And if this was all one big exercise in post-partum psychosis, like Doctor Keller said? The thought made bile rise at the back of her throat, but shit, she'd know soon enough.
The Department of Records was a low slung building of white marble turned green and grey by moss, dwarfed on the left by a cinemaplex draped in gold marquees and framed on the right by a colossal empty lot, two thousand square yards of mud ringed by creaking chain link. She could smell it even as she pulled in to the parking lot and stepped through the doors: that delicious tang of curling paper and binding glue. It'd been so long she'd been in a library. Returning was like the first drag of a cigarette after going cold turkey.
The door handles were cold and stiff to the touch, as if no living being had pushed them open in long years, but they gave when she put her shoulder into it, and the heat that radiated outward from the building was a balm on her rain-soaked skin.
Kimberly didn't know much about monsters or molotovs. She knew books. Knew syntax and punctuation as intimately as her own skin, knew the creak and groan of commercial printing presses, knew the sweet, metallic taste of fresh ink in the back of her throat. She knew how to read between the lines.
She was home.
She'd stepped into a long, wide hall carpeted in green, little orange lamps dotted around the periphery, bulbs so old they flickered. The bookshelves were layered like ancient strata, first the igneous slab of the periodicals, followed by compacted sedimentary streaks of town history, council meeting minutes, police statistics filed in black leather bindings.
There were two staff on duty - a rake-thin man in a white suit cursing at the fax machine, and a tiny woman behind the counter, almost swallowed by her high-backed office chair. She smiled as Kimberly approached. "My, you look half-drowned. Forgot your umbrella?"
Kimberly found herself craning over the desk to look down at the clerk. She wasn't tall herself - Peter had always found it hilarious to rest his chin atop her head when they cuddled - but the lady behind the counter was a muppet in a frock. "I need information on myself. My marriage certificate, birth-"
"Applying for a passport, dear? It's always such a fuss, isn't it. Do you have some ID?"
Kimberly passed her driver's license across the counter - a license she couldn't recall applying for, with a photo of her hair permed in a style she'd never liked. The woman behind the counter stared at the photo, then at Kimberly, then back down at the photo.
"No time for my stylist," Kimberly said. "And I woke up late. And-"
"No excuses, dear. I know how hard it is to pretty yourself up every morning. This might take a while, so if you want to sit down-"
"Wait a second." Kimberly glanced down the stacks, into the furthest corners of the hall. There were a lot more open shelves than she'd thought, rows upon rows of old tomes bound in leather stained the deep maroon of old blood. "What else do you have here?"
"Oh, that? That's all the Historical Society's business. I dust the shelves but I don't pay much attention to what's on them."
"What about records of the Pentacost Convent?"
The woman's eyes widened. "Like what, dear? Sermons?"
Kimberly bit her lip. "Legends and myths?"
The clerk shook her head, and Kimberly couldn't help noticing how her hair wiggled back and forth on her scalp. A bad wig, most likely. "Old maps of Rustwood are at the back. What's it for, a school project?"
"Personal interest."
"Funny. Maybe it's a fad." The woman pointed down the far end of the library. "Second floor. Ring the bell if you need a hand."
Kimberly waited until the clerk was out of sight before diving into the stacks. Floorboards creaked beneath her heels as she trailed one finger along the nearest shelf, tap-tap-tapping along the spines of old tomes. A short spiral staircase led to the second floor, where the shelves were neatly labelled with white, hand-lettered signs. Maps were stored in huge cardboard folders, which she opened on a nearby table and flipped through as carefully as she could manage, wary of tearing a corner off something worth more than her annual paycheque.
There were street maps of Rustwood dated back almost a century. Looping lanes wide enough for horse-drawn carts to pass three-abreast. Diagrams of the surrounding woodland, receding decade by decade as loggers swept the hillsides clean. Worming blueprints of the mines carved out beneath the mountains, veins drilled deep into shale until they twisted beneath half of Rustwood like the tendrils of an unseen cancer. A sheet detailing the Pentacost River and the places where it burst its banks, swollen by the never-ending rain year after year.
And, finally, the convent.
It was only a footnote, a dotted outline and a label on the far bank of the Pentacost river. The map was dated 1916 - midway through the Great War, if Kimberly remembered her high-school history.
She flipped through the rest of the maps, but there was nothing else detailing the convent. No true blueprints, no records of what went on behind the doors.
It was a punch in the gut, but what'd she expected? "A History of Terrible Convents and Their Secrets?" "Fifteen Ways to Quit Rustwood?" There were tomes on the shelves that covered the building of Rustwood from the first brick all the way up to recent renovations at Saint Jeremiah's, but it'd take weeks so sift through those. Even with a team of researchers, Fitch and herself doing double shifts...
Look again.
It was a voice in the back of her head, a tickle that might've been intuition. She bent low over the collection of maps, staring at the little oblong that marked the Pentacost Convent, set beside a bend of the river.
The mines.
Again, that scratching tone that wasn't quite heard and wasn't quite unheard. It reminded her of... God, the voice on the other end of the phone that time she'd tried to call home from the hospital.
And yet, she returned to the map of the mineshafts, those gnarled and knotted paths spreading hungrily beneath the soil of Rustwood. The main shaft opened in a quarry in the mountains north of town, a pit Kimberly thought she'd half-glimpsed through trees when she'd tried to escape over the peak. They then spread south, lapping at the east coast, skimming along the edge of the river, skirting the border of the town itself...
All the way to the riverbend, where it terminated in a small black square marked Coke Store/Smelter.
She set the two maps side by side, the mineshafts and the surveyor's sketch from 1916. Yes, that was where the convent squatted and yes, that was where a lazy looping finger of the mines extended, brushing the riverbank. She checked the date on the maps - the ink was faded, but the first two digits read 18. She traced the lines of the mineshafts again. There was no doubt. The Pentacost Convent had once been a place for coal storage, set directly above the old mineshaft. Which meant the same shafts that opened on the eastern hills of Rustwood threaded all the way south to the Pentacost river and opened directly beneath the convent. Jesus, could it be that simple?
No. Of course not. Not in Rustwood. Nothing was ever that easy. But at least they had a second option, now. So long as Fitch didn't veto...
"Mrs Archer?"
Kimberly almost screamed at the sudden voice behind her. She spun, the sheets scattering across the table.
Detective Goodwell stood in the aisles formed by the tall shelves, arms crossed over his chest, his suit jacket almost black with rainwater. His eyes were bagged by late nights and his smile was about to fall off his face.
"You..." She bit down on the curses. "What're you doing here?"
"I could ask the same. Suddenly got an interest in town planning?"
She looked at the tangles of paper around her feet and scowled. "How'd you find me?"
"Little birdie. Thought I'd check in on you."
"It was Doctor Keller, wasn't it?"
Goodwell's smile puckered, but only for a moment. "Do you know your husband is sick with worry?"
"I'd guessed."
"Does that bother you?"
She had to keep from blurting of course, of course, it t
ears me up. Because she loved him, even when they fought she loved him, ever since he'd first taken her hand in the kitchen of their newly-built home and said marry me, I'm not afraid any more since meeting you, marry me, and she'd said yes, yes, yes-
No!
She gnawed the inside of her cheek, trying to throw off the weight of those false memories. That was the true psychosis, those images of her and Peter Archer pressed together in the darkness. She wasn't going to end up like Keller's little pity-patient. She'd always know the difference.
"Mrs Archer? Are you okay?"
Goodwell reached for her and Kimberly pulled away. "What do you want? Did you come to take me back?"
"You're your own woman, Mrs Archer. You want to run around in the rain, be my guest. But there are things you don't know and things you need to know. Starting with that friend of yours. Yeah, the guy in the blue pickup. The one you've been spending your days with. Peter knows about him, and so do we."
Kimberly's cheeks were burning, not with embarrassment but with barely bridled fury. "Don't say another word."
"Wish I could walk away from all this," Goodwell said. "Wish I could let you get yourself into trouble. But I can't. See, my problem is that I care too much. I care about you, Mrs Archer. I care about everyone in my town. If I ever seem aloof, believe me, I'm just putting on a face. I joined the police because I wanted to help, and I'm helping you right now. That man you think is your friend? Don't believe a word he says. He's had friends like you before, and from what I hear..."
Goodwell dropped his voice low, like he was afraid of someone standing in the next aisle catching a single word. "He uses them and throws them away. You're not the first and you won't be the last."
Kimberly could barely breathe. Her throat had closed, like great steel hands had tightened around her neck. "That's not true."
"You ask him, then. You ask him what happened to the last one." Goodwell drew one finger across his throat. There was no smile in his eyes - just a soul-deep sadness. "I'm not saying he did it. I'm not saying he didn't. But-"
"How do you know?"
"What?"
Her eyes were burning but she blinked them clear. "How do you know? If Fitch killed someone, how'd you find out? Why haven't you arrested him?"
"Not my call," Goodwell replied. "I'm only a little man in all of this. My job is to tell you the facts. He'll keep you at hand so long as you're useful, and then he'll discard you. Maybe he'll leave you on a street-corner. Maybe he'll get paranoid, smack you over the back of the head with a bowling pin. You never know, with these sorts of men. Spend long enough on the streets, putting God-knows-what in your veins to stay warm at night, and it pickles your brain. He needs help. You need help." Goodwell took a business card from his pocket, and when Kimberly made no move to accept it he set it on the edge of the nearest table. "I'm here to help, truly. That's all I want to do."
Kimberly said nothing, and Goodwell finally got the hint. He turned, rapping his knuckles against the shelves as he moved to the spiral stairway. "We can protect you," he said. "From... anything."
There was something in the way he hesitated on that last word that stabbed right into Kimberly's gut. "I'm not crazy," she whispered.
Goodwell paused, one hand on the stairway bannister. "I know."
He walked on before Kimberly could reply, and once again, she was alone.
"Bastard," she whispered. "Slimy bastard." She snatched his card off the table, drinking in those neat pressed letters, the phone number pressed into the card. Taunting her.
She screwed it up and tossed it into the corner.
Footsteps below. She glanced over the railing down to the bottom floor and saw the tiny clerk in her cardigan and hand-knitted shawl crossing the floor. She only had moments.
Funny how easy it was to justify stealing a barrel of benzene from a faceless industrial complex on the edge of the town and how difficult it was to reconcile hiding a collection of age-old maps inside her coat. The paper crackled as she folded it, every snap of old fibres leaving her grinding her teeth, but she managed to slip the map of the mines away without too much of a bulge.
The stairs creaked. "Miss?"
Kimberly tried to look absorbed in whatever book was closest at hand - Town Council Minutes, May 1952-Jan 1953. "That was fast! Did you find the-"
"Of course! Took me a little while - you know how the paperwork piles up - but here you are." She handed Kimberly a slim sheaf of photocopies, bound with a plastic paperclip. "Those are yours to keep, dear."
The woman waited, hands crossed before her, as if she expected Kimberly to leaf through the stack in front of her. Her face fell as Kimberly folded the papers and stuffed them in her jeans pocket. "Hope they're useful to you," she mumbled. "That man didn't cause you any trouble, did he? Saw him walking in and thought oh, there's a bad egg."
"No trouble," Kimberly said. Her mouth felt like it was lined with wax paper. "No trouble at all."
Kimberly shivered as she slipped back into the stolen Audi she was sure now stuck out like an emergency flare over a still night sea. She checked twice for Goodwell's car - the detective was nowhere in sight, thank God - as she pulled out of the lot, and did three lazy loops through the side streets just for good measure before aiming for the theatre they'd made their home.
It wasn't until she was stopped at the traffic lights on the corner of Pascoe St and Coote Avenue, directly across from Easy Eddie's Motor Emporium, that she dared unfold the papers she'd been given by the clerk. Crisp Xeroxes, the stark black-and-white print making what was written there seem all the more indelible, undeniable.
Kimberly Evans. Born in Rustwood in Saint Jeremiah's Hospital, married in Rustwood, now Kimberly Archer. Birth weight, six pounds seven ounces. Registered voter. Parent's names...
She pulled back. Wasn't there supposed to be a date on a birth certificate? It was there, just above her birth weight, but she couldn't seem to focus on it. The numbers were a blur, like the ink was vibrating off the page. Looking at them too hard sent a stabbing pulse through her left eye, and the harder she stared the sharper the pain grew, until she was sure her skull was about to split down the middle. The numbers, goddamn it, the numbers-
A car horn sounded behind her. Kimberly snapped up. The lights were green.
The pain in her eye faded, and by the time she turned into the gravel lot behind the theatre she'd forgotten about it altogether.
Chapter 12
Peter Archer woke to darkness.
The floor was hard against his spine. He was sweating, skin slick, heartbeat thudding in his throat. He tried to stand but his legs were numb from the waist down. His hands lay limply in his lap. A blanket was tucked around him, pulled all the way up to his throat, covering his body down to the ankles.
It was dark, but not so dark that he couldn't make out the walls of his prison. The place was unfamiliar - rock walls, rock ceiling, a door in the far wall that looked suspiciously like the front door of his own home. The air was damp against his cheeks. His panicked, choppy breath echoed back at him.
He couldn't remember how he'd gotten there. The stranger on the stairs, yes, the odd paralysis that'd settled over his limbs - a paralysis he still couldn't shake, because when he tried to clench his hands into fists all he got was a bloodless, throbbing sensation in his joints - and then... Had they taken his car? He'd walked to the front door, the stranger following with Curtis in his arms. After that, nothing. Blackness and the smell of powdered chalk.
Peter wriggled as best he could but nothing came of it. Maybe he was bound? He couldn't feel any ropes around his ankles, but if they were tied tight enough he supposed everything would be numb anyway.
There was something odd about the echoes. They carried slightly out of time with his own exhalations. He held his breath and counted to three.
A single, choppy sigh carried off the cold stone walls.
Gooseflesh rippled up Peter's arms. "Where are you?" he croaked, squinting into the gloom. "Come
out, you-"
There. The stranger waited in the corner with cowl pulled up. Trying to surprise him, Peter assumed. Well, that wasn't gonna play. "Where's Curtis?"
The figure stepped forward. Curtis was swaddled in his arms, cheeks flushed, grasping at the stranger's fingers. He burbled and cooed.
Peter bit back a sob. "If you hurt him-"
"Why would I do that? We love Curtis. He'll do great things." The stranger held Curtis to its chest, almost like it was nursing him. Again, Peter found himself struggling to decide whether the person beneath the cowl was man or woman. Maybe it was only a trick of the light, but he couldn't make out any hint of hips or breasts. And yet it spoke so sweetly...
"Give him... to me." It was hard to talk. Like he barely had the air to squeeze out the words. His stomach was a tight ball of pain, like the cramps that followed food poisoning. And... oh Lord, yes, he smelled blood.
The stranger shook its head. "Not yet. When you're better."
"What did you do to me?"
"Nothing we can't repair." The figure offered Curtis his index finger, and Curtis grabbed the spindly digit in one fat baby-hand. "We take care of people."
"Give him to me!"
"He's happy. Can't you see that?" In the stranger's arms, Curtis cooed and blew spit bubbles. "You should be pleased."
"Give him back!" Peter tried to stand but his legs wouldn't work. When he looked down he found himself swaddled in heavy blankets from neck to ankle. Mummified in cotton. "Where is this place?"
"Away."
He didn't know why, but he was struggling not to cry. Something about the ache in his guts, the exhaustion, the unfamiliar space, left him feeling like a frustrated child being denied ice cream before bedtime. "This is bullshit. I know police."
The figure nodded slowly. "As do we."
"Why can't you just tell me-"
The figure set Curtis down, leaned over, and pressed one finger to Peter's lips. He recoiled at the touch, slamming his head into the wall. There was something horrible about that finger, the chill of it, the slimy residue left on his skin.
Rust: Two Page 11