Vikous stood on nothing, cradling Calliope in his arms. His breath came in gasps and sweat poured down his face.
“What—” Calliope began.
“Sshhhhuddup.” Vikous’s jaw worked. “Causentray.”
He was wiped out just opening the motel door last time. Calliope glanced around the smeared bruise color of the nothing that surrounded them. How can he do this? She tried very hard not to think of the obvious answer.
Vikous trembled, vibrating with the effort to do nothing but hold still. After a timeless moment, his right foot moved, dragging across the nonspace as though pulling a weight. Calliope’s chest was burning before she realized she was holding her breath; her gasp was a ragged sound in the silence that matched Vikous’s own. His eyes were lifeless, like a doll’s, in a way she had never seen.
Planting his foot, he began to turn, his body still trembling.
“C’mon,” Calliope whispered, clutching at the front of his coat with her left hand. Her one useful arm was trapped between her body and Vikous’s heaving chest. “You can do it,” she said, unsure what she was urging him toward.
Vikous halted. Again, there was a pause measured in years, and then he moved his foot.
Racing ahead of conscious thought, Calliope’s urging melted into a wordless singsong; from there, the sounds slid into a simple tune, nursery rhyme words she had known since she was a child, nonsense that she didn’t even hear—the point was the urging, the sound, the direction—Calliope sang her strength into Vikous, willing him forward.
Vikous continued moving. To Calliope, nonsense words still trailing off her lips like water, it seemed they had turned about halfway around when Vikous raised the hand under the crook of her knees, extending the key out and in front of them.
Calliope’s eyes locked onto the key; her words, meaningless and tumbling, pushed at the hand and key until they seemed to meet Something within the Nothing. She blinked, and saw a door.
She turned to Vikous and saw a strange motel room over his shoulder.
“Go’t,” he said. For a moment, Calliope thought he would drop her out of exhaustion and tensed in anticipation but, still moving with a trembling, glacial strength, he sank to his knees and set her on the old, worn carpet in front of the door as she whisper-sang to him.
His eyes, glistening, met hers. He nodded and a small smile moved his lips as Calliope pushed herself into a sitting position.
Then he dropped backward like a dead thing, utterly still.
Son of a bitch. No no no not again. Calliope pushed herself onto her knees and shuffled over the carpet. “Don’t you die on me, dammit.” She lurched alongside him. “I’m not doing mouth to mouth and I don’t know where your heart is or if you’ve got one or two or three or . . .” She held her hand over his open mouth, angry that she was trembling and unable to stop it. “C’mon now . . . I don’t know where we are . . . I don’t know where we’re going . . . please don’t die . . .” She rocked on her knees as she held her hand over him, tears shining on her face. “Please please please please please oh you son of a bitch please do something, please . . .”
His chest moved. Breath puffed, weak and warm, against her hand.
Air burst from Calliope in a sob that turned into a disbelieving, choked laugh.
Another breath. Another. Calliope held her hand in place.
“That’s right,” she whispered, “you . . . you just k-keep doing that.” She drew a shuddering breath, her lips trembling. “I’ll wait.”
In the darkness of an empty motel room, Calliope Jenkins sat on her knees next to the clown-faced man lying on the floor, singing lullabies she hadn’t known she remembered, holding her hand over his face to feel him breathe.
STAGE FOUR
14
“Josh?”
“Yeah?”
“What’re we gonna do?” The younger boy turns and looks up at the older boy sitting beside him on the fence.
Josh scowls. “I dunno.”
“But—”
“I don’t know, Mikey. Jeez!” Joshua boosts himself off the fence and turns to walk along it. The younger boy hurries to catch up.
“Are they gonna split us up?”
Joshua makes a face. “What? No.” He tries putting a hand on the boy’s shoulder, but he’s awkward and unfamiliar with providing comfort, and turns the gesture into a shove instead. “They’ll send us to live with Aunt Patricia or something. That’s all.”
Mikey scowls at the shove, but falls into step without retaliating. “She’s old.”
Joshua looks sideways at the younger boy. “We’ll be okay.”
“Sure.”
“We will,” Joshua repeats, trying to make it sound sure. “They aren’t going to split us up, okay? It’ll be okay, and if it isn’t, I’ll make it okay. I promise.”
Mikey sighs. “Okay.”
Josh looks at his little brother as they walk, then punches the boy on the shoulder. “I promise.”
“Ow!” Mikey glares up at Joshua. “Why’d you hit me for?”
The older boy grins. “So you’d remember.” He raises his fist again.
“Don’t!”
“You gonna remember?”
“Yes! Jeez!”
“Remember what?”
“You’ll make it okay.” The younger boy’s voice is low. “You promise.”
“I promise.” Josh loops his arm around his brother’s head, giving him a quick noogie, but he leaves his arm around Mikey’s shoulders. His eyes shift, belying his words, but his voice is steady. Reassuring. “I promise.”
Vikous woke up on the floor seventeen hours later. Unable to move at first—his arms and legs felt so heavy—he concentrated on getting his surroundings to come into focus, blinking repeatedly.
“Hi.” Calliope’s voice came from somewhere toward his feet and to the right.
He managed to lift his head for a moment, squinting. She was all right. Good. He let his head fall back, not caring if it hit the floor and surprised when it didn’t. “Looks like I’ve got a pillow,” he commented.
Calliope pushed herself out of the chair near the curtained window. “Least I could do, since there was no way I was getting your ass onto the bed.”
Vikous chuckled. “No doubt, but how did—” He frowned, then his face cleared. “Oh yeah.”
“Oh yeah.” Calliope moved to stand next to him and looked down. “That was really stupid, by the way.”
Vikous grimaced, abashed. “Yeah. Kinda think it was.” Calliope walked back to the chair. She sat down facing a small break in the curtains. “What’s the good news?” He propped himself up on his elbows, trying to make it look like a less exhausting effort than it was.
Calliope kept her eyes on the break in the curtain. “We’re in a motel and I’ve paid for the room.”
Vikous’s eyes narrowed at her expression, which was the kind of calm she tried to project when she was especially upset and didn’t want anyone to know. “What’s the bad news?” he said.
Calliope’s eyes never strayed from the window. “I think I know where we are.”
After a brief silence, Vikous said, “If you say ‘somewhere back in California,’ I swear I’m gonna start crying right here on the floor.”
Calliope’s smile was faint. “We’re not back in California. Nothing that interesting.” She turned away from the window. “It’s Portsmouth.”
Vikous’s eyebrows furrowed in disbelief. “I don’t think we’re on the East Coast, either.”
Calliope shook her head. “Portsmouth, Iowa, a few miles north of Persia and a few miles south of Panama.” She tugged at the curtains, leaving them parted only an inch. “Lots of places with names from somewhere else, filled with lots of people who wish they were.”
“Sounds like it’s awfully familiar.”
“I spent some time here on the way out to California the first time.” Calliope’s eyes wandered around the room. “This is where I decided to keep going, to really leave.” She slouched
, leaning back in her chair, looking at nothing with the tip of her pinky caught between her teeth.
Vikous took his time choosing his words, sensing the tension clinging to her. “Doesn’t sound like that bad a place, then.”
Calliope’s jaw clenched. “I also decided that I’d never be caught dead sitting in a motel room like this one again, trying to figure out what was going on in my life.” She shook her head. “And here I am. Ten years later and I’m right back where I started.”
Vikous sat up, moving with a certain care. “It’s not the same thing.”
“It doesn’t feel that different.” Her face twisted. “Except for the teleporting across two states and sharing a room with a demon clown.”
Vikous smirked. “So what’s the same?”
“The feel.” Calliope huddled closer into her coat. “The people I see outside.”
Vikous frowned. “You recognized someone?”
“I recognized their expressions.” Calliope looked over at Vikous, her eyes narrowing. She sat up in her chair and leaned forward toward him, her arms still tight around her. “You know how they say that owners start to look like their pets if they live around them long enough?”
“Sure.”
Calliope’s eyes locked on Vikous as though she were imparting a great secret. “These people raise cattle; they raise sheep. Those are their pets, and they have them for their whole lives.” She dropped backward into the chair, but her eyes stayed on Vikous. “Those are the faces I remember: cattle and sheep. I’ve been watching them walk up and down the street all day.”
“There weren’t any human sheep walking around on the streets where you’ve been living?”
Calliope scowled. Vikous didn’t press the point. Reaching over to the foot of the bed, he turned sideways and pushed himself to his feet.
Calliope was standing over him. Rough, threadbare carpet pressed into his cheek where he lay on his side, staring at the floor under the bed. “What the hell just happened?” she said. Her voice was hard and held more than a hint of something he’d never heard from her before. Turning his face slightly, he could see that her own face was almost as white as his; she held her right arm close to her side, tense with pain.
“Ahhm,” Vikous managed. His tongue felt thick in his mouth. “I’d say I blacked out a little bit. Still tired, I guess.”
“Tired,” Calliope replied. Her voice had lost its unidentified quality and exchanged it for something much more readily identifiable. “You nearly killed yourself with that trick yesterday. You stopped breathing when we got here.”
Vikous lay there for a moment, letting the sound of her voice sink in. “Wouldn’t be the first time, I guess.”
Calliope’s face grew taut. “I just got you brought back two”—she frowned, shook her head as though to clear it, wincing at the pain the movement obviously caused her—“four days ago . . . or something. You don’t get to throw yourself away for the hell of it.”
“Wasn’t—” Vikous cut himself off, lowering his voice. He had no desire to start a fight, and he suspected Calliope didn’t either. “It wasn’t a whim.” He pushed himself off the carpet for a second try. “Needed doing.”
“Whatever.” She sounded tired, exhausted actually, her words almost slurring; it seemed unlikely she’d slept since they’d gotten here. “What was so damn . . . why was it so hard?” she said.
“It’s not, usually.” He pushed himself to his knees and lay his head against the foot of the bed for a moment. “If you just want to hop in the door and come out wherever, it’s like going down a slide.”
“And?”
Vikous pulled himself up to the edge of the bed and collapsed backward, taking long, hard breaths. “You . . . you remember when you would try to walk up the playground slides at recess instead of going down them?”
Calliope’s eyes widened and she turned toward him. “How do you know I did that?”
Vikous frowned, lifting his head a bare inch to look at her. “I didn’t. Didn’t mean you specifically, just that some kids do that and it definitely seems like you.” He looked up at her again, puzzled by her expression. “What?”
“Nothing.” She turned away. “What about the slides?”
“Going down is easy.” He tried to slow his breathing. “Going up them—or standing still in the middle of the slope—that’s a lot harder than just riding them down. That’s what I was trying to do, to get us somewhere close to where we were going.” He closed his eyes and wiped at his face with a gloved hand. “Now imagine doing that and carrying someone.”
Calliope’s shoulders hunched unconsciously, making her wince. “You didn’t have to carry me.”
“I did if I wanted you to come out at the same place.”
Calliope’s eyes widened for a second. “Oh.” Vikous said nothing. The effort to get most of his body onto the bed had left him shaking and sweating. Calliope looked down at him, made an amused sound in her throat, and sat down beside him without bouncing the bed. “We’re a pretty sorry pair right now.”
“And no car,” he murmured, an arm across his closed eyes.
“And no car, yes, thank you.” She stared at the blank screen of the television standing on the bureau across from the bed. “Any ideas what we’re going to do?”
“Order pizza,” Vikous replied, his words distorted by a yawn. “Sleep. Then I’ve got a plan.”
“A plan.”
Vikous didn’t look up, but he could imagine her expression. “You gotta remember to—”
“Trust the guide, yeah.” She shifted on the edge of the bed. “I’ve heard that before, but I’d like to know what’s going on for once.”
Vikous waved his hand through the air above him, turning his head just enough to see her. “We’re in the Hidden Lands. Close to them, anyway. Anything’s possible.”
At his words, Calliope forced herself to turn despite the pain in her shoulder. Her eyes were flat and hard as she looked back and down at Vikous. “I used to live in these so-called magical lands and, in case you’re wondering, this is my skeptical face.”
“Duly noted. Who’s ordering the pizza?” Vikous studied Calliope’s unresponsive features. “Hello?”
“I’ll get it.” She turned and pushed off the bed with a hiss of annoyance and pain. “Watching you move right now is pathetic.”
“You have a lovely bedside manner. It’s a real gift; you should know that.”
She paused next to the side of the bed nearest the nightstand that held the phone. “I’m just going to remind you, just once, that I was shot. Yesterday. Next time I’m going to use my one good arm to drop a fucking lamp on your head.”
“Fair enough.” Vikous rolled himself laboriously onto his back. Silence filled up the room, broken only by the faint sounds of intermittent traffic outside. He licked his dry lips. “Are you going to—”
“Don’t.” Calliope picked up the phone with her left hand and tucked it against the crook of her neck as well as she could. “Don’t say it.” She wasn’t looking at him, but Vikous nodded anyway.
They were already asleep when the pizza delivery driver knocked. Calliope paid with cash. They ate, and were both asleep again twenty minutes later.
INTERLUDE
“Baby?”
“Calli? Honey?”
“Mmm . . .”
“You sleepin’?”
“Mmmmm . . .”
“ ’Kay, I’ll leave you alone.”
“Heeeeey . . . aahh. Wh-what’re you doin’?”
“Nothin’.”
“Tha— mmm . . . that doesn’t feel like nothing.”
“Glad to hear it.”
“I . . . I was sleepinngg.”
“Couldn’t be.”
“I was.”
“I’m a perfect gentleman, I would never disturb you when you’re sleeping.”
“Hmm . . .”
“Am I disturbing you?”
“Just . . .”
“Hmm?”
�
�Just shut up and keep doing that.”
“This?”
“No.”
“Oh. Okay. This?”
“You’re smiling.”
“You can’t possibly know that. The lights are off.”
“I can hear it when you’re smiling. I always can.”
“Huh. Neat trick. This?”
“Calli?”
“Y-yeah . . . yeah, do that.”
“You sure?”
“Bastard.”
“Now you’re smiling. And what a mouth on you.”
“I learned it all from y— tha-that’s new.”
“I’ve been reading in my spare time.”
“It’s . . . ’s a good book. C’mere.”
“Calli?”
“Mmm . . . yeah.”
“We need to get going.”
“Calli?”
“Yeah. I know. I’d just rather stay here.”
“It’ll be good to see everyone. I’m looking forward to meeting your folks.”
“I’m not.”
“You don’t want me to meet them?”
“No, you go and meet them. I’ll just stay here.”
“Heh. Funny girl. We really should get going though. We’re gonna be late.”
“Mmm. I’m tired. Someone woke me in the middle of the night.”
“Hotel pixies. Deadly little guys.”
“Mmm . . . c’mere.”
“Sure, what’s up?”
“I think the pixies are back.”
“Hey now, we need to—”
“You said something?”
“Didn’t say a thing.”
“That’s what I thought. You like the pixies?”
“They . . . must have been reading that book of mine.”
“I don’t need a damn book.”
15
WHEN CALLIOPE WOKE up, the hotel room looked wrong. Shabby. Smelled wrong. Also, her shoulder ached and she couldn’t remember when—
Hidden Things Page 18