Finally, Garland gave a slight chuckle. The amusement in it wasn’t of the nicest kind, but I’d take it. “Oh, Mr. Donnelly,” he said. “It’s extremely unlikely we’d be having this conversation—delightful though it is—if I had the key or knew where it was.”
“You wouldn’t mind me wanting independent corroboration of that, would you?” I said, though I tried to make my tone suggest I really didn’t give a damn whether he minded or not.
He blinked once as if to pardon my rudeness, but stayed polite, stayed amused. “Not at all,” he said. “Not at all.”
Cadiz was still lounging against the doorjamb, giving me the benefit of a lazy eye that was supposed to tell me something. He needed to work on his act a little—I couldn’t tell if he wanted to kill me or kiss me. At the sound of Garland’s snapped fingers, though, he looked over like he was about to be let off the leash.
“Jerome,” the fat man said. “Do I have the locker key in question?”
“You do not.”
“Doyou, perhaps, have it?”
“I do not.”
Garland turned back to look at me, spreading his hands in a what-more-can-I-do? manner, but Cadiz had apparently been enjoying the game and wanted to throw in a new wrinkle.
“Perhaps she has it,” he said, and nodded in Kelly’s direction.
“Miss Woodman?” Garland asked him.
“Yeah,” Cadiz said. “Perhaps she has it.” He paused, letting his eyes take a good long look. “About her person.”
“And who’s going to search me?” Kelly said. “You?” The contempt was withering, but Cadiz just shrugged and gave a half smile. It was wry and boyish and, though I hate to admit it, almost goddamn charming.
“Nobody needs to search anybody,” I said. “I’ve got the key.”
That got their attention. In fact, it was kind of unsettling the way all three pairs of eyes swung as one to lock on my face.
“More importantly,” I said, “I know where the locker is. Which means I can get whatever’s in there. Which means, unless I miss my guess, that I’m the only son of a bitch who can get his hands on this statue you’re all in such a dither about.”
Thing is, I did know where the locker was. I hadn’t realized I did until remembering the key reminded me of the bartender and remembering the bartender reminded me of his crack about my hats. How he knew whatever he knew about me was still a mystery to me, but he’d used it to give me a clue. I know how much you like your hats, he’d said. Well, I do like my hats. And I don’t like them from five-and-dime chain stores. I like them custom-made by an honest-to-God hat guy, and my particular hat guy was Stavros The Hat Guy—no kidding, that’s actually what it says on his shingle—who runs his business out of one of those little storefront franchises on the west concourse at Downtown Union. He’s sandwiched in between the shoeshine stand and the cigar store. And directly opposite the bank of left-luggage lockers.
Being polite about it—asking permission of my new friends before I stood up to cross the room and use the phone—I called Valerie, told her to get the key out of my desk drawer, head to Downtown Union, and bring whatever she found in the locker to the Hotel Montana.
“Really, Steve?” she said, like I’d brought Christmas to her early. “An assignment?”
She sounded thrilled. And then, when I told her to give the package to the pulp-reading bellboy in the lobby rather than bring it up to the room herself, she sounded devastated. If I got a chance, I’d make it up to her one day, but right now she’d have to stay devastated—I didn’t want her within spitting distance of these people.
I paused at the cocktail cabinet on my way back from the phone, took out the bottle of vodka, and raised an eyebrow at Kelly.
“Help yourself,” she said.
“Not drugged after all?” I said.
“Well, not the bottle,” she said, like I was stupid. “You think I’m an amateur?”
“I do not,” I said, pouring myself a shot. “It was you, wasn’t it? You killed Mike.”
She gave it a beat or two, wondered if the lie was worth it. “Not personally,” she said.
I believed her—I’d seen the body—but that didn’t stop her being guilty as sin. I swallowed the vodka and sat back down opposite Garland.
“What is it about this thing?” I asked him. “This statue. That makes people like you do things like that.”
“Are you fond of anything, Mr. Donnelly?” he said, interlacing his pudgy little fingers across his great fat belly, as if settling in for Mommy to tell him a story.
“Kind of question is that?” I said.
“Oh, I mean no offense, I assure you,” he said, though he seemed mildly amused at any offense he might actually have caused. “I have no interest in whatever worldly pleasures may delight you. I assume, for example, that like any vigorous man of your age, you find that wine, women, and song—or the equivalents thereof—have their inevitable attraction. I refer instead to the fascination that some of us feel for the artifacts of history, with their cargo of mystery and the ineluctable. There are some objects, some mysteries, for which—to those of us who are already on the journey—no price is too great. Objects which, once possessed, can bestow upon the bearer unimaginable power. The Scroll of Thoth, the Lament Configuration, the Ark of the Covenant, the Eye of Agomotto, the Spear of Destiny . . . these, and many other such artifacts, are being sought even now by our new friends over in Europe.
“Friends who, like us, worship a race that came out of the sky and existed upon this planet long before there were any men. They are gone now, inside the earth and under the sea, but they divulged their secrets in dreams to the first humans, who formed a cult which has never died. Hidden in distant wastes and dark places all over the world until the stars were ready again, we have always existed and always will exist until the Armies of the Night should rise and once more bring the Earth beneath their sway.
“This statue, Mr. Donnelly, was old before Atlantis drowned. It has been the stuff of legends and the destroyer of empires. Thrones have been traded for it, and thousands slaughtered. It is valued both for what it is—a thing of dreadful beauty carved from a stone not seen on this Earth for millennia—and for what it represents . . . the shining path to the Outer Reaches.”
The bell to the apartment rang and Garland nodded to Cadiz who, moments later, was standing a newspaper-wrapped object about eight inches high on Kelly’s kitchenette counter. Without waiting on Garland’s permission, he whipped the wrappings away, letting them litter Kelly’s floor, and revealing what was to my eyes a frankly not-very-impressive statuette of a squid-like but strangely regal monster. It was vaguely manlike in shape, but with the head of an octopus whose face was a mass of tentacles. Squatting on a rectangular pedestal covered with undecipherable characters, long, narrow wings folded back behind it, while curved claws gripped the front edge of the base. Carved from a greenish-black stone which glittered with golden, iridescent flecks, it was like nothing I’d ever seen before.
“Well, you tell a good story,” I said to Garland, and nodded at the tarnished thing on the counter. “And this is it?”
“I rather fear that it is,” Garland said, which seemed an odd response. He was on his feet faster than I’d have given him credit for, and the nasty little hammer was out of wherever it hid and in his hand before he reached the object.
“No!” Kelly shouted, but there was no time. The thing was in fragments before she or Cadiz could do anything.
“Calm yourselves!” Garland shouted at both of them. “Look!”
Nobody seemed to be too bothered about me anymore, so I stood up to take a look as well. Apparently, the statuette was important not for itself, but for what it contained. Within its shattered ruins, there was some kind of loamy earth. And within that, there were nine small objects. For one nauseating moment, I could have sworn they were wriggling in the stinking soil as if the decay-filled thing had bred worms within itself over the centuries. But, as Garland’s eager ha
nds swept the soil away from around them, I saw the objects were inanimate and stationary.
Figurines, I guess you’d call them. Small ornaments in a pearlescent green stone which put me in mind of Albie’s sad little fake, although these things had a milky translucency that made them seem . . . I don’t know . . . denser, somehow.
“Ni’ib shuggarath bah’im,” Garland said, in an awed whisper.
“Ni’ib shuggarath bah’im,” Kelly and Cadiz repeated, in unsettling synchronicity, like congregants echoing a priest’s invocation.
Sharing a glance of mutual understanding, their eyes glittering with the fervency of religious lunacy, each of them reached down and picked up one of the figurines and then, stepping away from the ruins of their octopus god as if by unspoken assent, they moved back into the room, each of them pinning their figure to their clothes—to a shirt, a robe, a blouse.
Brooches? I thought. Jesus Christ. This was all for ornamental jewelry?
“Sit down, Mr. Donnelly,” Garland said. “Please. This won’t take long.”
I sat—I didn’t mistake that “please” for anything other than the order it was—and he sat too. He resumed talking, making no reference to the odd little ritual he’d just shared with his colleagues, instead moving on to a new theme—I’ll spare you the circumlocutions and euphemisms— which was essentially the unfortunate necessity of removing the inconvenient Mr. Steve Donnelly from the picture.
The ornament in his lapel shimmered a little, catching the light and giving the strangest illusion of movement.
Garland continued to talk—was there ever a circumstance in which he didn’t?—but I wasn’t really hearing anything anymore. Because the movement I thought I’d seen revealed itself to be no illusion at all and I watched, appalled, as the small leg of the figure pinned to his lapel twitched spastically, as if in pain or shock. It wasn’t shimmering. It was writhing.
Jesus Christ. This fat bastard had pinned to his chest, like some vile cross between a medal and a trophy, a living thing. Living at least until it could be released from its agony.
I’d had very little doubt that these were terrible people, but this seemed awful even for them.
Garland saw me staring at his wretched ornament, and must have read the horror on my face. His own face contorted in a small grimace, not apologetic, hardly even embarrassed, more a sort of facial shrug, like somebody caught doing something not discussed in polite society but entirely natural.
I looked quickly at Jerome and Kelly. Their figurines too. Pinned, dying, twitching, wriggling.
“You think it a cruel affectation, Mr. Donnelly?” the fat man asked.
I just looked at him.
“It’s an optical illusion,” Kelly said, her voice constrained and tight in a way that I didn’t yet recognize as pain.
“Bullshit,” I said. “Those things are—”
“That’s not what she means,” Cadiz said, and I heard something new in his voice too. Half-terror, half-wonder. I looked to Garland.
“While I never like to correct a lady,” he said, “the illusion is not actually optical. Your eyes do not deceive you, Mr. Donnelly. The movement you see is real and the agony, I confess, is alarming. Your mistake is in assuming which is the pinner, and which the pinned.”
His head twitched involuntarily as he finished speaking, and suddenly all three of them were jerking spasmodically, jaws loose and limbs twitching.
Something else was happening too. Their faces—no, not just their faces but everywhere their skin was exposed—were becoming suffused with a hideous soft green pallor. An involuntary shudder from Garland rolled his robe’s sleeve back from his forearm, and I saw the veins pulsing against the skin, deep green veins.
I looked from face to face and while, for the first few seconds, there was an atavistic horror etched in each of them, it was slowly, horribly, replaced by what can only be described as delight. Unearthly delight.
It was a matter of moments before the possessions, the transmutations, were complete.
And then it got far too personal as, one by one, those inhuman faces turned to find mine and they each stood, still twitching, and moved in my direction, Garland’s caftan now rippling and pulsing as if it concealed beneath it a writhing array of soft new limbs.
They advanced on me with a shuffling step as if whatever they now were had yet to fully learn the intricacies of human anatomy. But, however contorted, the expressions on their faces were alarmingly readable. Cruel. Eager. Hungry.
There was a sudden rising sound from somewhere around us all. It sounded vaguely familiar as it surged to a climax. I assumed it was their doing, until there was a brief second where what used to be Garland looked at what used to be Cadiz with a mutual incomprehension, before a concussive roar similar to what had put paid to Albie’s ambitions the night before turned out my lights.
I don’t know if there’s an actual law about it, but being pummeled into unconsciousness by one means or another three times in two days seemed to me to be pushing the limits of reasonableness, if not legality.
But seeing the face of yesterday’s barman looking down at me with benign concern was certainly preferable to the faces I’d been looking at before this last blackout.
He was holding a briefcase, which seemed a little incongruous, and was the only person in the room apart from me. There was no sign of the three impostors that used to be Garland, Cadiz, and Kelly, though I saw that the wreckage of the statuette was still on the counter, along with the remaining six figurines.
“Wha . . . ,” I managed.
“The Olde Fellowes never see me coming,” he said, just as if I’d asked an actual question, one that made sense. “Don’t quite understand why. Perhaps because I’m a very old fellow.” He paused, as if puzzled by something. “Though not as old as I used to be,” he eventually said, more to himself than to me.
I’d have asked what the hell he was talking about, except that I’d already decided to give myself a break from shit that makes my brain hurt for a couple of days at least. So I stuck to more practical matters.
“They’re gone?” I said.
“Unfortunately, yes,” he said. “They managed to fold themselves into a gap in the continuum before I could complete the harrowing.”
Well, who could argue with that explanation? I elected to focus on the fact that they were gone. It helped me breathe.
“This can’t have been easy for you,” he said, which showed what a very perceptive fellow he was. “Why don’t we fix you a drink?”
He crossed to Kelly’s cocktail cabinet and took out the vodka bottle, though I noticed he held it to the light and turned it a couple of times as if he wanted to be sure that it was, you know, actually of this Earth. It seemed to pass the test and he proceeded to fill, quite generously, a crystal tumbler.
“Sorry,” he said as he handed it to me. “The former Miss Woodman doesn’t appear to have had in stock the ingredients for a Pink Princess.”
“You know, a barman is supposed to be a confidante,” I said, as I threw the vodka down gratefully, “not someone who goes around giving away the name of someone’s preferred poison.”
“You don’t like to name it?” he said. “Can’t say I blame you. It sounds like—”
I raised a hand. “I’ve heard every possible riff on what it sounds like,” I said and looked at him. “You are British, aren’t you? You told our friend in the bar that you weren’t.”
“Come on,” he said. “I work for the government. Can’t trust a thing I say.”
He moved to the kitchenette counter and opened the briefcase. I stood—I think the vodka had helped—and walked over to take a look at what he was doing. The briefcase had been customized, the inside fitted with a bank of specialized housings. Three rows of three. Nine in total. My friend—I really needed to remember to ask his name at some point— swept the remaining six figurines into their ready-made nests. I noticed that his movements were as quick as he could make them, and that he
almost unconsciously dry-wiped his fingers against each other once he was done.
“Sticky?” I said.
“No.”
“Wet?”
“No.”
“Dusty?”
“No.”
“I can do this all day.”
“Fair enough,” he said. “Malevolent. They’re malevolent. And persuasive.”
I’d have asked if he was kidding, but everything I’d seen in the last thirty-six hours made me fairly sure that he wasn’t. “You came prepared, though,” I said, nodding at the briefcase as he snapped it shut. “You knew what you were looking for.”
He shrugged. “Playing a hunch,” he said, which was obviously horse-shit but, what the hell, I wasn’t going to break his balls about the fine details. He’d saved my life.
“You saved my life,” I said out loud, in case he’d failed to notice in all the excitement.
He wavered for a moment as if not sure exactly how to respond, and then smiled. “I know your granddaughter,” he said.
What the hell? “Granddaughter?” I said. “I’m thirty-three years old.”
“You won’t always be,” he said, and then looked to the window a second before a car horn sounded from outside. “Our friends from Washington,” he said. “Impatient already.”
“FBI?”
“No.”
“OSS?”
“No.”
“DAR?”
“No.”
“We work on this a little harder and I can get us six nights and a Sunday matinee at the Orpheum.”
He actually looked like he might have been interested in discussing that idea further. But the car horn sounded again. Twice.
He hoisted the briefcase from the table and gave me a wink, like it was all just a fun day at the office. I looked at the briefcase swinging from his insouciant hand, thought about the terrible things that were in it, and decided I needed to work a little harder on my brio.
“You’re handing them over to them?” I asked.
“Somewhat reluctantly,” he said. “They assure me they’ll be safe.” He didn’t sound entirely convinced. “I’d like to take them back with me. Keep them out of the wrong hands. There’s a war on, you know.”
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