‘Meet me at the old house,’ she said and speeded up her march.
The afternoon turned balmy as she made the middle two miles, and they took her right through everything she never wanted to know about the Otopian methods of dealing with things they didn’t like, top of that list being the Returners.
Although they didn’t exist in sufficient numbers to be any kind of minority they cropped up with disarming irregularity. It took serious processing power to compute their statistics, but a few notable features had dropped out, features that were not so far in general knowledge. The first was that they always appeared when either the grave or the home of the Returner were very close to places where there was a dimensional weakness; from natural causes or the interference generated by more conscious activities. The second feature was the one that chilled her however. All the Returners had living relatives or friends who said, in some form or other, that they could not bear to say goodbye, that there was a connection they didn’t want to break and couldn’t accept was broken.
To top it off there was the non human undead rubbish that Xaviendra had left behind when she decided to hold Lila to ransom, and for which crime she was now sleeping soundly in the Agency jail. They kept her to hunt down and tidy the mess she’d made, or such was the excuse. Vampires and other necrosprites had become a little statistic on the bottom of the crime pages all over the Bay Area. Xavi was on special privileges (allowed out with Lila) to track and contain these things, when there was time. They should have been on it today, but today had gone awry. In any case, although Lila had taken her twice on ‘missions’ neither time had given her confidence in the activity. For one thing she had to trust Xaviendra’s choice of victims and for a second she knew that every second spent outside Sarasilien’s magic-proofed cell was a second in which Xavi could be performing any number of magical activities that Lila had no hope of detecting. She used any excuse herself to keep Xavi incarcerated, even conducting what briefings they had within its walls. The fact was that because the Otopian authorities felt unable to execute or repatriate her, she was better off dumped where she was. At first Lila had felt sorry for her. Later however, that sympathy had waned as she realised the extent of Xavi’s prior treachery to her own kin. This niggled at her. She felt there was more to uncover, and if only she had Friday she would have been able to see what it was. But Friday was not to be had.
Finally, among her extensive inbox, there were the urgent-flags of a detective in the Serious Crimes Unit operating out of Bay Central. They were all hunter cases – fae gone bad and half fae even badder – a string of murders awaited her perusal in gut-churning detail. All over town and beyond people wanted to be rid of the supernatural. It was a million miles away from the heady, optimistic times she remembered, before she even heard of the Agency, when elves and demons were rare, their worlds exciting new frontiers, their explanations of matter and energy fresh and exotic, rich with promise.
Lila must be behind the times because she still felt that way about them, even knowing the worst of their nature, but it seemed like nobody else in Otopia did. Aside from a few romances and soap operas featuring hot humans dressed up to thrill there wasn’t much positive media about the other worlds. But negative stuff, especially at the conspiracy-theory end, of that there was enough to choke on. Deadkill were only the pitiful tip of a big, ugly iceberg. It didn’t take genius to understand the pressure that Temple Greer and the Agency were under to get it out of sight.
With a final turn Lila reached the familiar streets of her home accompanied by a sense of déjà vu, not for the place, but for the fact she was always coming back only to run away again at the first opportunity. She didn’t like the run away element, though it wasn’t because she wanted to stay. She wished she could walk out with the feeling of a clean break and things made even, concluded, debts paid. Instead here she was looking at the changes in the neighbourhood and feeling guilt and shame grow inside her, twin poisons that sapped her will so that it was difficult not to march right past the end of the driveway.
Instead she didn’t even pause. The drive was cracked. Weeds choked its edges. The grass was long and turning brown. The trees, small when she was a child, had either been cut to stumps or were huge, covering the small front yard in late-afternoon shade. To either side the houses were much neater. She could just imagine the kind of thoughts the people there must harbour about her old home, but she couldn’t imagine and didn’t want to know what they thought about the person inside it. She didn’t know herself.
Without pause for thought she knocked at the door. Standing on the step was an odd feeling. She knew the place, and didn’t know it. So much time had gone by here without her, she wasn’t even sure it recognised her as one of its own. She was glad about it.
Footsteps sounded in the hall. The door opened onto a gloomy interior and in the instant before she saw the person standing there she smelled the warm waft of cinnamon and pastry and the sharper bite of lemon. Then her eyes adjusted perfectly and she had to force herself to be still and maintain the mask of pleasant enquiry that she had made of her face.
Max looked back at her with the same instant of incomprehension turning to recognition. Lila’s shock was the greater, she guessed.
Max wasn’t an old woman, nor even particularly mature looking. This was Max as Lila always remembered her, young, late twenties, her short hair in a raffish pixie cut, her more-like-dad-than-mine face rosy-cheeked from bending over hot stoves or running along the beach. Her greenish grey eyes sparkled and the left one quirked slightly, because they’d once fallen in love with the superior eyebrow of a film star and spent weeks practising the look. Ever after Max couldn’t stop doing it and the quirk had become part of her stand-back-and-let-’em-have-it attitude.
Lila expected to see a ghost, a lost person, a desperate person, someone she didn’t want her sister to have become, not just . . . Max. And certainly not the real thing. This should have been a pale shadow, a mockery, a monster.
‘Lila!’ Max stood back with a huge theatrical stride and swung the old door open wide. ‘Come on in! I thought you’d never make it!’
There was genuine delight in her voice. Lila almost ran.
She stepped forward into the dark hall, always inconveniently narrow, and as she passed Max said, ‘Jesus, what are you wearing? Is it costume-party day at work or have you converted to one of those weird kinds of catholic? I know your job must be intense but I thought you’d turn drunk before religious.’
There was no odour of death or decay, nothing to show that Max was anything but real and normal even though she had been twenty-five already once, long ago. Lila found it impossible to keep her mind from jumping with joy. Max was here! Something if not everything was going to be all right.
Lila walked on to the kitchen, the idea of being trapped in the hallway, perhaps in a hug, making her move forward in an awkward kind of dance that nearly stumbled as she crossed the threshold.
For a moment it was like she’d stepped back in time. She saw the kitchen of her early years, the old paint, the cupboards, the loose-handled drawer, the pinboard with its festoons of abandoned to-do lists and cat cards, the toppling slippery piles of special-offer mail that never got thrown out in case it held the winning ticket to some faraway dream. In her mind she heard her mother’s voice objecting, ‘But you have to keep it in case they come with your number. What if you hadn’t got it? You could miss out on the best win of your life.’
The faeries had my number all along, Lila thought, but she was moving on already.
On the wall over the little dining table there was the picture of the poker-playing dogs seated at their green casino table. Chips and drinks and cards covered it. And one dog, a happy hound with an almost berserk smile, had won an enormous pile of cash and thrown all his cards in the air where they turned in the smoke and gloom of the dark bar – four aces, two kings. Aces High! said the caption in small italics above the cheap gold frame. It wasn’t until college Lila had
learned that ‘aces high’ was a phrase about fighter pilots and not about cards.
Now for the first time ever she noticed the picture hanging on the bar wall behind the losing Chihuahua with his paws over his head – two spitfires, guns blazing against a cloudless blue sky. Seeing it now made a special pain turn in her heart and tears suddenly blotted out the vision entirely, making her dash her wrist across her eyes before Max could see her. She’d spent all her young life hating the cheap, nasty tackiness of that picture with its low-rent glorification of drinking and gambling and the stupid ambition of hopeless people with their contemptible crass humour and their short-sighted focus on pleasure. The feelings engendered by this image had instantly and always shamed her, baring as it did her own embarrassment and aspirations, her contempt of her family’s failure to exert any real effort to pull themselves out of the mire. Her own secret treachery was thrown in her face every day by this damned picture.
She’d tried once to throw it out by stuffing it down the side of the bins in the backyard and in doing so cracked the frame only to find her mother later that day restoring it lovingly but ineptly with craft glue that left an ugly line across it. The line was still there, the glue yellowed and ancient. Remembering her own arrogance and spite hurt like knives in her chest now. She closed her eyes to block it out and there in her mind’s eye saw her mother’s smile. She heard her mother’s voice that would never say anything again, saying lovingly to her, to Lila, the daughter who couldn’t save her, ‘Aces high!’ Well wishing her. At the time it had made her feel sick. And she’d known about the picture and who’d broken it and never said anything.
Two spitfires, four aces. It meant love. It meant luck. It meant the good times were and always had been right here, in this kitchen. If she had seen them.
Suddenly Lila was bent almost double. A howling noise was coming from her mouth, though it seemed not to be her making it. The caving hole inside her chest was making it, trying to breathe, trying to hold together when she could feel herself literally breaking up, falling apart. Her body went rigid, attempting to survive by any means, frozen in terror of extinction and feeling it was already too late.
She felt hands and arms on her shoulders, moving her to sit down, patting her, hugging her. The faint thought that she should brush them off and get away was too faint to survive. Her own arms were clutched around herself, holding her guts in.
From a great distance she heard Max say, ‘Li!’ and then, ‘Oh Lila,’ with such sympathy and this made her howl all the more. Her system cued up the procedures and drugs that could return her to normal but she offlined them ruthlessly.
All she wanted was what had been before the machine, before the job, before the college, before growing up. She wanted to be lost in an ancient time when in her innocence and naivety the picture amused her, delighted her, when she had no idea about the way things really were in the world, when it felt like everything was safe and going right.
‘What is it?’ she heard Max say, when she got too tired to continue and was paused, eyes closed, rocking on her seat.
‘I want to go home,’ she said, sniffing. As she said it she felt tired, a million years tired, and found the table in front of her. She put her arms down on it and her head on her arms. The soft sleeves of her shirt soaked up the wetness from her cheeks. She hated to be weak, but weakness had overtaken her. Everything she had shored up behind the dam of being competent and strong, had found this crack in the frame and spilled out and she couldn’t get it back. Her heart hurt with a cold, aching, unrequited longing so intense she couldn’t breathe unless she focused all her attention on that and nothing else.
Max sat down beside her and kept a hand on her back between her shoulders. ‘Is that why you called me?’
The words processed slowly through Lila’s mind, empty now that its efforts had failed. ‘Yes.’ She felt Max’s hand rubbing her gently through the tough faery cloth with a warm and steady beat.
‘It’s all right,’ Max said quietly.
It was a while before Lila trusted herself to speak, longer before she trusted what she had to say. ‘Where were you?’
‘When I heard you? I can’t say. Far. Very far.’ Max let her hand be still but it remained steady.
‘Was it hard? To come back I mean.’
‘Yes,’ there was real grit in the word. ‘Very hard. I was almost . . .’ But then a noise of frustration, breath puffed out between the teeth. ‘Oh every time I think about it I lose it! I was sort of going somewhere new but that’s all I can think of. And if you’re going to ask me how I came back I just don’t know. I heard you and there was something to grab onto and it pulled, or I pulled, and then . . .’ She puffed, giving up on an effort to explain it. ‘I woke up here, in bed. The house was full of faeries and a right mess it was. Still is. You can see they don’t have much time for housekeeping or gardening.’
Lila focused on breathing, on not being distracted. ‘Did it hurt?’
‘Yes. No. I felt . . . dislocated. That I’m really not supposed to be here, like I’m out of place. I really do.’ She sighed, a sad sound.
‘Do you remember?’
‘Yes. My life. I remember. Or do you mean dying?’
Lila didn’t know what she meant. ‘Do you remember that?’
‘Yes. I remember all my life up to the end. But describing the end is hard. I saw light. There was some kind of movement. Everything that had been was falling. But I was still there, only not me any more, the stuff of the memories didn’t matter. Shit, I can’t explain it and god knows I’ve wasted enough journals trying. There’s a Returner blogfest out there bigger than the sea and I don’t think one of ’em has ever managed to say it.’
Lila breathed, counted, rested. She felt stupid and heartless but also wary, and guilty for that, but she couldn’t help it. Now she was needy as well, but even that was partly calculated to discover if this was the real Max as she asked, ‘Are you angry with me? Do you think . . . were you the first? Did I make all of these people return? Do you wish you were still . . . dead?’ She kept her eyes shut. It was better that way. She felt the air moving over the wet linen. That was good too.
‘Yes I damn well am angry,’ Max said in the mildest of tones as she leaned on the table and pushed back into her chair, making the legs creak. She cracked her knuckles methodically, knowing Lila hated it, and took her time over every pop. ‘Fifty years and not even a fucking phone call. And here you are looking barely a day older. Are you back as well?’
‘I wasn’t dead,’ Lila said, feeling the tabletop, the wood grain, focusing on it so that she didn’t have to feel all of the reactions that were bubbling up inside her too strongly. ‘It really was only a couple of days for me. I just . . . skipped it. Faery—’
‘Those little fuckers,’ Max said with quiet venom. She paused. ‘You’re not going to leap in and correct me? Tell me not to abuse them in case they get all scary-wary?’ On the last two words she let her voice fall into a nursery sing-song.
Lila felt the kitchen move slightly, as though a tiny earthquake had happened underneath them. ‘I don’t—’
‘Yes, you always do and you always did. Leap in to defend, make sure nobody says boo. You were the peacekeeper.’ Max flicked a hand through her hair, stuck out her jaw unconsciously.
Lila snapped. ‘Well you were the griefer. No boot so big you couldn’t stick it in your mouth at any opportunity.’
‘Yeah, because things needed to be said and nobody would say ’em.’
‘Nobody needed to say them with you around to do the job for them.’
‘People should wake up and face reality. They’re weak, cowards, hiding behind all that booze and junk and card crap and special secretarial skills and nine to five.’
Lila bit her tongue for a second, trying to find a different response to her usual. They could have run through it all again, but it felt very after the fact now, too late. If this wasn’t really Max, it was doing a fine impression. Her blood pressure w
as sky high. She was surprised she could still feel riled. ‘Why unleash everything when it can’t do anything but destroy? Why not wait for a better moment?’
As Lila had known she would, Max immediately understood it was the criticism of their parents that Lila referred to, and the criticism of herself.
‘Because it’s poison,’ Max said. ‘There’ll never be a good time to let it out, never a better time than now, get rid of it once and for all.’
Lila felt calmer, quieter; the storm course had been diverted for a time. ‘Do you believe in once and for all then?’
Max’s chair’s front legs thumped down onto the floor with a bang. ‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘One shot, one chance, one life, one go. If you don’t do what you have to, then nobody will. You can feel as sorry and as mad about it as you like, won’t make a blind bit of difference. I didn’t live waiting for you. I lived with what I’d got. I didn’t waste my time dreaming and pretending.’
Lila let these cuts pass without comment. ‘Did you see them on the other side? Mom and Dad?’ This time her quiet question created a pause of intense silence. She could feel Max beside her, fixed in place, not even breathing.
‘No,’ she said finally. ‘I didn’t see anything. I felt that they’d gone before, ahead, long gone. That’s all. So if you were hoping for angels and white wings and heaven and bells and everybody waiting with a chorus of harpers then no. Just some feelings. Nothing else. Or I don’t remember. And then I was back. And I called you and I waited and waited and waited and finally here you are, asking all the questions like usual, doing the interrogations, making sure who’s been naughty and nice.’
Down to the Bone: Quantum Gravity Book Five Page 15