“What should we—” she began as she climbed out of the vehicle, but Vikous was already walking away down the street, lighting the cigar as he went. Calliope watched him, her face carefully blank.
“My foot,” she muttered to herself. “My foot, kicking your ass, very soon, I swear.” She checked her jacket pockets once and went to meet the fat man.
Their route took them east three streets, over a glass-enclosed pedestrian overpass and, inexplicably, through a construction site. Vikous shuffled along in his ridiculous, oversized shoes, passing through the automatic doors of a glass-fronted executive high-rise. At the security desk he paused, his hands jammed in his coat pockets, the cigar leaking a thin line of smoke into the air from the corner of his mouth. The guard eyed them both suspiciously.
“Business?” he asked.
“Top floor. The party.” Vikous looked bored.
“Invitation.” The guard leaned forward, hand extended. Vikous just looked at him. The guard settled back in his seat, his eyes hooded. “How do you know there’s a party if you don’t have an invitation?”
Vikous watched the guard, black eyes shining under the fluorescents. Like a great cat lowering itself to the ground before pouncing, he pulled his gloved right hand out of his pocket, laid it on the counter, and leaned toward the guard. “Well, there would have to be a party, wouldn’t there?”
Calliope couldn’t see Vikous’s face clearly from that angle, but something in the guard’s face seemed to give way for just a moment, leaving his eyes showing white all the way around as he looked at Vikous.
“Second elevator on the right.” His voice was barely audible. Vikous pushed himself upright and turned to the elevator banks without another glance at the guard. After pressing the call button, he put his hand back in his pocket and watched the LED display on the wall descend to 01.
Once the doors had opened and closed behind them, Calliope spoke. “Was that like the thing with Lauren?”
Vikous was watching the display above the doors climb. Neither he nor Calliope had touched any of the buttons inside the car. “What?” he said without looking at her.
“With the guard. What did you do to him?”
He looked at her, his painted face expressionless. “I suppose you could say I scared the devil out of him.”
“How?”
He glanced at her sidelong for a moment, one eyebrow raised, then turned back to the opening elevator doors. “I guess clowns scare some people.”
Noise flooded the elevator as the doors opened. Calliope followed Vikous out of the car and into a room that looked like a private club, almost a miniaturized version of the one where Tom had been playing, although Calliope had to admit that the costumes here were much better. Succubi and dark-suited G-men with gray skin circled pale, silk-clad vampires and cat people on the dance floor. There were definitely no angels or middle-management Valkyries. A young, androgynous man in a sleek suit—his face shaped by what had to be movie-studio-level makeup and prosthetics into something that looked like a cross between Legolas and an insect—moved to meet them, arms positioned in a way that, to Calliope, said “security” rather than “host”.
“Here to see himself,” Vikous said.
Without shifting his gaze, the guard seemed to indicate Calliope.
“She’s clear,” Vikous said.
The guard’s glistening eyes flickered over her for moment, appraising, before he turned to lead them across the club.
The office they entered was spacious and utterly soundproof once the doors had been pulled shut. The fat man glided across the thick plush carpet to greet them.
His was not the firm sort of fat found in those who are forced to be active against the trend of their predilections. Parts of him—his cheeks, chins, limbs—shook as he moved, jiggled with each step despite the apparent ease of his gait. His torso was a broad, taut teardrop that extended to his knees; his arms, also quivering, were flat wide sacks that swung ineffectually at his sides in counterpoint to his movements. Puffed lips pouted beneath bright eyes that had been forced into a permanent squint by the flesh that pressed in from above and below. He was dressed in a garish Oriental silk gown that only emphasized the rolling motions beneath. His black hair had been slicked back on his head and was possibly the only portion of his anatomy that didn’t constantly move.
“Vikous, it’s quite a surprise to see you.” His voice, although cultured and calm, seemed to be coming from the throat of a man drowning in butter. He turned to Calliope. “And you’ve brought a guest. Charmed, my dear. Quite charmed.” His face seemed to be making an attempt at a smile as he extended a fleshy pink starfish of a hand. Calliope left her hands in her pockets.
Vikous’s glance flickered back to her for a moment; he moved past their host and farther into the room. “You know her, Gluen.”
The hand seemed to falter and with it, the smile. Gluen’s eyes flickered over Calliope; they were the only part of him that seemed to move quickly. “I do? I think I would remember meeting such an”—his lips twitched—“enchanting creature.” He inclined his head to Calliope, giving himself three additional chins in the process.
Vikous turned away from the windows that overlooked the city. “I didn’t say met. I said you know her. This is Joshua White’s friend.” His smile was confident and encouraging if it wasn’t examined too closely. “He told her to come see you.”
The fat man frowned, shaking his head and by extension the flesh of his neck and upper torso. “Joshua White? That doesn’t sound like one of my clients, I’m afraid.” He gave Calliope another smothered smile. “I’d love to help you, my dear, but my hands are tied.”
“That’d be some rope.” Calliope’s voice and eyes were flat.
Gluen’s smile vanished beneath the sea of pulpy flesh. “I’m sorry?”
“Obviously.” Calliope turned to Vikous. “You said he’d heard something. I can’t even see his ears. I’m leaving.”
The bulbous man’s eyes narrowed to nothing but shadowed slits in his face. “You question my ability to gather information?”
Calliope looked back at him as though she’d forgotten he was still there. “Honestly, I’m surprised you’re not on display somewhere, washing yourself with a rag on a stick.”
His eyes widened a fraction, and he pivoted toward Vikous in accusation.
The shabby vagrant laid a gloved hand across his chest and chewed the stub of his cigar to the corner of his mouth. “I just brought her, Gluen; you let her in.” His black eyes locked with Gluen’s pig-eyed glare.
Calliope waited, smothering the instinctive repulsion that had driven her initial exchange with the fat man only because Vikous had said Gluen might know something about Josh. Something about Gluen made part of her—a primitive core with deeper memories but fewer words—want to crawl away and hide, mewling, in an abandoned corner. Perversely, her more conscious mind responded to that fear with aggression. It was a classic cockroach reaction: crush and cringe surging in equally powerful waves.
Gluen stare-squinted, smiled, and clapped his hands together. His arms rippled within their sleeves. “Well, I suppose I must prove my worth.” He inclined his head to Calliope. “Shall we discuss payment?”
Before she could reply, Vikous said, “You’ve already been paid, Gluen, and now you’re wasting my time.”
Now the fat man truly did smile, pushing deep crevices into his wreathed cheeks and revealing small sharp teeth. “I have been paid to deliver a message only, my dear Vikous.” He swept a heavy arm toward Calliope. “This one wants information as well; for that I have not been recompensed, and I shall be.” He raised his eyebrows at Calliope, deep wrinkles furrowing his brow. “Miss?”
Calliope pushed her fedora back and shoved her hands into her jacket pockets. “How much?”
Gluen smiled without showing teeth. “I require only an exchange of information, my dear.”
“I don’t know anything about what’s going on.”
He shook hi
s head. “Nothing like that. I want you to tell me something about . . . food.”
Calliope hesitated, sure that somehow, in the stillness of the office, she’d heard him wrong.
Gluen turned away from her and moved smoothly back toward the center of the room. “We are, all of us, tied to the idea of consumption. It is the heart and soul of everything we are, everything we do. It is, really, not just how we live but why we live. I want to know something interesting about you and that which you have consumed.”
Calliope stared at him. “And then you tell me everything I want to know.”
He bowed his head graciously, his neck folding in loose rolls.
“That’s it?”
“My needs are simple.” He smiled.
She looked at Vikous, who gave her no hints. “I don’t have any . . . stories like that.”
Gluen shook his head again, even that small motion sending echoes throughout his body. “Let’s not be coy, my dear. In my experience, everyone has ‘stories like that’, as you say.”
She stared at his broad back as he stood at the window. “I . . . choked on a chicken bone once, when I was a little kid.”
Gluen’s broad smile was a dim reflection in the floor to ceiling windows. “Ahh . . . go on.”
Calliope frowned. “There isn’t much more to say. I was sitting at the table with my family—we all had a specific seat where we’d sit—my dad was on the right of me where he could see into the living room and to the TV. Mom was on the left where she could get to the stove and the refrigerator, and my sister was across from me. I sat against the wall of the kitchen and I could look out of the kitchen window into the branches of the cottonwood tree outside of our house.” Calliope shifted her stance, but fought the urge to pace. “Dad farmed and Mom kept chickens, for meat. We raised cattle, but we ate chicken a hundred fifty times a year.”
“Why do you mention such a particular number?” Calliope couldn’t be sure, but it seemed that, in the window’s reflection, she caught the tiny pink point of Gluen’s tongue dragging across his lips as he spoke.
“That’s . . .” She blinked as her memory filled in the answer. “That’s how many chicks she got each year. A batch of broilers, she called them.”
She shook her head and continued. “Anyway, one weekend—it must have been a weekend because it was during the middle of the day but we were all there—one weekend I started choking on a bone or something. I didn’t know what was happening. My dad picked me up—lifted me right over the table and carried me to the sink that was right under the window I always looked out of, bent me over it, and pounded on my back until I coughed the bone out.”
“Were you frightened?” Gluen turned back toward her, but his eyes were glistening and far away. “Frightened you might die?”
Calliope shook her head. “It was over too fast to really get scared. I was more scared by my dad pounding on my back. Mostly”—she frowned—“mostly I just remembered that while I was choking, I’d been the center of attention. Everyone was paying attention to me and nothing else. That didn’t happen very often.”
There was silence in the room for a moment.
“What happened after that?” Gluen seemed on the cusp of some sort of revelation; his face was turned toward the ceiling rather than Calliope, his eyes half closed, his mouth partly open.
Calliope narrowed her eyes at the fat man and looked away. “For the next few weeks I pretended to choke on bones every time we ate chicken.”
“Why?”
Calliope’s face was a mask. “I wanted them to pay attention to me like that again.”
Gluen’s eyes closed fully, and his mouth opened farther in something like a perverse rapture. “Thank you, my dear. Thank you very much.”
The look on Gluen’s face made Calliope feel as though she had shared a much more familiar intimacy with him. Confusion and resentment flared in her chest, along with something close to self-disgust. She had no idea why she had told that story—she hadn’t thought about it or anything about her old life for years. Some compulsion had almost seemed to draw it out of her.
“Consumption,” Gluen said, his breath a bare rasp of pleasure. “Not just of food, certainly, for you have built a culture of consumption, gluttony.” His eyes slowly focused and shifted to Calliope. “We all crave more than what we currently have, do we not, my dear? Force another bite down, angle for more time with a loved one, squeeze yourself into the spotlight just one more time: that is the nature of . . . things.” He blinked sleepily, in an almost postcoital languor. Again, his sharp pink tongue, far too dexterous for the rest of his body, flitted over his lips.
Calliope shuddered, but concealed it within the folds of the oversized wool suit; she had no desire to let Gluen realize how deeply disturbing she found the turn in the conversation. “Really glad you’re getting your rocks off, but you told me I’d get information; the only thing I’ve found out so far is that you’re a creepy fuck.”
Gluen blinked away the last of his glassy-eyed stare and turned away from Calliope. “She is a crude young woman,” he said to Vikous.
Vikous chewed slowly on the end of his cigar, shaking flakes of ash onto the lush carpet. “Pay some attention to who you’re complaining to if you want any sympathy, fat man.”
Gluen scowled for a moment, his face an obese parody of a cherub. “Indeed.” He turned and moved toward his desk. “Indeed.” With great care, he maneuvered himself into his chair.
“Tomorrow,” he said. He raised his arm and motioned to an attendant, flesh swaying on his arm like a damp towel. The man approached with a tray covered with appetizers and candy—both in a number of unlikely colors.
“What?” Calliope looked at Gluen, then the slim attendant, then turned back to the fat man. “What the hell?”
“You already took payment, Gluen,” Vikous murmured, taking a half step forward. His hands were buried in his pockets, but the smoldering cigar jutted at an unfriendly angle.
“Technically, I took payment several weeks ago, my dear Vikous.” Gluen’s pig-eyes flickered to Calliope, the motion mirrored by the darting pink tip of his tongue. “This little exchange was a . . .” He paused, a smirk pushing at the mass of his cheeks like fingers in wet dough. “A trick or treat.”
“What the fuck—” Calliope began, her face growing hot, flushed with anger and something very much like shame.
“No business transactions,” Gluen interrupted, “on this night.” He clicked his tongue, his voice full of regret and admonishment. “You know that as well as anyone, Vikous; I’m surprised you bothered bringing the poor girl all this way. Wasted her time.”
“Why—”
“Tomorrow,” Gluen cut in again, his eyes back on Calliope, hard and black. “Night.”
Silence dropped over the empty spaces of the room like loose stones.
“C’mon, Calli.” Vikous turned to the door. “Fat man’s got candy to eat.” He stopped, angling his head back toward Calliope, who had not moved. He opened his mouth to say something, but before he could, she turned and left the room, hitting the doors with enough force to rattle the glass. Vikous watched her go, taking his time following.
“She’s unpleasant, Vikous.” Gluen spoke around a mouthful of sweets, sucking stickiness from his fingers and examining the tray held before him. “You should rein her in.”
Vikous paused, as though he might say something in reply, then kept walking. Only the guard by the door noticed that his mouth was stretched in a smile, and on the whole, he wished he hadn’t.
INTERLUDE
Whispers echoed through dusty rooms, making outrageous claims or revealing hurtful secrets. It was difficult to tell the one from the other.
The thing stood on the threshold of what had once been a family room.
“They said you managed to contact the girl again.”
“Is that what they said?” Joshua White stood (after a fashion) at the front window, watching sleeting rain slide down the dirty glass. He did not
turn to face the thing speaking.
“Yeah.”
“Well”—Joshua leaned forward until his hand seemed to rest on the wall—“I suppose they’re right. They seem to know about things like that.”
“They do.” The thing shifted in the doorway, for all the world like a child afraid to approach an angry parent. “They also say you sent a message to Gluen.” One bright eye glimmered in the gloom. “How did you do that?”
Joshua almost turned. His head moved a few inches toward his shoulder and the thing standing in the doorway. “They don’t just talk to you.” His eyes flickered. “Not anymore.”
The thing blinked. “I’m . . . sorry about that. That’s not why I—”
“She didn’t like Vikous, did she?” There was a hint of a smile in Joshua’s voice. His eyes were distant and far away.
Again, the thing blinked. “No.” It straightened, its arm scraping like a rasp on the door frame. “No, she didn’t.”
“I didn’t figure she would.” This time, it was clear Joshua was smiling, and the room was silent for so long that he thought the thing had gone. “That’ll change.”
“Do you want to—”
“No.” Joshua’s smile faded. His voice, if it could be called that anymore, went flat. “I don’t.”
The thing didn’t seem to know how to reply. Silence filled up the room like cold water. “This isn’t—I thought this would be different,” it finally said.
“I wouldn’t know about that.”
It took a short step into the room. “That’s not true! You—” It stopped short, panting through an almost-normal mouth. “It doesn’t matter how it starts with her, you know; it always starts different, but it always ends the same.”
“Does it?” Joshua had turned back to his original position, but during the conversation, the rain had stopped, while the whispering in the corners had gotten stronger.
Hidden Things Page 5