Hidden Things

by Doyce Testerman

  “The Midwest.” Calliope’s voice went from flat to scornful. “The last magical thing that happened there was about ten years ago, the summer of my sixteenth birthday, when I left, and it wasn’t good magical. You’re saying I managed to miss some secret kingdom?”

  “You didn’t miss anything.” Vikous paused. “Well, okay, a few things, yes, but not the parts I’m talking about. The Hidden Lands aren’t there to be seen in the first place.” His voice sounded as though he were repeating something memorized. “Somewhere between the back of your mind and the corner of your eye, just beyond the edge of hearing—that’s where the hidden things have gathered for years, finding their way there when the world got too hard for them, or too small, or too lonely.” He looked at her. “That’s the business that White got pulled into.”

  “What? Why?”

  His black eyes gave no hint of his thoughts. “It would have been his choice. That’s pretty much all I know.” He hesitated, then, softly: “What did he tell you?”

  Calliope didn’t answer immediately, though she’d heard him clearly enough. “He said he was trying to save someone.” Her voice was shaky. “And that they’d killed him. But he didn’t say why.”

  Vikous shook his head. “I don’t—” He glanced out the side window again and frowned. “How long did you plan to drive tonight?”

  Calliope shrugged. “I can go for a while. We got started late and I wanted to get some distance before we stopped.” She glanced at him. “Why?”

  Vikous settled back and adjusted his seat to give himself more room. “Someone’s following us.”

  Calliope swore and checked her rearview. “Which one?”

  Vikous wriggled his shoulders, trying to get comfortable. “I don’t know by the lights—I can feel it.” He glanced across at Calliope. “ ‘Unfriendly regard’, remember?” He settled his head back. “We’ll have to do something about them when we stop.” He pulled his hood up and slightly over his eyes. “Don’t worry about it now; they aren’t going to try anything out here.”

  “What do we do when we stop?”

  “We’ll see.” He shifted in the seat. “Wake me up when you get close to where you want to stop. I need to rest up.”

  After that, there was only silence.

  9

  THE RADIO WAS playing “Dead Man’s Party” when Vikous lifted his head. It was hours past full dark, and the highway wound slowly into the foothills of the mountains.

  “How we doin’?” he asked, his voice still muffled by sleep.

  “Fine,” Calliope replied. Vikous glanced up at her curt reply but said nothing and slowly readjusted his seat, rubbing at his eyes with a gloved hand.

  “Are they still back there?” she asked.

  He blinked at her, glanced over his shoulder, then settled back in his seat, inhaling through his nose with a loud and ungraceful snort while flop-shaking his head from side to side. Calliope looked at him askance. “Sorry,” he muttered. “I don’t wake up very fast.” She remained silent, and he turned his attention to the side window through which only darkness and the occasional house light could be seen. His head tilted slightly to the left as he stared out the window, as though listening.

  Finally, he relaxed back into the seat. “Yep, still there.” He almost sounded satisfied. “Closer than they were before, actually.”

  “Great,” Calliope said, her voice flat.

  He looked at her, underlit by the dashboard lights. “What’s the matter?”

  Her expulsion of breath was equal parts astonishment and anger. “Oh nothing: ‘We’re being followed, Calliope, drive for a while so I can catch up on my no-one-could-call-it-beauty sleep.’ The hell have I got to be bothered by?” She glared at the dark road ahead of her.

  Vikous said nothing immediately, then: “What would you like me to tell you?”

  Calliope’s eyes widened. “What . . .” She made a visible effort to keep her hands firmly on the wheel. “All right, how about telling me who’s back there and what they want.”

  Vikous watched her, his expression bemused. “I’m not sure.”

  “I’m . . .” Even in the pale green light of the dashboard, Calliope’s face seemed to grow darker. “I’m really getting tired of that answer.”

  “Sorry, but that’s how it is.” He turned back to watching the oncoming road. “They could be waiting to grab us or kill us the next time we stop or they could just be watching us. It really doesn’t matter.”

  “How could that not matter?”

  “Where we’re going, we don’t want to be grabbed, killed, or watched. Any of those options and probably a half-dozen more are equally bad.”

  “And the obvious answer to this looming threat is a quick nap?” She made half of a raised-hand gesture from her grip on the wheel. “You’ve convinced me. Truly, your ways are mysterious.”

  He adjusted his position. “I was getting ready for what’s coming up. I don’t have any pepper spray, so—”

  “It’s in the back.”

  Vikous paused. “You packed it?”

  “I didn’t think I’d need it right away. Can we get to it? Will it help?”

  “Probably.” Vikous considered it for a second. “Probably it would help, I mean.” He shook his head. “We can’t get to it by the time we’d need it. It takes time.”

  Calliope’s jaw was tight. “So that would be a drawback to your magical car-packing ability, then.”

  “Looks like. Don’t worry, we’ll be fine.”

  She favored Vikous with a dark look.

  Vikous raised a hand in a warding gesture at her sour expression. “We can get this over quick; go ahead and pull over at the next motel sign you see.” He fished in his pockets. “The older and more beat-up, the better.”

  It was six more miles before the Jeep pulled into the gravel parking lot of a roadside motel—a long, narrow brick building that looked like nothing so much as a stretched shoebox with a too-large lid for a roof, facing a loose-gravel parking lot that looked like it could swallow cars whole. Although it had been built over a half century ago, Calliope didn’t honestly think the place had seen better days; she guessed it had been an ugly and unwelcoming last choice of travelers since the day it had opened. It was a nothing sort of place—the kind that grew up like fungus in out-of-the-way corners—and she’d seen thousands like it.

  “Perfect,” Vikous said. “Pull up in front of twenty-three.”

  Far beyond any sort of calm or rational comment, Calliope complied, shutting off the engine and killing the headlights as they rolled to a stop. Vikous immediately got out, swinging his ridiculous shoes to the ground as though he had not spent over four hours in a cramped vehicle. Calliope followed.

  Vikous was already close to the door labeled 23. Something glinted in his hand under the illumination of the lot’s single light. The metal-on-metal jingle helped Calliope identify it as a key.

  “Where did you—” she began, but stopped as he reached for the doorknob and a light came on behind the thinly curtained windows of that very room. Vikous didn’t seem to notice, and she hurried up alongside him. “Someone’s inside,” she whispered, but Vikous only glanced at her, his mouth set in a grim smile.

  “I suppose there might be,” he said, his voice low and taut. She could see sweat beading on his paste-white forehead as he wrestled the key back and forth in the lock. After a few moments, he let out a deeply held breath, gave a final turn, and withdrew the key. The old, diamond-shaped plastic tag hanging from it did not match the darkened sign near the road.

  “No luck?”

  “We’ll see.” He headed down along the concrete slab that fronted the motel, moving away from the light of the lobby. “C’mon,” he called without looking back. The light in room 23 remained on.

  Vikous stepped around the corner at the end of the building and stopped, glancing back toward the Jeep and the highway as Calliope walked past him, the truncated black shaft of an unopened police baton in her hand. Vikous spared it a
bare glance, then turned back as a nondescript car pulled into the lot, heading for the Jeep.

  “They’re going to know we’re around here. The Jeep’s right there and we’re not in that room,” Calliope said.

  “Good thing, too,” Vikous replied, his voice slow and almost amused. “Because here they come.”

  The car pulled up. Four doors opened. Four large figures got out. Three of them slid things into the night air that gleamed and looked long and sharp in the bare lighting.

  “Definitely not here to watch,” Vikous whispered.

  They descended on the door quickly and efficiently. One of them—the one not holding a sword—stepped to the center. Calliope could barely make out a few strident spoken tones from the group. Vikous smiled.

  “Oh, very good,” he whispered. “You’re very good, aren’t you?” His eyes were looking down and away from the figures, all his attention on listening. “Here we go . . .”

  With the last spoken syllable, the door opened, spilling cheap golden light onto the walk and the front of Calliope’s Jeep. The four moved inside so quickly that they barely seemed to cast shadows. The lot echoed with the slam of the motel room door.

  The light in the window went out.

  Calliope waited, noticing that Vikous’s smile was back and spreading too far to look normal.

  She squinted at the room, but couldn’t make out anything. No lights. No sounds. The door remained shut. Vikous looked back at Calliope, the sweat on his face and his smile making him look like an exhausted but satiated demon clown, which she thought might be a fairly accurate summation of what he actually was.

  “Good motel you picked,” he said, his voice pitched at a normal volume. “Real shame we can’t stay.” He headed back to the Jeep, only glancing at the door to 23 once, a strange smirk on his face.

  “You’re going to explain what just happened,” Calliope said from behind him as she walked.

  “You kidding?” he said, almost to himself. “I’m going to be talking about this for years.”

  “Reality is like carpet,” Vikous said as they pulled out of the parking lot. They’d checked over the other car for anything that might have indicated their followers’ identity and Calliope, who had worked at just that sort of activity for several years, had found nothing that gave her any clues. The vehicle was a nondescript rental with no paperwork inside, not even proof of insurance, which meant that its absence was probably deliberate. If Vikous had noticed anything, he wasn’t sharing.

  “In some places,” he continued, “special places, it stays nice and fresh and solid, practically like new for all intents and purposes—sometimes even normal people recognize a spot like that—maybe make a holy place out of it.” His expression was unreadable. “In other places it wears down. Even then, the . . . carpet usually remakes itself; it builds its own inherent strength back up from the energy of the same living that’s wearing it down—it’s not new anymore, not like those really good places, but there’s nothing wrong with it. Most places are like that.” He gestured out the window and back, vaguely in the direction of the already-invisible motel. “Then you’ve got the opposite effect.” He jingled the old motel key. “Places where there’s no . . . soul, I guess . . . behind the living that goes on in a place. The carpet wears down to paper thin.”

  “That’s very feng shui,” Calliope interrupted. “Where did the bad guys go?”

  Vikous shrugged. “I don’t—” he began, but cut himself off at a warning look from Calliope. “Ahh, see, a magician’s not supposed to give away his secrets, but basically what I did was shred what was left of the carpet.”

  Calliope frowned. “So they just . . . what? Fell through?”

  Vikous shook his head. “I had to have it all go somewhere; just ripping open a hole would have been . . . bad.”

  Calliope cast him a glance. “Bad?”

  “The stuff under the carpet isn’t exactly friendly.”

  “Cute. So where’d they go?”

  “It’s a very inexact thing. They went somewhere like the place they’d just left—a motel like that, probably, but somewhere else—maybe not even realizing they were in the wrong place right away, except they probably did not all end up in the same place.” He smirked. “Seriously, and don’t hit me, I don’t know.”

  Calliope nodded, feeling oddly calm. “So they could be ahead of us.”

  Vikous waved his hand in a broad gesture. “They could be lots of places, so yeah, they might be ahead of us, but if they aren’t following us, we don’t have to worry about them.”

  “At least for a while,” Calliope said. “We couldn’t have just broken their kneecaps and left them behind?”

  Vikous glanced at her, his expression tired. “We’ll have plenty of chances to fight. Usually we won’t have a choice one way or the other, so I like to take advantage of it when we do. Besides”—he shifted in his seat—“at least one of them was real good. It’s better that we didn’t have to deal with them.” He looked out the front window at the oncoming lights of a small exit-ramp town and pulled up his hood. “You hungry? I’m starving.”

  STAGE THREE

  10

  THE WAITRESS TOOK their orders; the expression on her face said she didn’t understand why Calliope was having a midnight meal with a homeless guy, but also that she didn’t really care. From beneath his hood, Vikous glanced around the diner. “This place would have worked too,” he commented, “if I’d had the right kind of key.”

  Calliope nodded, although she wasn’t quite sure she understood. “That sort of thing—magic—that’s . . . normal?”

  “Nothing’s normal with what we’re doing,” Vikous replied, his voice back to something like a lecture tone. “Some of it is more . . . common. Some”—he produced the motel key from somewhere—“isn’t.” He watched her for a second from the shadows of his hood, then pocketed the key. “It’s all knowing how the world goes together, what pieces fit where, then figuring how to rearrange them a little bit.” Without looking, he reached over and scooped up half of the individual jelly packs that sat in a bowl at the back of the booth and dumped them into a pocket. “Or a lot, like we did tonight, but that’s harder.” He glanced up. “I’m starving. Where’s the food?”

  Calliope looked around as well. “Actually,” she said, her voice suddenly very quiet, “where are all the people?”

  The waitress was gone, as were the two truckers at the front counter, the tall blond woman huddling in a ragged denim jacket in a booth near the entrance, and the tired couple with the sleeping baby that had been sitting two tables over. The kitchen was silent. Calliope turned back to the table, but Vikous was already standing.

  “Run.” He looked around the room, his expression equal parts hunter and hunted. For one electric moment, his haunted eyes reminded Calliope of a cheap black velvet clown painting that had hung in an even cheaper burger joint her family had visited when she was a kid.

  “Who—”

  “Run. Now.” Without looking, his hands found Calliope’s shoulders and he dropped his eyes to hers. “Someone else either has the right key for this place, or they don’t need one.” He nearly threw her, stumbling, toward the front door and the Jeep. “Run.”

  Eyes wide, Calliope ran. Behind her, she heard the fire exit at the rear of the building slam open and the wind come howling in. Over it, just barely over it, Calliope thought she could hear Vikous shouting something in a language she didn’t know. He sounded desperate, and the wind sounded very much like laughter.

  Someone was standing just outside the doors to the diner, rock-steady in the tearing wind she could both see and feel, unaffected by the sudden violent flashes of lightning that had sprung up out of nowhere outside. Calliope froze, simply unable to process the shift things had taken in so short a time. The landscape outside was barren, stark, and monochrome in the lightning illumination. Inside . . .

  She turned.

  Vikous stood where she had left him. His right hand, gloved, exten
ded away from him like a claw. His ridiculous feet were spread wide and staggered to brace against the wind that tore in from the back of the L-shaped diner, pulling at his coat and clothes like a madwoman. Every movable stick of furniture in the place was sliding across the floor toward the rear entrance, moving against the blasting wind and piling itself before the opening in heaps, like a warped replay of The Sorcerer’s Apprentice. Chairs stood in a haphazard pile atop one another, heaped over tables that had turned themselves on their sides.

  And still something was coming through, hurling the debris away.

  Calliope heard, in the rising pitch of the wind, the front door open behind her. She leapt back toward Vikous and pivoted. A tall man, wrapped in a long black coat that muffled him nearly to his eyeballs, took a few broad strides into the space and stopped. Slowly the door pulled itself shut behind him, and the volume of the wind dropped enough to hear the sound of crashing furniture.

  Enough to hear Vikous’s exhausted panting.

  A voice, thin and reedy, like a sickly child’s, came out of the crashing near the back door. “But when, Calliope, thy loud harp rang . . .”

  crash

  “in Epic grandeur rose the lofty strain . . .”

  crash

  “the clash of arms, the trumpet’s awful—”

  crash

  “mixed with the roar of—”

  Calliope lost the rest of the recitation in the ripping and tearing that rose up behind her. She turned, ignoring the large man, and saw an orgy of violence that cleared a passage through the heaps of synthetic and metal furniture.

  Amid the wreckage stood a dusty brown old man no more than four feet tall: hairless, dry, and desiccated, with great, watery brown eyes that had, with age, bulged in their sockets rather than sinking. His shoes, pants, shirt, and ragged coat were all a simple unadorned black and he gripped the twisted metal leg of a chair in a knotted hand that might otherwise have looked too weak to make a fist. The wind had died completely away.