by Emby Press
I saw movement out of the corner of my eye. The monkey-child and cat-child peeked out from the lettering on the sign above the candy store, watching us with malice. I raised my voice to be sure they would hear me. “So, you’re willing to let someone else’s children be kidnapped for the sake of your own?”
“I’m a parent. I’d do anything for my son.”
“Your son ran away. You didn’t want him. In a moment of weakness, you wished he was gone from your life. Otherwise, the Childkeepers wouldn’t have been able to find him for you.” I took a few steps closer to Dougan. “I’m right, aren’t I? Was it the divorce? Did you make him into just one more trophy for you and her to fight over? Come, on, Dougan. What did you say to Matthew to drive him away?”
Dougan shook his head, clearly distressed. “Like you said, it was a moment of weakness. His mother, that bitch, she. . . . I never meant it. It doesn’t matter. The Childkeepers know where Matthew is. I can get him back, make things right again.”
I took another step forward. I was close enough now that I could have reached out, put a hand on Dougan’s arm, comforted him. But I didn’t. “Matthew is dead.”
Peter Dougan stared at me in silent denial.
“A body was found in a river just outside of Charlotte. It had been there for years and was badly decayed, but they identified him by his dental records. It was your son Matthew. The medical examiner’s best guess was that he had drowned.”
“Charlotte, that’s where Matthew’s mother lives. He must have been trying to get to her house after he ran away. But why? Why didn’t they tell me?”
I shrugged. “By that time, it had been four years, and you had been declared a missing person yourself. Your ex-wife worked with the cops for years after that to track you down, but she never could. She died two years ago, never knowing what happened to you.”
Dougan gaped at me. “Sophie’s dead? Years? I can’t have been gone that long!”
Beside me, Ellie spoke. “The times of the worlds don’t always line up like you think they will. The portal you opened for the Childkeepers touched your world thirty years after you left it.”
“No!” Dougan whirled around to face the Childkeepers. “You tricked me! You lied!”
“We did not,” the cat-child purred wickedly. “We said we knew where your son was and what happened to him. We know right where he’s buried and just how he died. You never asked if he was alive. You assumed.”
“Made an ass out of you and me,” the monkey-child giggled. “Just you, actually.”
“I kept my end of the bargain,” Dougan demanded. “Keep yours! I’ll make a new portal, back to the time before Matthew drowned. Then you have to go get him for me, you nasty little demons!”
“You can’t.” Ellie’s voice had gone suddenly sad. “Time doesn’t work like that. Once you connected that portal, you became part of that time. The past is done, and it’s too late to change it. Time between the worlds is relative, but for each person, it only goes one way.” She looked at her feet, almost as if she wanted to cry. “Believe me, I know.”
“Then my son’s really gone? I can never get him back?”
“I’m sorry,” Ellie whispered.
Dougan howled with rage. The Childkeepers looked at each other, then bolted.
“They’re going for the kids!” I shouted, and took off after them, not looking to see if anyone else was coming with me. They scuttled along the walls, spider-like, backtracking past me. They reached another department store, ducking around and between its complicated maze of display walls. But I had been a beat cop for three years before I made detective, and I knew how to follow a perp in a foot chase. At last they ducked into a dressing room. It was a dead end, and that could only mean one thing.
“Devon! Sherrie! Kaytlyn!” I shouted the names of the missing kids. “We’re coming to help you!” From nearby I heard children’s voices shouting back for help. I shoved past the batwing doors hanging drunkenly on broken hinges, following their cries until I reached the right stall. The door was locked, and I kicked it open. The three little kids were on the floor, tied up with some kind of silvery rope. The Childkeepers stood between them. They each had a paw on a weird glowing object, and they were chanting.
I was about to tackle them when Dougan shoved me aside. He raised his talisman and a sphere of purple light swallowed up the two creatures. “Our bargain has been broken,” he bellowed. “I banish you back to the world that spawned you! The gate is sealed!” Then the sphere turned black and winked out of existence. The Childkeepers were gone.
The eerie silence that followed was broken as the three children started to cry. I pushed past Dougan and untied them, speaking softly, telling them everything would be okay, now. Very little was said as the four of us plus the kids made our way back out of the mall, through the parking lot, and to the playground. When we reached the jungle gym, we all turned back and looked at Dougan.
“What are you going to do now?” I asked him.
Todd glared at us. “He’s coming with us to stand trial for kidnapping, Nora, that’s what.”
“Come on, Todd, what evidence are we going to present against him? We can’t tell this story to anyone. We’d be stuck in psych evaluations for a year.”
“But. . . .”
“Let it go. It’s over.”
“Then how are we going to explain how we got the kids back?” Todd wanted to know.
I just shrugged. “We’ll think of something.” I turned back to Dougan. “So?”
“It’s been thirty years. Everyone I care about in our world is dead. And I’m pretty sure my ex has had me declared dead, too, and sold all my property by now. She would. There’s nothing there for me. I think I’ll try my luck in some other world. There are plenty to choose from.”
Ellie put a hand on his arm. “I think I can help with that.”
“You’re not coming back with us?” I asked her.
She smiled. “You’re wondering if you’ll ever see me again.”
I nodded.
“You know your world isn’t the only one, and you don’t know what to do with that knowledge. Possibilities are going to open up to you that you were blind to before. It’s okay to be nervous. Detective Mills might do well to get drunk and try to forget the whole thing, but you’ve got good instincts, Nora. You could be one of the links between your world and the things that wander into it. Not all of those things are bad, you know. Some are just like us, just trying to figure it all out. And the bad ones? You’re strong enough to stand against them, I think.” She pulled something from her pocket and handed it to me. It was a tarot card, exactly the same as the one from my dream. That was when I realized where I had seen Ellie before. She was the girl from the card, the girl with the guiding star. “If you need my help,” Ellie said, “hold this against any door and knock. Or just hold it in your hand and wish really hard. I’ll hear you and come if I can. You’re not alone.”
In silence, we crawled back under the jungle gym. Ellie closed her eyes, and we followed suit. There was a wind, and a shifting sensation, and then Todd and I were standing under the vine-covered jungle gym of our world, green-tinged sunlight filtering down to us through the trees. Kaytlyn, Devon, and Sherrie lay on the ground at our feet, sound asleep.
Todd grinned at me. “So, have you thought of a plausible explanation yet?”
CINDER & SMOKE
Antonio Urias
It began with a comet that was not a comet. It appeared without warning and blazed a fiery trail across Paris, before vanishing as suddenly as it appeared, somewhere above the 16th arrondissement.
The newspapers seized the story ravenously. Some called it a hoax, a grand illusion. Others took a darker, more apocalyptic turn. The Observatoire de Paris was forced to issue a public statement to calm the rising panic, but it did more to reveal their puzzlement. The astronomers had checked and rechecked their calculations, searched the heavens in vain, but there was no further sign of the comet.
The newspapers quickly turned to more terrestrial matters, and public interest faded. It was as if Paris had collectively dreamed of the comet and then awoke, but a frenzied disquiet lingered.
It was past midnight when a taxi pulled up outside 22 rue Le Sueur, home of the late Professor Jean-Francois Merminod. At that hour, even the nightclubs on Montmartre were closed. The proprietors had turned off their lights, wound down their shutters and, like their patrons, had slunk to bed. But in the backseat M. de Ravenot, recently of the Académie de la Metaphysique, was wide-awake. The drive had put him on edge.
He was a young man with a sallow complexion and a peculiar, furtive intelligence. He was applying it now, turning questions over in his mind, and he didn’t like where they led him. He had felt the city’s unease crying out to him, saw it in the faces of drunken stragglers and nightwalkers, and tasted their dreams in the air—feverish and bitter.
It had gotten worse the closer he got to Professor Merminod’s house. At 15 Rue Piccini a young couple clung to each other dreaming of loss and betrayal. In a third floor room at 26 Rue Duret a little girl curled up and dreamt of darkness and all-consuming fire. Down the road at 21 Rue Le Sueur, a fallen countess tossed and turned in her sleep dreaming of slaughterhouses and of murder yet to come. Ravenot saw them with noise and terrible clarity. Beneath it all, Ravenot could sense something else, something thrumming dangerously. He did not care to delve deeper, but knew with grim certainty that he might have to, before the night was over.
Professor Merminod’s daughter, Madéleine, had written him, asking for help. Apparently the old man had considered him suitably competent and knowledgeable, though he doubted Merminod had phrased it quite as politely.
Ravenot wasn’t sure precisely what had happened, but he could sense the edge of something unfathomable. He had already caught glimpses. The comet worried him. He was not well versed in astrological matters, but he knew a portent when he saw one. There were hints too in the letter, oblique references to an experiment of some sort. It was connected somehow, the dreams, all of it. Ravenot was certain of that, although even he had to clutch his thoughts tightly at times, and constantly remind himself of their connections as they tried to scuttle away. That in itself was suspicious.
The lights were still on at 22 rue Le Sueur, waiting. As Ravenot climbed up the steps to ring the bell, the fog whispered to him of smoke and malice, but Ravenot was not afraid, not yet. He had come out of curiosity, out of unexpected loyalty, and because it was her, though he nearly hadn’t come for the same reason.
The door opened almost immediately. He was expected. The butler, Darcis, smoothly and efficiently relieved him of his hat and coat and ushered him into the petite salon to wait.
“Mlle. Madéleine will be with you shortly,” Darcis said with a nod. It was not entirely friendly.
Darcis had been the professor’s familiar shadow and had a hand in all his dealings, certainly more than any student, however brilliant. They shared a grudging respect, however, and Darcis had occasionally allowed Ravenot to help with certain delicate tasks. And in return if Ravenot noticed anything unusual in the butler’s many, flickering shadows, or in the way his skin would sometimes turn translucent in the right light, he kept his suspicions to himself.
Ravenot gazed around the room running his eyes over the décor. The desk was ornately carved. Oriental and tribal artifacts were strewn across the room, flaunting Merminod’s knowledge and prestige cavalierly. Ravenot did not approve. He had largely avoided associating with the fashionable cults and orders—the Palladium, the Ordre Martiniste, the Theosophists and Spiritualists—who flaunted their secrecy like a badge for all to see, and this room possessed the same vulgar ostentation. It spoke too of deep-rooted scars and reverberated with the professor’s purpose. There was something else, though, layered on top, something new and sinister. Ravenot tried to center his mind, as best he could. He would need his equilibrium.
Mlle. Madéleine arrived a moment later, Darcis right behind. Ravenot bowed slightly, and felt the corners of his mouth twitch into a smile, but crushed it ruthlessly. No one else would have even noticed that it had been a smile.
“Thank you for coming, M. de Ravenot. Please sit down,” she said accepting his courtesies gracefully. “May I offer you a drink?”
“No,” he said studying her. “Thank you.”
She seemed more tired, weaker, and in some way colder than he remembered. Not that he knew her well. They had only met once or twice at social occasions, usually at the Académie. She was witty, intelligent, and possessed unforeseen charms. Ravenot distrusted that instinctively. Distrusted himself.
“Something’s happened,” she said, perched on her chair poised and polite, but unable to fully veil the worry throbbing beneath her skin. “Three days ago.”
“I gathered as much from your letter. You mentioned an experiment, I believe?”
She hesitated. “My father spoke highly of you, as highly as he was able. There is no one else he would have trusted to handle this.”
It was flattery, and far more blatant than he had expected of her. A sign of nerves, perhaps.
“I hope you understand this will require the utmost discretion,” she continued.
“I can keep a secret,” Ravenot replied.
“So I’ve heard.” She examined him sharply, but he said nothing. He knew what she was thinking. They moved in similar circles after all, and rumors of envoûtement, of witchcraft and murder, clung to him unanswered, even on the dueling fields. He had disdained such nonsense, and, in truth, his witchcraft was much better than his aim.
After a moment, Madéleine nodded to herself, satisfied. “It concerns my brother, Nicholas.”
“I see.” Ravenot blinked, and he did see, at least in part. A missing piece of a puzzle he hadn’t even known he was solving slotted into place. Professor Merminod had a son. And Ravenot hadn’t known. Interesting.
“I have always known about my father’s more occult interests, and that over the years he has recruited a number of students to help him. You were the best of them, but he kept his most promising discoveries hidden, even from you.”
Ravenot said nothing. He had kept the extent of his own knowledge and pursuits private and had never doubted that the professor had done the same. It was expected. There had been no great warmth of feeling between them. He was more interested in the edges around Madéleine’s story. He wondered if she had ever tried to join her father, ever shared what she termed his “interests,” and what had happened. He obviously hadn’t been summoned to hear the family history.
“My father spent his life pioneering a new magical science he called psychonautics.”
“And this psychonautics pertains to your brother?” Ravenot turned the word over in his mind, thoughtfully. Its roots and intentions were obvious—to travel into the psyche, the places inside. To see into the world within the world was the most difficult and rewarding of the Great Arts, and Merminod had tried to turn it into a science.
“Yes,” she said glancing up at Darcis. “Intimately.”
Madéleine seemed unwilling to say any more, but Ravenot could taste the outline, the scar, of something terrible in Madéleine’s brittle poise, in the macabre opulence of the house, and in Darcis, grim and loyal, standing behind her.
“I don’t want to disillusion you about him too harshly, but perhaps it would be best if I showed you Nicholas,” she said rising.
Ravenot wondered what illusions she thought he harbored about her father, but didn’t ask. He had long ago learned how to separate truth from illusion, and how to join them. He had no illusions left about Merminod, and fewer and fewer about Madéleine. He brushed that thought aside, irritated at himself.
She led him deeper into the house with Darcis following silently behind. The rest of the house was much like the salon filled with a macabre and gothic sensibility that Merminod had mistaken for taste. At last they reached the end of a long corridor. Hidden behind a tapestry was not so much a
door, as a fusion of overlapping locks and bolts. There were 144 of them. Ravenot knew the number without counting, just as he knew without being told who was imprisoned there. The very air was screaming it, if you knew how to listen. And Ravenot could sense something else, locks of a different kind. Locks no living eye could see but he felt them swirling about that door, with a faint, sickening hum.
Ravenot and Madéleine waited in silence, while Darcis unlocked the door slowly, meticulously. She opened her mouth once or twice as if to speak, but said nothing. He did not push the issue, but was acutely, awkwardly aware of her presence, even as the scent of old wounds and magic churned his stomach. Finally Darcis turned the last key and the door swung open. Madéleine gestured for Ravenot to enter. She seemed to be steeling herself. He entered gingerly.
The room was bare, not even a window, and the walls were covered from floor to ceiling with corks, thousands of them, assembled into makeshift soundproofing. The stench of filth and magic was overpowering. In the far corner huddled a boy rocking back and forth. He was ten, maybe eleven, and small for his age. It was Nicholas.
One of his ears dangled from the side of his face, torn and bloodied, as if he had tried to claw his own ear off in frenzied desperation. Ravenot saw this at a glance and understood with dawning horror. He had performed countless rites and rituals, stretched his senses and expanded his mind in strange and secret ways, but the boy was something more.
Where Ravenot heard only whispers, the boy heard screams, and where he heard screams, only God knew what the boy heard. Ravenot shuddered at the thought. He turned his gaze to the boy’s eyes—old scars and empty sockets.
“Your father did this,” Ravenot said. It was not a question.
“Yes,” Madéleine said. There was bitterness there, but also belief, belief in her father’s work. Nicholas turned towards her, desperately, longingly. For a moment, despite the mutilation and the scars, he almost looked like a normal boy. But she ignored him, keeping her gaze firmly fixed on the walls. He flinched.