“She said she was going to leave town,” I added.
A nod. “She was always talking about going to Paris. She went to school there for a couple of years, she always wanted to go back.”
“You ever hear of a place called The Good Earth?”
“Sure, Dr. Klein bought stuff from there all the time. Is that where we're going?”
“That's where I'm going. How about Keith Morgan?”
She chewed her lip. It was a cute gesture. “She used to talk to a guy named Keith. I thought maybe he was her boyfriend and he was married.”
Interesting. “What makes you say that?”
“She was always kind of paranoid about his calls. Kept her voice real low. Like she didn't want anyone to hear.”
We got back on the main street and I realized I was starving. “Hang on, let's stop for food first.”
“Sure. And, uh, can you drive? I don't have a license.”
Now she tells me. “Pull into Subway.”
I got myself a footlong. Godiva claimed she wasn't hungry. I wondered if she just didn't want to give me another opportunity to see her eat. I hadn't looked before, or at least I'd tried not to, but it was clear that she didn't eat the same way that normal people eat. Of course, neither did I, since I had to deal with my body being hijacked by Catskinner on a regular basis. It could be that she really wasn't hungry, I wasn't good at judging a reasonable food intake.
While I was eating I asked her about the blue metal boys and the nova crew. She'd overheard Dr. Klein mention both of them, but didn't know who they were. She had a little more information about the nests.
“I think it's some kind of cult. There were a bunch of guys who came over to do work around the place, building the booths and moving stuff. They looked like they were brainwashed or something, they all looked the same and they didn't talk. Creepy.”
About six hundred calories later I was pulling onto the highway. We drove in silence for a while and then I turned on the radio. I wasn't any good at small talk.
As I drove I kept glancing at her. She was singing silently along with the radio, her soft lips moving gently to the rhythm. She didn't seem to be looking at me, but I couldn't tell where those strange eyes were focused behind her sunglasses. I didn't quite know what to think of her. Her body in the seat beside me was like a pin-up made flesh, all curves and warmth and soft smooth skin. I remembered how it felt to hold that body close against mine. I wanted that, I wanted her close beside me, but I knew the danger of wanting.
I found myself thinking about her strangeness—her green-in-green eyes, her toothless mouth, the way her jaw moved. I wondered how deep that strangeness went, what more was covered by her clothes.
I remembered what she'd said, what she'd promised in exchange for food. I'd gotten her food and part of me wanted to take her up on it. Just once, a body like that, under me, doing what I wanted—
She was looking at me, then, and my eyes met her sunglasses. She smiled, wide and open, as if she knew just what I was thinking and liked it.
Dangerous. Very dangerous.
I took a deep breath, let it out. Time to come back to reality.
“Where do you want me to drop you off?” I asked.
She looked sharply over at me. “I'm going with you.”
I shook my head. “You can't.”
“I can't?” Her eyebrows peeked over the top of her sunglasses.
“You can't,” I repeated. “In the first place, I don't know where I'm going. And in the second place... I'm not a good person. You don't want to go anywhere with me.”
“I think I do,” she said softly.
That made me angry. Soft things, nice things, they weren't part of my life. Never had been, never could be. “Well, you're wrong. Look, this thing inside me, it kills people. It's very, very good at it.”
“But it's not you.”
“Yes! Yes, it is.” I tried to calm myself. “Catskinner and me, we're part of the same thing. I am a monster.” Surely I could make her understand that.
“You're not the only one.”
That gave me pause. I looked over at her for a moment, then back at the road. She wasn't human, or not entirely human, I reminded myself.
“This is not going to have a happy ending.” I tried again, “People are going to get hurt. People are going to die. Maybe you.”
A dry chuckle. “I'm hard to kill.”
Well, that was something we had in common.
“I don't—” I began.
“I do,” she interrupted me.
“You do what?”
“You were going to say that you don't know where you're going or what you're doing. I do. I'm going with you, and I'm going to do whatever you're doing. The only way you're going to stop me is to throw me out of the van, and I don't think you're going to do that.”
Before I could answer Catskinner did. “he wouldn't. i would.”
A slow nod. “Yes, you would. You'll kill me if you think I'm a threat to you.”
“yes.”
“I'm not. I can help you. I know things that you don't know. Things that you need to know.”
Catskinner didn't answer her. After a while I did, slowly, stumbling over the words. “Do you know what you're asking me? If Catskinner decides you're dangerous, he'll kill you. He'll use my body to do it and I won't be able to stop him. Do you understand that? I'll have to watch you die.”
“Is he really that much stronger than you are?”
I shrugged. “Yes. No. I don't know. Strength really isn't the issue. It's . . . he's so fast. When he acts, I usually don't even know what he's doing until it's over.”
She chewed that over. “I do understand, James. I won't make you watch me die.”
I wished I could believe that. Inside I said, she's no threat to us. Honestly.
you want her with us.
I do.
it is a mistake.
Maybe. But she really does have useful information.
No answer, at least no answer in words. Instead I felt his focus, shift, relax a bit. It was if Catskinner was no longer painting a target on her forehead—that's the best way I can explain it.
I relaxed, too.
“I'm not going to throw you out of the van,” I said.
She smiled at me. “I like you,” she said. “It's like Stockholm syndrome.”
“What?” It wasn't the most flattering thing anyone had ever said to me.
“It's when a hostage falls in love with her captor,” Godiva explained.
“I know what it is,” I groused. “You're not a hostage. I tried to get rid of you, remember?”
She looked up at me, her sunglasses reflecting my face back at me. “What am I?”
a mistake.
Catskinner's tone was amused. Aloud I said, “You're the princess.”
She smiled at that, and her tongue flickered over her lips. “And you're the knight who rescued me.” She leaned up against me. Catskinner didn't react at all.
“No, I'm the dragon,” I corrected her.
She chuckled. “Silly. The dragon doesn't rescue the princess.”
“I never was any good at playing by the rules.”
She moved in her seat and we were no longer in contact, but I was intensely aware of her closeness.
“We should get cell phones,” she said suddenly. “So I can call you if I have to move the van or anything. So we won't get separated.”
I nodded, just to be agreeable. I'd never had a cell phone. I'd never had anyone I wanted to keep in contact with before Victor, and he never left his office. Thinking about cell phones made me think about the future. I'd never been good at that. Life had always been to simple for plans—I was the monster and the world was filled with villagers with pitchforks and torches, and all I had to do was stay away from them. Victor had shown me that I wasn't the only monster in the world, but working with Victor had been close enough to working alone that I scarcely noticed any difference.
Godiva felt differ
ent. I didn't know why. I had known her less than two hours. I didn't really know anything about her except that we were both caught up in something that neither of us understood. I didn't even know if we were on the same side, or how many sides there were, or what any of them were trying to accomplish.
Screw that. Life was simple. Catskinner and me, we were one side. Everybody else, the other side. And as far as I was concerned, they were outnumbered.
The Good Earth was a freestanding building that looked like it used to be a fast food restaurant. Half the lot—the half that included the drive-thru window—was fenced off. Inside the fenced area was a collection of lawn decorations—concrete fountains, statues of nymphs and gnomes, trees in pots. The other half of the lot had only one vehicle, a battered white pickup with a camper shell. If that was Keith Morgan's truck then there shouldn't be any customers. Good, we could get right down to business.
I parked the van and Godiva next door, at a convenience store.
“What are you going to do?” she asked me.
“Ask him some questions. After that . . . I dunno. Play it by ear.”
“Be careful.” She looked serious.
Catskinner smiled back at her. “i won't let anything bad happen to james. keeping him safe is my job.”
And then we were across the empty parking lot and at the door. Catskinner put my hand on the door, but I opened it.
Chapter Seven
“there is always more that isn't than that which is.”
The space was big and cluttered. The internal walls and partitions had been torn out and shelves put in, big industrial shelving units, some metal, some plastic, none of them matching. On the shelves merchandise was strewn, in no evident pattern.
Directly in front of me was a display of aquarium supplies, chemicals, fish food, bags of that weird colored gravel. A plastic mermaid sat at eye-level, faced turned towards a ceramic figure of a diver in an old fashioned brass helmet.
To my left was a dead end, a pallet stacked with bags of fertilizer. So I turned right. There were shelves of vitamins and supplements and such, in bright colors with words like organic and healthy all over them. Then the aisle turned right again. The store wasn't laid out like a regular store, the shelves were butted together, making a single path that wound along side the front windows—charcoal briquettes and lighter fluid to my left—then turned again, to the right again.
I still hadn't seen anyone, but my eye caught movement in the center of the store, behind the shelves.
“Hello?” I ventured.
“Good afternoon,” a voice called back. Cheerful and male.
I went around the next corner and saw more of the same: a single aisle stretching around the side wall leading to yet another right turn. The place was a spiral, I realized. Shopping for obsessives.
I kept going.
Do spirals mean anything to you?
difficult places to get out of.
Yeah, they meant that to me, too.
I made two more right turns, winding my way to the center of the shop. Along the way I passed shelves of plant cuttings, a display of what seemed to be air tanks, bags of pea gravel, more vitamins—these labeled in some Asian language—a rack of knives. If there was any method to the inventory I couldn't see it.
“Looking for something?” the cheerful voice asked.
“Just . . . looking.” I could see glimpses of the man in the middle. He looked short and fat and blond, that was about all I could tell.
Right turn, right turn, past bug spray and T-shirts and hard candy, dried fish in crinkly plastic bags, right turn past a pallet loaded with bolts of cloth that looked like silk, and I was in the center of the spiral.
The counter in the center of the store was more normal looking than I expected. A big box with a Formica top and a cash register and a display of lighters with skulls and flags on them, and behind all that a short pudgy guy with long blond hair and goatee wearing a Star Wars T-shirt. He smiled at me.
“Welcome.”
“Are you Keith Morgan?”
“I am. And you're James Ozwryck.”
“Then you know why I'm here.”
“I could guess, but I'd rather you told me.”
“Why did you kill Victor and try to kill me?”
“I didn't do either one. I wasn't even there. I'm sure Madeline told you that much.”
“You gave her the Seal of Solomon. That almost killed me.”
He frowned, nodded. “That was a bad move on her part. But, honestly, what would you have done if she released you?”
Catskinner answered for me. “torn her apart.”
He nodded again. “See? There really wasn't a good move for that situation. By leaving you she gave you a chance. Obviously, it worked.”
“Why Victor?”
He sighed. “Do you mind if I smoke?”
“Sure, go ahead.”
Catskinner's attention was focused on Morgan’s hands like a laser, but he just shook a cigarette out of a pack and lit it with one of the lighters from the display. Clove, by the smell.
“Okay,” he let out a cloud of sweet smoke. “You know Victor was undead, right?”
Undead? I suppose that word fit what I knew of his condition, but it seemed overly theatrical. I shook my head.
“I know he was my friend.”
“I know he's a vampire, but he's still my brother!” Said with a grin.
“He never drank blood. Whatever he was, he wasn't a vampire.”
“Sorry.” Keith waved a hand. “Lost Boys reference. I'm guessing pop culture isn't your strong suit.”
“I want to know why we were attacked.”
He took a long drag on his cigarette and let out his answer with the smoke. “I know, and I'm getting there, but I'm not sure how much I have to explain. I assume you know about the Macrobes?”
“No.”
“Eldila? Outsiders? I'm not sure what you call that passenger inside you—”
“Catskinner.”
He smiled at that. “Very appropriate. Well, it is what I call a 'Macrobe', a form of life that does not require a physical form. Such things are not bound by laws of physics that apply to physical objects. They exist as information, as permutations in the patterns of matter, but not actually material. You see?”
Is this true?
it's as true as that one can understand.
I nodded.
He smiled. “Good. Now, the relationship that you and . . . Catskinner have is rare. Almost unique. Most Macrobe/human interaction is more symbolic. Macrobes communicate by inspiration, visions, dreams. As I said, they are information. Information is to them what flesh and blood is to us.”
“Victor.” I prompted.
“Relax, I'm getting there. There is an entire Macrobial ecology. There are big ones, little ones, predators, prey—just like the biological ecology we have on Earth. Many Macrobes have an interest in terrestrial matters—they find physical life just as fascinating as we find immaterial life. They communicate with humans, some humans, those that they find . . . interesting. They make deals.”
He was warming to his subject, talking with his hands. He talked like he was explaining a new religion to a possible convert.
I wasn't impressed. “When do we get to the part where you tell me why I shouldn't kill you?”
“Soon,” he promised, holding up a hand. “Victor was in communication with a particular Macrobe, one that passed on to him certain information, technology, if you will. That's how he was able to maintain an anathanotic homeostasis—how he became undead.”
“And Dr. Klein?”
“Is in communication another one. One from a competing . . . tribe, you might say. Two alien intelligences at war, using human pawns to do their fighting in the physical realm. Essentially, you got caught in the crossfire. Since your . . . tenant is not allied with either side, the decision was made to neutralize you, but not kill you. You do realize that Dr. Klein could have simply cut your throat while you were p
aralyzed.”
“I still don't have an answer to my question.”
“Why you shouldn't kill me? There are a number of reasons.” He ticked them off on his fingers, “First, I'm no threat to you. I function as an intermediary between the Macrobes' human envoys. I am, myself, not directly aligned with any celestial faction. Secondly, I would be dangerous for you to kill, for the same reason. I am valuable to many very powerful creatures. As you've observed, continual communication with these intelligences has a teratogenic effect on human beings. They change, and those changes can make it difficult for them to interact with the mass of humanity. I do a fair amount of legwork for things much more dangerous than you. Thirdly, I can be useful to you—we can be useful to each other. I am well aware of your unique abilities. I can put you in touch with those who would pay handsomely.”
He smiled and curled his outstretched fingers into a fist. “Lastly, you might find that I am not as easy to kill as you suppose. The Macrobes pay their employees in strange coin.”
I nodded. What he said made sense. Something didn't add up, though. “Dr. Klein said that you paid her to kill Victor and destroy his book.”
“Did she now?” for a moment his affable manner dropped and his eyes were cold. Then the smile came back. “I suppose she was trying to deflect your ire from herself. I assure you, she approached me for the Seal, and she paid me for it. I had no reason to attack Victor or you.”
“And she paid you to arrange the workers from the Manchester nest?”
A slow nod. “Yes, she did.” He smile was starting to look forced. “As I said, I'm a middleman. A broker, if you will.”
What do you think?
he probably is too dangerous to kill.
Did you know about other Macrobes working with humans?
i know that there are thrones and dominions in the vasty deep and the wars of heaven are mirrored and shadowed in this tide pool. as above, so below, as ever was.
Were you planning to mention this to me?
were you planning on telling me that you didn't know?
I shook my head. Infuriating as always.
Keith was watching me warily.
“Suppose,” I said at last, “that I did want you to broker my services. How would that work?”
Catskinner's Book (The Book Of Lost Doors) Page 6