“It was probably a stingray,” Daphne said, almost like an afterthought. “Sorry, I was still trying to process all of this last night in the lighthouse and didn’t think to mention it.”
“Damn!” Patrick slapped a hand to his forehead. “I should have thought of that.”
“Don’t beat yourself up,” Izzie said. “I’ve used the damn things on investigations before, and I was too distracted to think of it.”
“Um, hello?” Joyce held up a hand, looking like the only one not in on the joke. “What the hell is a stingray?”
“It’s a cell site simulator.” Daphne explained. “It mimics a cell phone tower’s signal, in other words. They’re used to track cellular devices, or intercept signals, or even just to boost cell signals. But they can also be used for jamming. The stingray broadcasts a stronger signal than any of the legitimate cell phone towers in the area, forcing all of the compatible devices in range to connect to it, instead. But if the stingray isn’t set to passively transmit that data on to the network, then any of the connected devices are basically useless. You’ve got full bars, but no real signal.”
“Recondito PD has one,” Patrick said. “We used to bring it out on stakeouts to scan the cell phones of suspects we were monitoring, pulling their call logs and text messages without them ever knowing about it. But there were a whole rash of lawsuits in the courts, with people suing the city and arguing that it was an invasion of privacy, or overreach. That kind of thing. It was a mess.”
“Wait.” Joyce sat up straighter. “So that thing wasn’t just blocking our phones, but it could have been scanning them, too?”
“Could be.” Izzie frowned. “There’s no way of knowing for sure.”
Joyce crossed her arms over her chest, scowling.
“Okay, let’s think this through,” Patrick said, leaning back in his chair and rubbing his temples with his fingertips. “Those . . . those ‘Ridden’ guys came down to the warehouse because they knew we were there.”
“They knew because the loa knew.” Daphne glanced around the table, and then turned to Izzie. “That’s what you called it, right?”
Izzie nodded. “Don’t ask me how it knew, though. Those people were barely alive when we got there.”
“Well,” Joyce said, “what we’ve been calling Ink is just part of this higher dimensional . . . whatever, if your theory is correct. And the Ink appears to highjack the host’s nervous system, which is how it’s able to direct their movements. So it obviously would have access to their senses, as well. So even if the hosts were dormant . . . like those six bodies we found in the basement . . . the Ink in their brains would still be receiving any incoming sensory data.”
“You’re all missing my point,” Patrick interrupted, an impatient edge to his voice. He stood up from the table and began to pace across the floor. “The Ridden knew we were there last night. More importantly, Martin Zotovic and his people had to have known we were there, too. He had to have been the one to send the broadcast van to block our radios and phones. So we can’t dismiss the possibility that he knows who we are, too. Hell, he could be tracking us right now.”
Izzie couldn’t help but steal a glance down the hallway at the front door, as though a horde of shambling Ridden might burst through at that very moment.
“Crap,” Joyce said softly, looking down at the phone in her hand like it had suddenly turned into a poisonous snake. Then she suddenly set it down on the table at arm’s length before hurriedly leaning back away from it.
“But these Ridden guys, they can’t go out in the daylight,” Daphne said. “So even if they did know where we are right now, they wouldn’t be able to come after us.”
“Yes and no,” Izzie answered. “Malcolm Price had enough Ink in his system to turn Ridden after he jumped out a third story window, but before that he was walking around in the daylight without any trouble at all. So I’m not sure how that works.”
“I have a theory about that.” Joyce pushed back from the table, perhaps to put even more distance between herself and her phone. “You described how Price’s skin changed after he got back up from the pavement. How quickly the blots spread.”
Izzie nodded. She could still remember the way that the inky blots had bloomed across his skin from one instant to the next, until he looked like a walking shadow, staggering toward her with murderous intent.
“And the blots on those six bodies in the warehouse moved in response to external stimulus,” Joyce went on. “They aren’t bruises or blemishes. I think that the blots are Ink, the substance itself. We assumed that the Ink was somehow being manufactured in the hosts’ bodies, and extracted from their brains and spinal columns by those hoses and pumps. And that fits the available evidence. But if the blots are Ink, then where did it go when Malcolm Price died? There was no trace of it when I examined him postmortem. More Ink appears in the host’s system over time, but I don’t think it’s being produced there. I think it’s arriving in their bodies from somewhere else.”
“From ana to kata,” Izzie muttered. Seeing Daphne’s confused glance, she explained. “Two terms that keep cropping up in the weirdest places. A nineteenth century mathematician made them up, or borrowed them from the Greek or something, to describe movement in the fourth dimension. North and south, east and west, up and down, ana and kata.”
“I was thinking in terms of ‘in’ and ‘out,’” Joyce said, nodding, “but the terminology doesn’t really matter. The important thing is, I think that the place the Ink is coming from as it appears in the hosts’ body is the same place it goes when the host body is killed. When you described it as ‘tentacles,’ Izzie, I think you were pretty close to the mark. The Ink is still connected to the main body, wherever that is, through the fourth dimension, and it pushes more of itself into the body, consuming more and more of the host’s grey matter as it does, and it can pull itself back out of the body, as well, leaving vacuoles behind. We know that the more pronounced side-effects of Ink use, like photophobia, only show up after prolonged usage. But maybe that’s just because there’s more of the stuff in their system. It could be that it’s the Ink that’s reacting to the light, not the host.”
Izzie scratched the back of her neck, thinking it through. “So, what . . . ? Maybe the loa can draw enough of itself out of the Ridden that those side-effects go away? At least temporarily?”
Patrick was leaning against the wall, arms crossed, a skeptical expression on his face. “Doubtful. It’s chewing up their brains, right? That’s where it starts. Would there even be enough up there left to operate if the Ink was gone?” He turned to Joyce. “What was it you said the other day about the effects of that much of the brain being missing? Their personality would be gone, and even if they were moving around, from a medical standpoint it wouldn’t be them calling the shots? Isn’t that how Ink works?”
Joyce held up one hand, palm toward the ground, and wiggled it back and forth in a “yes and no” gesture.
“Sure, that was the case with Malcolm Price,” she answered, “which was in line with the pattern of brain damage that we found in Nicholas Fuller’s victims five years ago. In all of those cases, the majority of the vacuoles were located in the frontal lobe, and yeah, with that much grey matter missing, they would have been incapable of independent thought or moving on their own volition. The car might have been driving, in other words, but they weren’t the ones behind the wheel anymore. But the brains of the other Ink users that I’ve examined didn’t display that same pattern. In each of those cases, the vacuoles were more evenly distributed throughout the entire brain. So they would still have been capable of some level of independent thought and agency, but it would have been impaired to one degree or another.”
“Maybe it just affects different people in different ways,” Daphne put in.
“Or maybe we’re looking at two separate things,” Izzie suggested. “What if the reason that we saw different kinds of damage in the brains of Nicholas Fuller’s victims was because the I
nk was doing something different to them? The damage is more precise, maybe even surgical, because it needed to control them without causing all of those other side effects. Fuller claimed that his victims showed signs of personality loss, so there’s that, but none of them had black marks on their skin or had a problem walking around in broad daylight. Maybe it was using Malcolm Price the same way, until he threw himself out a window and ended up basically as good as dead anyway. So that was the point where enough Ink was pushed down into his system to cause the blots to appear on his skin.”
“So let’s assume for the moment that it’s a one way street,” Patrick said. “Once someone is totally taken over, and the blots are on their skin, then they can’t go out in daylight. But until that point, sunlight isn’t a problem.”
“So, if they know where we are right now,” Daphne asked, “what’s stopping them from coming after us? There’s got to be some of them that aren’t that far gone, right?”
“Well, we know that there are other ways of stopping the Ridden, short of sunlight,” Izzie pointed out. “They can’t cross running water, we saw that last night. Loud, discordant noise or music confuses their senses. They are repelled by salt and other crystals, or can’t come into close contact with crystals, or something like that. And silver disrupts their connection with the loa, somehow. At least, that’s what Robert Aguilar wrote in his journals. So maybe some of those side-effects apply to the Ridden like Fuller’s victims and Price, who are under the Ink’s control but aren’t completely far gone yet.”
“Uncle Alf’s marks.” Patrick turned to Izzie. “Remember?”
Izzie nodded slowly.
“Uncle who’s whats?” Joyce raised an eyebrow.
“Symbols of protection that my great-uncle carved into Te’Maroan houses all over this part of Oceanview,” Patrick explained. “I noticed that there hadn’t been any reported cases of Ink-related crimes in this part of the neighborhood. No Ink deals, no users, nothing. People from these blocks were using the stuff, but only in other parts of town, and once they started using they never came back home again.”
“Then we found a map of the city in Fuller’s effects,” Izzie added. “And he had put these little spiral marks all over the southwest corner of Oceanview, and another similar mark over the Ivory Point lighthouse.”
“Where the Ridden can’t go,” Daphne said.
“Exactly,” Patrick answered. “Uncle Alf always told me that the marks were there to prevent evil influences from entering a house. To keep away things that lived in the shadows. Looping spirals carved into the pavement, or the brick, or even wood, and filled with a paint that was mixed with sea salt.” He gestured over his shoulder toward the rear of the house. “There’s one on the back of this place, and on at least a third of all the houses in a six-block radius from here.”
“So maybe they haven’t come after us because they can’t come after us.” Joyce glanced again at her phone, as though it had betrayed her. “Not here, anyway.”
“That’s why we were trying to get here last night,” Patrick went on. “But then when we were cut off by that bus that the Ridden had stopped in the street . . .”
“The lighthouse was the only other option,” Izzie finished for him.
“But Ivory Point is only safe at high tide, I’m guessing,” Patrick said. “That’s when Fuller committed all of his murders, so far as we were able to work out. Presumably so that the other possessed individuals couldn’t come and interfere.”
Daphne was thoughtful for a moment, a worried look on her face.
“So are we going to be okay going back to the Resident Agency? Or even back home, for that matter?” She finally said, looking around the room at the others. “My apartment is on the other side of Hyde Park, and there’s no magic markings on my building, so far as I know. If they know who we are, couldn’t they be waiting for us?”
“Maybe there’s a way to make something portable that would serve the same purpose.” Izzie frowned, rubbing her chin. “My grandmother never left the house without her mojo hand, a gris-gris bag that she made to protect herself against evil. Could be we need something like that to keep us safe, only using the stuff that we know is effective against the Ridden instead of the camphor and roots and bits of bones that Mawmaw Jean used.”
“I’ve got tons of sea salt, and we can probably do something with my mom’s wedding silverware, or maybe some of her old jewelry.” Patrick glanced over at the pantry and the cabinets. “It’s worth a shot, anyway.”
“I’ll see what I can do.” Izzie nodded.
Daphne was thoughtful. “I wish there was a way to know who was Ridden and who wasn’t, short of them going all blotchy and mindless. Would help to defend against them if we could see them coming.”
“Well,” Izzie rubbed her jaw, “there is the ‘ilbal.’ It was a drug that Nicholas Fuller took that supposedly helped him to see the Ridden for what they really were.”
“What, you mean those vials of powder that were found at Fuller’s apartment?” Patrick gave her a skeptical look. “You really think one of us should try that stuff?”
Izzie shrugged. “It might be worth a shot, is all I’m saying.”
“So what’s the plan?” Joyce asked. “Where do we go from here?”
“We still need to figure out what the hell they found down in that mineshaft,” Izzie answered. “Was it just the stuff we’re calling Ink, or was there more to it than that? What happened the other times this kind of thing cropped up, like with the Guildhall fire in the forties and the Eschaton Center murders in the seventies, and is there anything from those cases that might be useful for us to know now? Strategies, tactics, defenses, whatever. And finally, how does Martin Zotovic and Parasol fit into all of this, and just what is it they’re trying to achieve?”
“And then?” Daphne looked a little dubious.
“Then we figure out how to stop them.”
CHAPTER FOUR
It was past noon before Joyce’s clothes were finished in the dryer, by which point Daphne and Izzie had already left together, each carrying one of the “gris-gris bags” that Izzie had assembled: Ziploc sandwich bags filled with sea salt, random bits of quartz that Patrick had found in a drawer, and a piece of silver cutlery from the silverware drawer or silver jewelry that had belonged to his mother. The idea was that, if cornered by one of the Ridden with no way out, they could use the salt to form a ring around themselves, and hope that either the quartz or the silver might be enough to keep the Ridden at bay. If nothing else, they could throw the sea salt in an attacker’s face and hope for the best, or try stabbing them with a fork. Daphne and Izzie were driving back to the FBI offices to retrieve some of the things they needed, and would pick up clothes and supplies at Izzie’s hotel and Daphne’s apartment before returning to Patrick’s house for the night. They’d all agreed that it was safest to spend the hours between sunset and sunrise in a place that they knew to be secure, at least until they could work out other forms of defense.
Patrick had finished cleaning up the kitchen, clearing away the dirty dishes and washing up the pots and pans, and then changed into something a little more appropriate for the cold weather outside, ultimately opting for flannel shirt, jeans, and hiking boots. His quilted jacket was in the dryer with Joyce’s things, a little scuffed up after the evening’s excitement, but still serviceable.
While he was getting dressed he heard the timer on the dryer buzzing down in the basement, and by the time he finished lacing up his hiking boots and returned to the living room, he found Joyce was already dressed in her own clothes again. She was looking at the framed photos on the table beneath the spot where he had hung the tapa cloth that his maternal grandparents had brought with them from Kensington Island back in the seventies.
“Is this you?” Joyce picked up the frame that was sitting front and center, showing a little boy standing beside an old man in overalls.
“Yeah, that’s me and my great-uncle, Alf Tevake. That was taken
when I was about three years old, I think? Right around the time that he moved in with us.”
“He was your dad’s uncle, then?”
Patrick nodded. “My dad died when I was little, and after that it was just me and Mom in the house for a while. Uncle Alf used to have his own apartment in the neighborhood, but when he got older and needed a little more help, he moved in with one of my aunts. When they had another baby on the way, he went to stay with her sister, and then a few years after that moved in with another. He spent the last years of his life moving from one relative’s house to another. But he stayed the longest here with us, and this was where he lived for the rest of his life.” He took the photo from Joyce and looking at it for a long moment before continuing. “I was just a baby when my dad died, and I guess Uncle Alf figured that my mom and I needed him around as much as he needed a place to stay. He helped raise me, really.”
Patrick set the photo back on the table.
“He looks like a sweet old man,” Joyce said, gently.
“Sometimes.” Patrick smiled. “He was kind of a bastard sometimes, too. He’d never had kids of his own, and there were times when he could be hard to live with. But that’s just how families work, I guess.”
Joyce rolled her eyes. “Remind me to tell you about my sisters sometime. If you want to talk about ‘hard to live with,’ I’ve got you beat.”
Patrick looked over and saw that Joyce had brought his quilted jacket up with the rest of the laundry, and left it neatly folded on the couch.
“Well, I guess I should be going,” Joyce said, jerking her thumb toward the door. “I’m hoping that my car is still where I parked it last night. And that those Ridden jerks didn’t mess with it.”
“Hang on, I’ll walk with you.” He went over and picked up his jacket. “My car is parked over there, too. It’s only a ten, fifteen minute walk from here.”
He picked up the two makeshift “gris-gris bags” that Izzie had left for them, and handed one to Joyce.
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