as when the Dread had first taken up residence was how she had managed not to notice it coming on. Eventually she understood that she hadn’t—she had simply pushed it to the back of her mind and then, being continuously busy, had kept on pushing it all the way into the Worry About Later file, where it had finally grown too intense to ignore.
Which brought her back to the initial question: When the hell had it started? Had it been there when her partner Rita Castillo had retired? She didn’t remember feeling anything as unpleasant as the Dread when Rita had made the announcement or, later on, at her leaving party. Held in a cop bar, the festivities had gone on till two in the morning and the only unusual thing about it for Ruby had been that she had gone home relatively sober. Not by design and not for any specific reason. Not even on purpose—she had had a couple of drinks that had given her a nice mellow buzz, after which she had switched to diet cola. Some kind of new stuff—someone had given her a taste and she’d liked it. Who? Right, Tommy DiCenzo; Tommy had fifteen years of sobriety, which was some kind of precinct record.
But the Dread hadn’t started that night; it had already been with her then. Not the current full-blown knot of Dread, but in retrospect, she knew that she had felt something and simply refused to think about the bit of disquiet that had sunk its barbed hook into a soft place.
But she hadn’t been so much in denial that she had gotten drunk. You left yourself open to all sorts of unpleasantness when you tied one on at a cop’s retirement party: bad thoughts, bad memories, bad dreams, and real bad mornings-after. Of course, knowing that hadn’t always stopped her in the past. It was too easy to let yourself be caught up in the moment, in all the moments, and suddenly you were completely shitfaced and wondering how that could have happened. Whereas she couldn’t remember the last time she’d heard of anyone staying sober by accident.
Could have been the nine-year-old that had brought the Dread on. That had been pretty bad even for an old hand like herself. Rita had been on vacation and she had been working alone when the boy’s body had turned up in the dumpster on the south side—or south town, which was what everyone seemed to be calling it now. The sudden name-change baffled her; she had joked to Louie Levant at the desk across from hers about not getting the memo on renaming the ’hoods. Louie had looked back at her with a mixture of mild surprise and amusement on his pale features. “South town was what we always called it when I was growing up there,” he informed her, a bit loftily. “Guess the rest of you finally caught on.” Louie was about twenty years younger than she was, Ruby reminded herself, which meant that she had two decades more history to forget; she let the matter drop.
Either way, south side or south town, the area wasn’t a crime hotspot. It wasn’t as upscale as the parklike west side or as stolidly middle/working class as the northland grid but it wasn’t east midtown, either. Murder in south town was news; the fact that it was a nine-year-old boy was worse news and, worst of all, it had been a sex crime.
Somehow she had known that it would be a sex crime even before she had seen the body, lying small, naked, and broken amid the trash in the bottom of the dumpster. Just what she hadn’t wanted to catch—kiddie sex murder. Kiddie sex murder had something for everyone: nightmares for parents, hysterical ammunition for religious fanatics, and lurid headlines for all. And a very special kind of hell for the family of the victim, who would be forever overshadowed by the circumstances of his death.
During his short life, the boy had been an average student with a talent for things mechanical—he had liked to build engines for model trains and cars. He had told his parents he thought he’d like to be a pilot when he grew up. Had he died in some kind of accident, a car wreck, a fall, or something equally unremarkable, he would have been remembered as the little boy who never got a chance to fly—tragic, what a shame, light a candle. Instead, he would now and forever be defined by the sensational nature of his death. The public memory would link him not with little-kid stuff like model trains and cars but with the pervert who had killed him.
She hadn’t known anything about him, none of those specific details about models and flying when she had first stood gazing down at him; at that point, she hadn’t even known his name. But she had known the rest of it as she had climbed into the dumpster, trying not to gag from the stench of garbage and worse and hoping that the plastic overalls and booties she had on didn’t tear.
That had been a bad day. Bad enough that it could have been the day the Dread had taken up residence in her gut.
Except it wasn’t.
Thinking about it, remembering the sight, the smell, the awful way it felt when she had accidentally stepped on the dead boy’s ankle, she knew the Dread had already been with her. Not so cumbersome at the time, still small enough to snub in favour of more immediate problems, but definitely there.
Had it been Ricky Carstairs, then? About a month before the nine-year-old, she had been on her way out of the precinct house when she had passed two uniformed officers bringing him in and recognized him immediately. She had no idea how she had managed that mental feat—he had been skinny, dirty, and obviously strung out, and she hadn’t seen him since he and Jake had been in the seventh grade together but she had known him at once and it hadn’t been a good moment.
“It’s just plain wrong,” she had said when Rita asked her why she looked as if she had just found half a worm in the middle of an apple. “Your kid’s old school friends are supposed go away and live lives with no distinguishing characteristics. Become office workers in someplace like Columbus or Chicago or Duluth.”
“And that’s just plain weird,” Rita replied, her plump face wearing a slightly alarmed expression. “Or maybe not weird enough—I don’t know. You been watching a lot of TV lately? Like the Hallmark Channel or something?”
“Never mind,” she said, making a short dismissive wave with one hand. “It made more sense before I said it out loud.”
Rita had burst into hearty laughter and that had been that; they’d gone with the rest of the day, whatever that had involved. Probably a dead body.
The dismaying sight of one of Jake’s old school friends sweating in handcuffs had lodged in her mind more as a curiosity than anything else. Uncomfortable but hardly critical—not the fabled moment of clarity, not a short sharp shock or a reality check or a wake-up call from Planet Earth. Just a moment when she hoped that poor old Ricky hadn’t recognized her, too.
So had the Dread already been lodged in her gut then?
She tried but she honestly couldn’t remember one way or the other—the incident was just too far in the past and it had lasted only a minute, if that—but she thought it was very possible that it had.
It was unlikely, she realized, that she would ever pinpoint the exact moment when something had shifted or slipped or cracked—gone faulty, anyway—and let a sense of something wrong get in and take root. And for all she knew, it might not even matter. Not if she were in the first stage of one of those on-the-job crack-ups that a lot of cops fell victim to. Just what she needed—a slow-motion train-wreck. Christ, what the hell was the point of having a breakdown in slow-motion unless you could actually do something about it, actually prevent it from happening? Too bad it didn’t work that way—every cop she knew who had come out the other side of a crash described it as unstoppable. If it had to happen, why couldn’t it be fast? Crack up quick and have an equally rapid recovery, get it over with. She pictured herself going to the department shrink for help: Overclock me, Doc—I got cases to solve and they’re gaining on me.
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