We Will All Go Down Together

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

  “Mmm, well. That’s always the question.”

  Was a weird, teasing note slid into her voice as she said it, almost sly; cast a glance back over her shoulder, one pupil already lengthening, catlike in its slant-set Balkan socket.

  Explaining: “I don’t know its name, so I call it Nobody—Mister Nobody. But I’ve been checking grimoires for it ever since I realized I can read any language, human or not, which is how I met Mac in the first place.”

  “Not one of the Seven, though.”

  “The Maskim? Liber Carne was one of the first places I looked, so no.” Her yellowing eyes narrowed. “Still, you got a connection with those things, I guess . . . you and old Creepy Gramma, back there.”

  “Aye, somewhat. But then, I s’pose your man’s told you that half of it, at least.”

  “Roke’s not ‘my man.’”

  Interesting, Jo thought; he’d been Mac, when Judy wasn’t thinking about it.

  “Suit yourself,” she said. “So . . . how’ll you know, you do find this Mister Nobody of yours?”

  “Oh, don’t you worry your head ’bout that, not-so-small medium at large. I’ll know.”

  Jo looked away, back at the Connaught. “Must gall you somewhat to be here, though,” she ventured. “So close to holy things.”

  Judy shook her head. “Doesn’t work that way. See, I’m favoured of God, supposedly, because he chose me to make a point with. Made a walking object lesson of me, just to prove that, when you live inside a universe God created, nothing happens except what God allows to happen.”

  If Euwphaim could’ve spat, she would’ve. God, forbye? I’ll ha’ nae truck wi’ him.

  “And yet,” Judy shot back, toneless.

  Say on, Euwphaim demanded.

  “Still don’t get it, do you?” Judy replied. “You only exist because God lets you, blasphemy and all—just like the angels, all the angels, ones who screwed your million-gone great-greats included. So it must follow he wanted a Schism, wanted Nephilim, Himself only knows why. Wanted you, Euwphaim Glouwer, with just power enough to hurt yourself trying to hurt Him. Even the fact you can stay angry at Him, that’s something He allows you: free will, the gift that keeps on giving. The angels don’t have that. Which is why they hate us for it, almost as much as we hate ourselves.”

  My Black Man loves me, ye mere bag o’ wind.

  “Maybe,” Judy agreed. “Never met the gentleman, that I know of. But I’ve knocked a few of his relatives down, in my time—made ’em bleed, too. And I’m pretty sure that was only ’cause God let me.”

  Ye ne’er.

  Another of those smiles, eyes lightening a bit further, pupils even more bent. “Try me.”

  Another pause ensued, wrapped in uncomfortable silence.

  “So,” Judy asked, at last. “Monster-killing nuns, huh?” To which Jo nodded.

  “Aye, that’s right. Your man was their confessor, once.”

  “He’s not my . . . Yeah, well, guess he is, at that. Christ, this city.”

  “It’s chockablock with oddity, that’s true enough. But you’ve him to protect you, at the least.”

  Judy smiled at that so strangely that Jo wanted to pull back. “From what, Mister Nobody’s leavings? That’s trouble for other people, same way a skunk can’t smell its own stink. I’m like a . . . haunted house, one of those suburban bungalows where somebody cooked meth for a year, the kind cleans up really nice, but then you move in and start bleeding from the eyes. I don’t get any worse, even if I don’t get any better. Just stay . . . me.”

  “Roke must be truly perfect for you, then.”

  “He is, yeah. ’Cause being less than half human, none of the toxic shit I spew out even touches him. Making him maybe the one person in this city I can’t hurt, not unintentionally—”

  Her eyes dropped, still brown, still human. And Jo felt the unspoke words resound inside her head: . . . not as much, anyway.

  After a second, Euwphaim laughed, a lewd, gloating chuckle. Ye foolish child. The door opened, and Roke stepped out, smug as a creamery cat, with a wooden rune-carved box tucked under one arm and a hammer hanging from his other hand: perfectly normal claw-head and a rubber grip, like it came from Home Hardware. The woman striding beside him was tall, dark, and frighteningly lovely, a true warrior-cleric from her close-cut reddish natural hair to her sensible shoes. Sister—no, Mother now—Blandina, Jo’s brain supplied, remembering a spray of photos she’d once seen tossed across Abbott’s desk.

  She rolled the window down as they paused a few feet away, curious to hear their conversation.

  My pretty Alizoun, Euwphaim breathed, sounding for the first time halfway impressed. ’Tis she herself reborn, touch o’ the tar or no. Oh, that she might hear me!

  The nun didn’t react at all, however—only laid her hand on Roke’s arm, a gesture no one could mistake for tender. Telling him: “You’ll have to leave it in for it to do any good—”

  “I know, B.”

  “—so if we don’t get it back, I’ll assume you actually used it, instead of selling it. Don’t prove me wrong.”

  “Now, Mother, would I do that?”

  “I find out differently, you’ll answer. And we’ll need the box back, too.”

  “Forgive me,” Jo called out. “But what is this we’re talking about, exactly?”

  “The Ordo’s secret weapon against the Druirs,” Roke said, flipping the box’s lid up, tilting it for Jo to see—a squarish, rusty metal spike, some six inches long. “Relic nail, cold iron, supposedly used to martyr a saint. . . .”

  “Severo,” supplied Blandina, flatly. “Early Christian bishop from Barcelona. Had it driven into his skull by pagans.”

  Reminded, Roke looked down at the hammer. “Forgot to ask: this holy, too?”

  “Blessed just this morning. By the guy who has your old job.”

  “Hmmm, convenient.”

  The Ordo’s battle-leader swept her wintery gaze over the car’s occupants, then gave a curt little nod—like she’d won a bet with herself and wished she hadn’t. “Your team, I take it: a witch born from witches, the girl who got Cillian Frye defrocked, whatever’s in the back. Plus you.”

  “Two ghosts, one a much worse witch’s, and yes. We’re also looking to hook up with Carraclough Devize on the way. You came too, it’d be like we were getting the band back together.”

  “Pass.”

  “That’s what I thought.” Roke latched the box again. “Now, I owe you, obviously.”

  “I’m aware of that.” Blandina glanced at the car again, huffing. “Do this right, Roke. I’ll have the Anchoress pray for you.”

  “Since you’re not going to?”

  “Don’t be so sure. Considering how much you’ll need it, I just might.”

  “I’ll take my chances.”

  Another nod. “Yes,” Blandina replied. And shut the Connaught’s rear entry in his face.

  Miles on, the Devize/Hark/Horse-Kicker/Kim Uncomfortable Canadian Road Trip ™ was already a few miles out of the GTA. Jude had his shoes off and his feet up, apparently in some sort of trance—it was the slightly visible Buddhist nimbus of transparent purple flame that gave it away—while Carra studied the fat yet remarkably uninformative file Sylvester had brought along.

  A relatively tiny (two miles square) glacier-carved basin with a steep southern drop, the Lake of the North is located up past Gananoque, Dr. Abbott’s introductory monograph began. Surviving settlements trace a loose crescent around its rim. These include Sulfa, site of a thriving anti-malaria drug industry, and the twinned former Anabaptist religious colonies of Your Lips and God’s Ear, all within a few hours’ drive of villages like Chaste, Overdeere (its own economy maintained by the Sidderstane family canning factory), and Quarry Argent. The locally infamous “phantom village” of Dourvale, though unoccupied, also remains unaccountably listed on most maps.

  Once a resi
dential development planned around Quarry Argent’s silver mine by poet turned amateur folklore collector Torrance Sidderstane, Dourvale was named after the hereditary holdings of a noble Scots family he claimed to be descended from and had just married back into.

  After Torrance’s 1911 conviction for “death by misadventure” in the disappearance of his pregnant bride, however, Sidderstane’s relatives found their plans to remake the mansion he’d built on the lake’s Ice Age esker-rimmed “Dourvale shore” over into a luxury hotel and spa thwarted when the resulting scandal rendered it a socially unsuitable vacation spot.

  Dourvale village would have been an adjunct to the spa/hotel combo, a place for workers and their families to live, with a selection of rental cottages left over for the tourist trade. 1911 was also the same year the Quarry Argent silver mine tapped out, however, cutting the area’s workforce in half. Most migrated to other townships or cities (Barrie, in particular), and the project was discontinued.

  In 1919, needing a cash injection to fund their permanent relocation to Toronto, the Sidderstanes cut a deal that saw their former home and its grounds turned into a Flu Pandemic hospital-cum-hospice, TB ward, and mass graveyard by the Ontario government. New family head Dacre Dowersby Sidderstane used the overflow to fund another eccentric and ambitious project, that of transporting the former Witch-House at Eye from Scotland to Canada and rebuilding it in Scarborough, from the foundations up. Today, the so-called Sidderstane Mercy Hall buildings’ ruined remains can be located by hiking through various farms’ uncleared back-lots, which have merged to form one sprawling, near-impenetrable deadfall.

  Photos had been appended, and Carra flipped through them: karst topography, limestone hell-holes, alkaline barrens of scrub and swamp, bordering and encroached on by various timber sinks. Then some studies of the Lake itself, surprisingly beautiful, its degraded limestone sides supporting cliffs, caves, and the occasional grotto, along with a series of unusually top-heavy rock pillars known as “flowerpots.” A perfect place to disappear in, according to the chart Abbott had somehow obtained from the Ontario Provincial Police, which collated fifty years’ worth of localized missing-persons records.

  Flipping the file closed, Carra nudged Jude. “Tell me what this guy Barney said,” she demanded.

  Without opening his eyes: “Everything?”

  “Skip the pillow talk.”

  Jude sat up, shooting a glance at Sylvester, head bent over his phone’s GPS app. “Very . . . heterocentric of you.” Adding, as she raised a brow: “All right, all right. You know about the Stane. . . .”

  “Vaguely. It’s this—thing, the Druirs have it—”

  “—possibly a meteorite, possibly a pebble from what used to be Faerie itself. Lady Glauce’s bride-price. Well, Wrob claimed that the Stane anchors Dourvale, or at least the big pile of dirt your cousins live in. . . .”

  “It’s called a brugh.”

  “—which most people find impossible to locate, unless they have somebody like you along. That’s because the Stane only responds to Druir blood or some variation thereof. To everybody else, it makes it seem like the brugh isn’t even there, because—well, it is, and it isn’t. It’s in two places at once, Ontario and Scotland, but not just that. . . .”

  “—it’s in two times at once too,” Sy chimed in. “Right?”

  “You’ve heard this one before,” Jude said, slightly disgruntled.

  Sy shrugged. “Been a theory for some time at the Institute. Certainly fits with various information about the other Dourvale, the original: lots of stories about folks wandering around in a wood they’d never seen before, tripping across what sounds like twentieth-century technology, and being horrified by it. In 1936, an old man was found wandering near Overdeere; he claimed to be ten years old, spoke a dialect so thick they had to get the town centenarian to translate, and died of measles within a week.”

  “How’d he get there?” Kim asked, shifting lanes.

  “Said he was looking after his Dad’s sheep, and a lady beckoned him away, promised him sugar-candy. But she took him to a low place instead, very dark, and kept me lang. He got away when she was asleep—another lady helped him, tall and fair, wi’ hair like leaves. And then he was stumbling out onto the highway, eight times older than he’d been that morning.”

  Kim turned his head, eyes suddenly haunted. “The first chick . . . what’d her hair look like?”

  A pause. “Red,” Sy replied, at last.

  To himself, quiet: “Bitch.”

  For the next hour, Kim drove hard, pushing the speed limit, slipping in a series of ever-less-soporific CDs: Slipknot turned up loud, Corpusse, Malhavoc. By the time Cannibal Corpse rolled around, Jude leaning his head in next to Carra’s, whispering: “Family or not, you’re still going to need a tithe.”

  “Cross that bridge when we get to it, I guess. And no, we are not giving them half your damn soul, Jude. First off, I’m not even sure they’d want it—but you will later on, no matter how inconvenient you happen to find it to deal with, right now.”

  “So you keep claiming,” said Jude.

  Around Chaste, GPS suddenly quit and froze simultaneously, with no warning but a brief greenish flicker. By then, things were getting dimmer, and everybody’s stomach was rumbling, so Kim pulled into a gas station for directions, plus a combined Tim’s and toilet run.

  “Where are we, man?” he asked the guy behind the counter, who just grinned.

  “This’s Paragon, almost,” he replied. “Where’d you think?”

  “Uh . . . we just passed Chaste, so . . . Quarry Argent?”

  “Took a wrong turn, maybe. Easy to do when you’re not from here.”

  Kim bristled. “Well, I was born in Toronto,” he pointed out. “Close enough for jazz?”

  “Given ya ended up here, maybe not. Where ya headed?”

  “Over—” Kim began; “Dourvale,” Carra put in, perhaps inadvisably, at almost the same time. And took a tiny amount of pleasure in the way the word made the man flinch, then flinch again, once he’d fully registered her features.

  “Sorry, ma’am,” he said, finally. “I didn’t . . . you got family business, up there? I can—think I got a copy of the right map, still. Let me look.”

  Several, as it turned out. Probably doesn’t get much call for them in the normal run of things, Carra thought, slipping a pack of peanuts into her pocket while holding the man’s gaze, pointedly not offering to pay for them; he just swallowed and nodded. Kim didn’t notice. As she left, he was saying: “Okay, this looks doable, long as you talk me through it a couple of times.”

  “Glad to,” the man replied, eyes still on Carra as she made her way outside, where she found Sy and Jude drinking coffee against the side of the van. “No, there’s not really a fairy-tale tradition in Hong Kong, per se,” Jude was telling him. “Mogwai, of course, but that’s different—they’re their own thing. The British called them fairies because they didn’t know what else to call them, or sometimes demons, but they’re more like animistic spirits, leftover remnants of the pre-Taoist world.”

  “Like Shinto in Japan.” Jude nodded. “Some Christian theologists thought Celtic fairies were demons, too. Or ghosts—the pagan dead, trying to seduce people away from Jesus with big parties and free food. That’s why fairies hung around with witches, and vice versa.”

  “Ai-yah, what else were they going to say? But whenever you peel the big-F Fae legend back far enough, you end up with a secret people or lost tribe idea, some sort of historical/evolutionary subdivision, surviving alongside humankind through guile and child-stealing.” To Carra: “Though why they’d bother, when they can obviously interbreed with adult humans anyhow. . . .”

  Carra thought for a moment. “Because it hurts more,” she replied. “Changeling babies sicken and ‘die,’ leaving human parents unaware their real kid is still alive somewhere, caught in yon green hill tae dwell. Years later, they’re so
glamoured up they can walk right past their own mother and father without recognizing them, and vice versa.”

  “They hate us that much,” Kim said from behind her. She shrugged, sadly.

  “Maybe. But then again—I’ve also heard they envy us because we’ve got what they don’t, supposedly: a soul. Dead Fae blow away, like leaves, but humans at least go somewhere. I’ve seen it.”

  “Where?”

  “I don’t know.”

  (None of us do.)

  Unable to stop herself from thinking, as she said it: Witches on one side, Fae on the other; witches can sell their souls, but the Fae don’t have anything to sell. So—what about me?

  She looked over at Jude, holding his hand up in front of the gas station’s sign for the express purpose of seeing how long it would take his shadow to remember to mimic the gesture, and for just a split second, she wanted to shake him ’til his teeth clacked. Stupid dogshit ghost, he’d called it to its face; his nature’s better part, gentle and empathetic, guilelessly good. She feared for it once this trip was over, without her to keep him from stuffing it in a damn box and burying it somewhere.

  But then again, when she thought about it further—she feared for all of them, a little.

  “My turn,” she announced, heading for the door marked LADIES.

  Two hours later, back on the road, squinting against the dark, the rising mist. Sylvester at the wheel, highbeams off to cut the mist-glare, and Carra now riding shotgun so Kim could doze; she was trying to help him negotiate by feeling out in front of them, letting her mind become diffuse, but it was hard when every reflective road-marker came at you like a distracting, cat’s-eye flash.

  Sy drove with both hands kept glued to the wheel, as though he could guide the car in the proper direction through sheer need alone, he only held on tight enough. Four wheels, a chassis, and an engine, peeling headlong from highway to road to route, asphalt to tar to dirt and gravel, while the trees clustered in and began to overhang, the towns shrunk to crossings, the sky grew full of cold stars.

  Feel ahead. Feel ahead. Open yourself up. Don’t be afraid.