The Umbral Wake

by Martin Kee

  “This is difficult enough as it is.”

  “I never thought your job was easy, sir.”

  Tom leveled his gaze at the man, knowing now what this was about. On some level he knew as soon as Vicky had walked out that door. It had just taken this long for it to completely settle in his mind. And yet, Tom was surprisingly okay with it. A crushing weight had just been lifted from his shoulders. He was free. No more secrets.

  “You are in violation of church law under at least half a dozen counts,” the mayor continued, his voice seething and low. “Amanda has been on the TalkTyper all day fighting with the press.”

  Perlandine took a labored breath and continued.

  “You’ve embarrassed this office, which by the way, was already in a tenuous position. You’ve also left me little choice in the matter. I’m going to give you one more chance to confess, Thomas. I am giving you this chance because I have always liked you, loved you even—you’ve been like a son to me these last few years.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “We have access to some very good legal council… but I have to hear you confess it first.”

  Tom kept his voice even. “I have nothing to confess.”

  Perlandine went deep red. “Say what you’ve done!”

  “Sir,” Tom said, keeping his voice even. “I’m afraid I don’t know what you are talking about, as much as I am sure you would deny me any questions I were to ask pertaining to your own bedroom. I do not see a trial here, and therefore I will not admit anything to you under oath.”

  Perlandine lowered his voice to a growl. “Say it.”

  “Say that I am in love? Say that I’ve found someone I want to spend the rest of my life with?”

  “Don’t feed me that bollocks about your fiancée. Does she even know of your deviance?” He threw his hands in the air. “Does she know the boy is underage?”

  A snap decision. Dona would be implicated if she knew.

  “No, she does not. She never did. I’ve kept it a secret.”

  “And just for how long did you think you could keep up this sort of behavior before people found out?”

  “I don’t care who finds out,” Tom said, finding his voice, ignoring the shock on Perlandine’s face. “I’m tired of living my life in the shadows, like some sort of deviant, unable to call myself a man because I choose to love who I wish. Is Julian my lover? Yes, he is. He is old enough to make his own decisions, and I am old enough to make mine. This isn’t about laws, and it isn’t about the reputation of this office. This is about one group of people telling another group of people how to live. And I can no longer abide by that, sir.”

  “How long were you planning on waiting to tell me?” Perlandine said, his voice low.

  “How long were you planning to wait before telling me about your sexual encounters?” Tom replied.

  “That’s none of you business,” the mayor said, almost hearing the words. “None of your damned business at all. But my actions are not illegal.”

  “But your election was.”

  The words had the effect of a gunshot, stopping the mayor like some great beast. Shadows seemed to become darker in that office somehow, the light turning the color of blood as Perlandine leaned in. “What did you say?”

  “I said, I know all about the election results. And I will use those to protect myself if you try to force any sort of implication out of me.”

  “How dare you tell me this!”

  “I’ll tell you, and I’ll tell the press.” Tom couldn’t believe the words were coming from his mouth, but there they were. I guess we all use what we can to survive.

  The mayor’s eyes became two huge globes. “Don’t you even think of telling the press! Tom, that would set the archbishop up for a coup! He’s already threatened to censure the executive government, because of the accusations on your part. It will be the end of this office. Do you understand?”

  “I do,” said Tom. “But I’m through making excuses for being who I am. If it’s a resignation you’re asking for…”

  It felt good, very good. Tom felt five pounds lighter just getting that off his chest. He wasn’t sure, but he thought he might have even smiled a little when he said it.

  “Tom…” A vein stuck out on the Mayor’s forehead. “This is not something a resignation will fix. This isn’t even something lawyers can fix.”

  You’ll be arrested, came the sobering voice. You’ll never see Jules again.

  He backed away from the mayor, that first tinge of fear taking root in his mind.

  Have to get out of here, he thought.

  “Now, if you’ll excuse me,” Tom said, backing towards the wall of golden guns, staring at the red-faced mayor as he reached up to take a trophy revolver. It might have been loaded. He didn’t know. Maybe the mayor didn’t know either. “I’ll be taking my leave.”

  He aimed the gun at the mayor, locking gazes with his bloodshot eyes. They were wide with what Tom could only imagine was surprise, that mustache a billboard across a scarlet landscape. Tom cocked the gun.

  “Tell Amanda that I turned myself in, Emanuel. Tell her I went north to Arist. I’ll be your scapegoat if you wish, but I will not turn myself in.”

  The mayor only stared.

  “I could leave through the fire escape,” Tom continued. He waited for a reply, a reaction, anything. “Sir? I said I’ll take my leave now.”

  A sound like water seeping up through a pipe emerged from the mayor’s throat as the he twitched, blinked, and sputtered. A small dab of foam began to leak from the corner of Perlandine’s mouth, white as milk. A deep purple cobweb appeared on the mayor’s left temple. The blemish grew, spreading along the skin. One pupil dilated wide, the other growing small.

  “Mr. Mayor,” Tom said, dropping the gun and stepping around the desk as Perlandine’s right arm went limp. “Emanuel!”

  With a colossal thud, the mayor collapsed along the desk, his left eye no longer simply bloodshot, but red, filling with blood, a massive stroke slowly consuming his brain.

  “Mayor!”

  Tom smelled vomit and the sharp stench of urine rising up from the man as a muffled squeal escaped Perlandine’s wet, livery lips. Tom shook him, grabbing the man’s massive shoulders, trying to turn him over, but it was like lifting a boulder. His shoulders shrugged in punctuated spasms as Tom got him to his back.

  “Help!” Tom yelled. “I need help!”

  The mayor looked up at Tom, focused for only a moment, then stared beyond him, at the ceiling. Breathing became stuttered, then fell still like some great broken bellows, a long relieved sigh.

  Tom blinked, stepped backwards from the man, his brow coated in sweat. He had never seen a man die before. He lunged at the great man, shook the mayor by his collar, calling his name, begging him to simply not be dead. The begging turned to crying and at one point he thought he heard the sound of breaking glass.

  There was a scream. He thought it might have been Amanda. “Get off of him!”

  But all Tom could do was stand there, pulling on the mayor’s lapels, screaming into his face to please, please not be dead. Please, anything but dead, because those lawyers worked for Perlandine, because Tom worked for Perlandine, and without the mayor there, an interim leader would take the place.

  Oh, Tom was plenty familiar with the ever-changing tide of politics in Bollingbrook. The mayoral office, as coveted as it was for a time, was really nothing but a puppet office for the archbishop. With the mayor dead, staring up at the ceiling with a blood-filled eye, a new interim mayor would of course, have to step in.

  How convenient, he thought. How convenient that Vicky leaves and five minutes later the Mayor is dead. How very fantastic. His eyes drifted across the table to the liquor cabinet, at the empty glass, the oily film of alcohol still clinging to the crystal tumbler. Had it been poison? He supposed it was possible. But did it even matter now?

  Once he turned around he would explain everything to the screaming woman, to the men rushing
towards him to pull him off the inflated corpse of Mayor Perlandine. Yes, Tom would explain everything.

  Even as heavy armored hands dragged him away, Tom still found the strength in his mind to convince himself it would all work out just fine.

  Chapter 25

  Rhinewall

  EMIL ROLLED ON the ground, clutching his stomach as Jimbo held his bloody nose there beside him. Hetch loomed over them, cracking bruised knuckles.

  “Are you stupid, Emil?” Hetch said into his ear. “Are you a moron? Did I tell you to ditch the simp in a hole in the ground?”

  “We thought… we was… lost,” Emil spoke between gasps for air. “I tried… to open… it but… the door jammed.”

  Hetch leaned down and slapped him aside the head. “And you didn’t bother to look for him?” His hand came down on Emil’s ear. The boy let loose a howl as he cupped a hand over that side of his head.

  “I’m sorry!” Emil screamed.

  “You’re sorry?”

  “Yes!”

  “You don’t know what sorry is,” Hetch hissed. “Because I am about to kick you back down into that pit, shove you into the poison gas, and have you find him yourself. Do you want that? You want me to lock you down there until you find the little retard?”

  “No.” Emil stood with a hand over his ear. “He’s probably dead anyway—”

  A punch flattened his nose, knocked him to his ass again as the other boys took three more steps back. Emil cried out from the pain and before he could move, Hetch was on top of him delivering two more punches to his nose. Emil struggled unsuccessfully to block the blows.

  “You are such a fucking liar!” He stood and grabbed a towel from the arm of his throne, wiping his brow and hand, waiting for Emil to get back up. “Emil, I had some very big plans for the simp. And now you’ve pretty much botched them.” It scared Emil when Hetch spoke like this, dropping the slang and bravado, talking with adult words. It made their leader sound older, more serious, like his brain was somehow running circles around Emil’s.

  “Well, you didn’t tell me!” Emil yelled. It came out as Weh oo dinnt dehll meh.

  Hetch ignored him and wiped his face one last time before tossing the towel on the chair and taking a breath. “So the door is jammed?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And you tried to open it once you knew you’d lost him?” He narrowed his eyes at Emil, who nodded again.

  Hetch spat on the ground and walked over to his throne. He opened a dusty drawer from an old cabinet in the back and pulled out a long scrolled piece of torn paper, three feet on a side, stained and ripped. He laid it out on the dusty floor as the boys gathered around him—all except for Emil who watched from a distance.

  “This is the cemetery,” he said, pointing a finger at the map, tracing along a long hidden corridor that snaked beneath the city. “There used to be a garage or something down below there, but they’ve boarded it all off. See if you can find that entrance. There’s no more salvage so nobody uses it anymore.”

  Emil’s jaw fell open. “That’s nothing but a cliff now! You can’t even walk inside without falling a hundred feet.”

  “It ain’t a hundred feet,” said Hetch. “It’s more like fifty or so. Take some rope. And take the masks in case you stumble into more gas pockets.”

  “This is stupid!” Emil spat on the ground. “All this for a stupid chimp. He can’t even talk and you want me and three of my best to go in there for him?

  Hetch looked up at Emil as if he had never heard him. “And Emil,” he said. “If you don’t bring him back, I’m going to personally assign his task to you. You won’t like it, trust me.”

  *

  Gil had a list.

  She hovered over Skyla’s shoulder, reading it with her, occasionally pointing out specific items for clarity. It was important that the parts be precise, otherwise this whole trip would be a waste of time. She held in one hand an old manual, salvaged from a confessional, its pages brittle and charred, most of them missing.

  “This thing here feeds power to the unit,” she said. “It has to be working or the shutter won’t work properly.”

  “How will I know?”

  “Just don’t bother with it if it looks burnt. It probably means it doesn’t work anymore. There should be a red and a green light. They might be off, but both of them have to at least look like they work.”

  Next to each item on the list was a crude diagram, copied from an old manual that Gil had salvaged months ago. The names of the items were almost more cryptic than the pictures themselves. The longer Skyla stared at it, the more she began to worry.

  “This is a cantilever cog,” Gil said, pointing at one item on the list. “It’s very small, but you will probably be able to find one on anything mechanical. It’s a pretty common part.”

  Skyla nodded, trying to keep up with the onslaught of information.

  “And this here—are you paying attention? This here is a shutter mechanism. I made the one in the camera from scratch, but I think if you found another pair of goggles like the ones you have, it might work.”

  “These are the only pair,” said Skyla.

  Gil chewed her lip. “Well, try to improvise. Maybe there’s something else that will capture light the same way. They had cameras, didn’t they?”

  “I don’t know… maybe? That was three years ago, Gil.”

  “Well, see what you can get. You’ve used the camera so just look for anything that seems like it would fit. I think I can figure it out.”

  “I’ll look for it,” Skyla said, hoping to just be done with the briefing. She was feeling anxious already. “This seems more complicated than the camera I broke.”

  “That’s because it is,” said Gil. “This next one will be able to take pictures that see more of… whatever it was that was on the wall.”

  “The Wilds…” Skyla said.

  “Right, that,” Gils said. “It will also be able to store the images for longer than the one I made.”

  “We’re using confessional components?”

  Gil nodded. “I think the way they did it was through some kind of resonance,” said Gil. She had a diagram next to her, propped up by a stack of books. It was lined with creases and stains, water damage and burn marks. “You said you remember a hum?”

  Skyla nodded. “Yeah… just before it did what it did.”

  “Right. I remember Mr. Henry saying the same thing. He told me that was what they heard in the confessionals too.” Gil was almost giddy with excitement.

  “But why vibrations?”

  Gil grabbed a book and opened it to a dog-eared page. “There’s an old theory,” she said. “It dates back centuries. They believed that everything was vibrations, even light.”

  “Light?” Skyla barked out a laugh. “That sounds silly. Light is just light.”

  “I know, but if you follow that theory—that light is a vibration of sorts—well, then maybe you see a type of light others can’t. Maybe you’re sensitive to some sort of vibration other people aren’t.”

  Skyla blinked at the idea. “How do you mean?”

  “Well, look…” Gil grabbed another book with faded yellow pages. An illustrated man with no skin stared out at them from the cover. She turned to a thick page and jabbed her finger at a diagram. “So this is an eye, right?”

  A slow bobbing of Skyla’s head prompted Gil to continue. “This here is your retina. It’s the back of your eyeball. It’s where the images are focused, like a projection screen. You have rows and rows of cells back here called cones and rods.”

  “Really? They’re called that?” She almost snickered.

  “Yeah,” Gil giggled, then gave her a curious look. “You never went to school?”

  “I tried. My mother made me go.”

  “They didn’t teach you this?”

  “I missed a lot of classes.”

  “Why?”

  Skyla waved a hand at the question. “I spent a lot of time hiding, avoiding Dona, Vicky, o
thers… It was distracting. We learned about basic biology, but girls were shunted off to learn other things while the boys stayed for the more detailed lessons.”

  “Like what?”

  Skyla paused. “Sex, for one.”

  Gil made an O shape with her mouth, and a fit of giggles overtook them. The skin on Gil’s cheeks flushed red as she covered her mouth.

  “At least it wasn’t with the boys,” said Gil, laughing harder.

  “I wasn’t there, but they were all blushing when they left class.” Skyla said, prompting more giggling.

  “I never went to school,” said Gil. “This is all new to me. I was lucky that my mother taught me to read or all this would be meaningless.” She pointed back to the book. “So yeah, cones and rods. Those cells are what catch the different vibrations or wavelengths that light makes. They allow us to see color.”

  “I never even considered that.” Skyla blinked. “You mean not everything sees in color?”

  “Some birds do, but dogs don’t…” Gil flipped to a new page. On it was a cross-section, a row of cells.

  “They really do look like cones,” said Skyla. The drawing was ancient, the colors faded dust-blue with time. She even remembered stealing this book for Gil from a Rhinewall museum during the riots.

  “Yeah, so this is how people see. If you filter it through a colored lens,” she pointed at the goggles hung by the closet door. “You filter out some wavelengths and allow others.”

  Skyla walked over to the goggles and picked them up, placing them on her head. “So you think that just because I am filtering out other things, I can see what’s really there?”

  “Well, or a frequency of it. Maybe what you are really seeing is just a wavelength that is invisible to everyone else. But if I can calibrate the camera to see what you see, I think we might get a better idea of what’s happening in that house.”

  “Do you think we could even use it in the Wilds?”

  Gil shrugged. “It would be amazing if I could actually see into wherever it is you go… to see all the people…”

  “To see your father?”