We Will All Go Down Together

by We Will All Go Down Together (v5. 0) (epub)

  “What are you thinking about?” Sylvester asked.

  Here’s the part where I’d look up and smile, if I smiled, it occurred to Carra. “Oh, uh . . . a bunch of things,” she replied, “most of them probably not mine. I always have to concentrate pretty hard to tell what actually originates with me, as opposed to whatever might’ve just leaked in.”

  “I can see how that would be a problem.”

  She shrugged. “I’m used to it. People just give off a . . . general hum, you know, like a light fixture—dead or alive, it doesn’t really matter. The only person I’ve ever not felt that from was my friend Jude.”

  “Jude Hark Chiu-wai? I met him, once.”

  “Oh? I’d’ve thought he was before your time.”

  “A little. But Abbott put him on that pull-list for clean-up jobs—we had him in to look at the basement, two years back, during that last big lab renovation, when we found a box of bones inside the darkroom wall. You were, um, on hiatus, I think.”

  Carra frowned. “I heard he wasn’t working much anymore, except out of his own apartment or in Chinatown. That he didn’t like going anywhere he couldn’t walk to.”

  “For a while, yeah—Abbott told me he had anxiety issues, agoraphobia. Maybe he got better.”

  “Did you happen to see his shadow, when he was here?”

  “What?”

  “. . . nothing.”

  The last time she and Jude spoke, his shadow had been the main—the sole—topic of conversation. That’d been at the Clarke, too: Carra floating and spinning ectoplasm, trying to warn Jude that the same guy he’d been dogging after was none other than the lost half of his soul, cut away with a black-handled knife one night, when they’d all been far too chemically impaired to think better of it. Just another Saturday with the Black Magic Posse, doing like they did.

  That smell, Jude, God . . . it’s you.

  “Seriously, just ask me what you were going to,” Sylvester said, carrying on with the conversation like any normal person, since he couldn’t read her thoughts. “I don’t have to know the context to answer.”

  It caught her off-guard for a moment, but she decided to take him at his word. “All right, then: ‘Did you see his shadow?’ When you stood next to him, under the light . . . did he have one?”

  “A shadow.”

  “Yes.”

  Sylvester thought. “Well, uh—yes, he did. Definitely. I remember thinking I saw it, sort of. Like . . . out of sync with the rest of him, as if it was trying to get away, or something.”

  “But it couldn’t.”

  “Well, no—it was stuck to him, same as yours or mine. Because it was his shadow.”

  “Huh. Well. . . .”

  . . . that’d be different.

  “We had sex, you know,” she heard herself tell Sylvester, suddenly, without the faintest idea why. “Jude and me. Just the once.”

  “I thought he was gay.”

  “Oh yeah, very much so. But I asked him, and he was okay with it; he liked to experiment, back then. My first time. His too, I think—with a woman.” Sylvester didn’t say anything, but that didn’t stop her. “And Janis Mol, from intake? She stayed with me, after the Goshaugh Incident . . . we ended up sleeping together as well, almost every night, ’til she finally moved out. When Abbott got her into housing.”

  “Carra—”

  “I mean, I don’t want to make any judgement calls on how she chooses to categorize herself, these days—or even how I do, really.” She snorted. “I haven’t done enough, for that.”

  “Did you love her?”

  “Still do, as much as I love anybody. Jude, too. I haven’t talked to him since ’99, but—that doesn’t change anything. We just weren’t a good fit, him and me, not unless his soul was somewhere else, and that’s no way to live. As for me and Janis, psis almost never stay together, even if both of them have wards that work. Too much static.”

  “Why are you telling me all this, Carra?”

  “I don’t know,” she whispered. “I—want to be honest.”

  “Which I appreciate.” Leaning forward, he laid his hand carefully next to hers, so close she could feel its warmth. “It just seems like you’re making yourself uncomfortable, which is your business, except. . . .” He paused, choosing his next words carefully. “. . . it’s sort of painful, to watch. Which is my business, I guess.”

  “I’m always uncomfortable.”

  “I know. I read your file.”

  Now she did smile, finally. “Everybody’s read my file.”

  “Around here, yup,” Sylvester agreed. And left it at that.

  They adjusted their glasses at each other, then looked back down at their respective plates, silent, but not uncomfortable. Reminding her, yet again, how easy Sylvester made it for her to be with him, without seeming to try.

  He’d been wary of her when they’d first met, but not afraid, and that had drawn her to him, against her own better judgement. Now, there was always a sense of something soothing shedding from him, especially when they sat together like this, not quite touching; just him, accepting her for who she was, with far more grace than she’d ever managed to.

  “This is . . . different, for me,” she said, cautiously.

  “I get that. You can have a run-down of my sexual history, if you think that’ll help . . . I mean, it’s pretty short.”

  “Really?”

  “Well, yeah: I’m a big old nerd, Carra. Don’t let the whole exotic indigenous person thing fool you.” She smiled again, sidelong, which made him grin. “There you go. Listen, I’m sure you don’t want anybody getting the wrong idea about you and me, not that there really is a ‘you and me,’ yet. . . .”

  “Like you somehow screwed me sane, or something—that it? ‘Oh, Carra Devize finally got herself a boyfriend, and now she’s alllll riiight.’”

  “That’d be pretty good work on my part, considering we’ve never actually, um—”

  “Uh huh.”

  “—and we might not, still, ever. Not unless you’re okay with it.”

  “It’s not that I don’t want to. But you’ve seen the reports, right? When I get excited. . . .” Carra trailed off, then finished: “I’ve hurt people.”

  “Sometimes,” he agreed. “And sometimes not, like in the storage unit. Remember?”

  “. . . I remember.”

  Fallen and twitching next to the Thanatoscopeon, shucking what tenacious fragment remained of the thing Kate-Mary’d named Semblance out her pores, surrounded by a degrading fan of body-fat-slicked spirit Polaroids with telekinetic etching. And looking up as Sylvester looked down, her head in his lap, his palm on her forehead; sampling his memories without wanting to, in uncontrollable little gulps. His Mom fixing a car, wiping grease across one cheekbone. Crows on a fence. That hole in the roof, plastic bags taped across the inside and an old bed’s backboard nailed in on top, yet still it kept dripping. Emptying the pot out in the morning, red with rust, then swishing a steel wool scrubber ’round inside it under the pipe ’til it ran clear, and using it to boil up water for tea.

  “I took all the same tests as you,” he told her, “back when my internship first started—Abbott insisted. Thinks if you don’t know what it’s like to fail every one of them, then you won’t know what to look for when somebody starts getting it right.”

  “That seems illogical.”

  “Kind of, so don’t tell him I told you. Anyhow . . . I don’t have enough psi to pick Lotto tickets, like you couldn’t already tell. Is that good?”

  “It might be.” Another pause. “I am grateful for the way you treated me, maybe more than grateful . . . but it’s hard to tell. Everything’s all run together.”

  “So we take it slow.”

  “Slower than this, even?” She wrung out her hands, knuckles white. “Look, I just want to know if you’re disappointed. If I—scare you.”

 
; “Carra . . . I’d be a fool to say yes or no. But. . . .” He put his hand on hers, so braced for her to flinch he looked pleasantly surprised when she didn’t. “. . . I’ve worked here five years now, at least. I couldn’t deal with a little fear, I’d’ve took off running that first week and never looked back.”

  His thoughts leaking in underneath, borne on a tide of merged energy: I do feel something, though, for you. Right . . . here. Don’t you feel it too, for me?

  Tears pricked her eyes. “Yes,” she said, out loud. Thinking, at the same time—

  . . . but that isn’t necessarily a good thing, for me. Or you.

  It almost never was.

  Jo Glouwer woke to the memory of Davina Cirocco’s tongue in her ear, with what was left of the woman in question coiled all ’round and through her like smoke, that raised black sigil throbbing inside her elbow. Whispering, barest thrum of words, borne on nothing like breath: Hey baby, time to shift ass. Somebody’s here.

  Who?

  Fuck if I know. She says you will, though.

  Jo opened her eyes. Across the bachelor apartment’s single room, a shadow wavered, tall and nude and foully fair as any Thane’s vision, its unbound hair a nest for nightmares.

  “Do I know you?” she asked, thinking she didn’t—yet suspecting herself wrong.

  Only all yuir life, ye daftie, save ’twas that other’s face I wore, the whole time. Now let me in, Jodice; I’ve come far, and I’ve no’ got long. ’Tis time.

  And yes, she did know the tone of that voice, almost from birth.

  “Nan,” Jo said. “Told me was just a cold you had, last time I called.”

  Aye, as the leech at the Clinic claimed, for all the good he did me. Still, ’tis of nae moment: my Black Man visited at the gasp and showed me what best tae do, spending that other’s last power tae bring me o’er, tae settle what’s so long owed. Will ye help or no’?

  Jo shook her head, clearing it only slightly. The room was dim, dusty; she didn’t recall having drawn her shades in a week, no more than what she might’ve last ate or when she’d bathed. Why bother, so long as she had Davina? Was company made a home, after all.

  Her new life: playing nursemaid to her murdered lover, forever cradled inside Jo’s ectoplasm-attracting aura, while the other spooks still coaxed to her moth-light moaned outside in jealousy. Sometimes, she roused herself to do small jobs for ready cash, booked through the Freihoeven Institute—Ross’d mentioned her to them as he passed through an internship there, in the wake of Glouwer-Cirocco-Puget’s dissolution.

  But she hadn’t seen him in person since that day, when he held her hand and cried as she wiped blood off Dav’s cold face. Now he ran some sort of website—CreepTracker.org—providing a forum for Ontario’s aspiring paranormal investigators, which the Freihoeven mined in turn for fresh leads as to where the maximum spooky shite might currently be happening.

  The work was easy, now she knew what she was doing, though, and for that she’d always thank him. It filled the proverbial hole, much smaller, if never entirely gone.

  Not even Dav could see to that.

  Eight long years since she and what was left of Davina Cirocco had been . . . joined, and she still wasn’t used to having people in her place who weren’t dead, no more than she was to thinking of it as only her place. So to find Euwphaim Glouwer’s last fragment suddenly there, as well, was hardly a great surprise, even now she knew the truth—how every touched tale her Nan’d ever told her was nothing but gospel, hard and dreadful reality. How everything Jo knew was built on someone else’s pain.

  She could remember the very moment, exactly, when her world had spun off-kilter: right as that black angel Euwphaim so loved laid its uncanny imitation of a hand in hers and kissed her inside the elbow, imprinting her with its awful seal.

  Jo sighed, shaking her head again. “You saying I’ve a choice?”

  Cert, girl. The same as any other.

  “I doubt that, somewhat.”

  I’ve ne’er told lies tae you, Jodice, my hen. Not wi’out reason.

  Jo swung her legs out of bed and sat up, floor cold beneath her feet. Behind her, she felt Davina eddy away, then swing back, as though leash-yanked, reassembling herself with her knobbly knees crossed, tucked ever so slightly behind one of Jo’s broad shoulders. More a pose struck than any real show of fear, but Euwphaim was an awful object, and no mistake—had been even before, wrapped for comfort and camouflage in a long-dead woman’s sagging skin, “her” face set in a parody of kindly old age.

  Jo put one hand on her knee, palm up, closest to Dav’s. Closed her lashes and shivered, gooseflesh stippling all along the love-line, as her living energy-field spiked to the brief brush of Dav’s dead one.

  Come all right in the end, we just give her her will, she tried to tell her. But: Enough delay, her Nana snapped back, impatient. Will ye do’t, girl?

  “Oh, I’ll help, if it’ll set me free,” Jo replied. “Though, I’ll tell you this much—I’m none too like to boil a bloody child for flying ointment just to get from here to Overdeere.”

  Did I say as ye should?

  “Not yet.”

  Nor shall I. The no-voice turned persuasive, almost gentle. All that falls tae you is tae bring our coven together once more, or close as can be. There’s Jonet’s girl, for one, that sees mair e’en than yoursel’, though the foremost Rusk o’ this time’s vowed hersel’ tae the Kirk, which cuts Alizoun’s get from the mix. But that Roke boy, the soiled priest—he’ll gi’ ye what ye need, for he fears his family far mair than e’er he loved ’em. Only list tae me, an’ you’ll see it done.

  At her elbow, Dav gave a thin hitch of laughter. Uh huh, piece of fuckin’ cake. You really down with all this mediaeval bullshit, Jo?

  Hold yuir tongue, dead-girl. Ye’ve tae do’t, Jodice, sharpish, wi’ nae mair dispute. Yuir a witch, born and bred, and blood is blood.

  “Blood, aye, but no witch. I’ve no learning on it, no craft—”

  Ye took the mark, same as us all.

  “You know as well as me why I did that.”

  Aye. And has she thanked ye for it yet, yuir leman? Or would she rather be Below, ploughing hot coals, where all her kind maun go?

  Another sidelong eye-flick from Davina, who probably had choice words lurking hid behind her ghost-teeth on the subject of whom a woman might choose to bed down with versus damnation predestined, if sense enough not to say ’em out loud. Jo rubbed at her forehead, feeling a migraine coming on.

  She knew Euwphaim correct, however, in her heart of hearts: what Jo had done to bring Dav “back” sprang from selfishness alone, a futile railing against death driving her to reorder the universe by force.

  ’Tis yuir choice, her Nan lied, empty eyes now full as two moons, just rising. So say the word an’ send me elsewhere, if it suits ye better—leave us Three Betrayed unavenged, after all this time and worry, all this bloody sacrifice. Do as ye will, an’ live wi’ it.

  Think I’ve not lived with worse? Jo ached to snap back, but didn’t.

  :At Euwphaim Glouwer’s request, I serve without complaint,: the angel—Ashreel Maskim—had told her, softly, :even I, who once laid the foundations of this world with my six siblings’ help. For she and I are such old friends, I can remember seeing the very idea of you form in her, long ago . . . at my suggestion, of course.:

  You were there? she remembered blurting out, amazed.

  To which it replied—:Why not? I am there still.:

  (Here, there, everywhere else. Everywhere, at once.)

  And thus was the pact signed, hours after Jo had penned Davina’s soul in her bottle, once she’d finally cried and drunk enough to call her Nan for that bloody name. Thus had it been signed, Jo later realized, from the very second its first syllable struck her eardrum. That simple; that easy. That irreversible.

  Damnation take her, Jo thought, wearily, and me too, for bad measure.
But let Davina walk free of this, please Christ, once it’s played to its close. . . .

  So long as Jo was already dead, that was, when it happened. Long as she didn’t have to stand there and watch Dav go, then live the rest of her God-damned life alone.

  Jo bent her head, aura blossoming coronal, open invitation to any dead thing within range; heard every shade for a mile ’round turn and sniff as she did, poised to come running. But was Euwphaim’s shade alone she allowed to enter in before twitching it shut once more—a bubble of invisible force, proof against death’s gravity for so long as Jo chose. Saw the dead witch breathe out a held sigh in relief at no longer having to spend so much effort to hold herself together, and thought: That’s her freed for mischief, and those she turns it upon won’t thank me for it.

  But then again, considering who those were, and their works—the family Druir, creatures rather than people, surely, even by her own unorthdox standards—Jo couldn’t really bring herself to feel too bad.

  Good girl, Jodice, her grandmother said, hugging her so close Jo could feel ghost-bones grate icy-sharp against her own. This will nae be forgot.

  While Jo just looked to Davina, dragging hard on that cigarette of hers and shaking her rexed red head as she did it, as though to say: Bad idea, baby. Bad, bad idea.

  And thinking, in her turn—No other kind in my world, as you well enough know. Ye great American hoor.

  “Save your thanks ’til the deed be done,” she replied out loud, reaching for her car keys.

  “Janis said you could maybe help,” Josh Kim told Carra in Abbott’s office—a biggish guy perching uncomfortably on one of those rickety little intake chairs, black hair buzzed to the scalp instead of caught back in a clip, like Sylvester’s. They made for odd bookends, Korean vs. Mohawk, supplicant vs. enabler, to this whole innately freakish system: psychical research, bastard child of magic and science, forever the single pastiest game in town. “Because of . . . what you are, I guess. Your family.”

  Carra frowned. “All I had was my mother, Mister Kim. And she’s dead.”

  Beside them, Janis sighed. “No, Carra,” she said. “I meant your other family.”

  “The Five-Family Coven, that’s what this is about,” Abbott chimed in, helpfully, from behind his desk. “You see, Mister Kim’s girlfr—” Kim made a flapping motion, causing Abbott to backpedal: “—his friend, Galit Michaels, was listed as a missing person by the Ontario Provincial Police in 2003. She was last seen in Overdeere, out by the Lake of the North.”