by Harvey Click
Dexter heard the peevish edge in her voice, but it seemed far away in some other layer of his mind. He was listening to the layer that had worked on the puzzle that changed its rules. What had Grimes called it? Fathom-two noesis.
“Then maybe they’re quantum wormholes,” he said. “Stephen Hawking dreamed them up, which means they’re probably just science fiction. Even if they exist they’re short-lived, I mean very short.”
His own voice sounded far away, up there in the layer where people chatted and watched television. Fathom-two was working out a kind of equation in his brain, Philosopher plus spectron equals Grinchin equals why I started all this trouble and why Grimes kept me out of it for a while.
“Spectrons are short-lived too, unless they’re captured,” Mary said. “Grimes said there’s a way to hold them stable inside some kind of crystal, and then you have a spectrehole. Alchemists and medicine men figured it out long ago, but no one knows how to do it anymore. That means spectreholes are worth killing for these days.”
They were in the park now, walking along the bike path with a dark field on their left and an overgrown riverbank on their right. Fathom-two saw trouble and gave up on the equation. Dexter watched both sides but saw nothing.
“That still doesn’t explain why you can stick one inside a buffalo horn and talk to dead people,” he said.
“I told you, they’re doorways to other worlds,” she said. “That’s how mediums talk to the dead. They’re able to capture a spectron with their minds and hold it stable for a few minutes.”
Fathom-two was quiet; fathom-two watched the riverbank.
“Don’t ask me to explain it,” Mary said, “but Grimes talked about some kind of magnetism between the spectron and the human mind.”
Magnetism between the spectron and the human mind. Maybe when he slept he captured a spectron and a Philosopher named Grinchin infiltrated his dreams. “Someone has trained you,” Grimes had said.
Yeah. Maybe a dead teacher in another world farther away than the moon.
“That’s how Grimes used to talk to his main man,” Mary said. “He captured a spectron with his brain.”
“What do you mean, his main man?”
“Some dead wizard he called the Philosopher,” she said.
The riverbank moved. Dexter yelled at Mary to run, but already clumps of darkness wearing camouflage clothes were lunging from the bushes. He sent one grunting backwards with the flat of his foot, slammed another with his fist, and turned to see a ball bat swinging toward his face. He ducked and drove his shoulder into the batter’s gut. They both fell and pounded each other, but Dexter got up and the batter didn’t.
He looked around for Mary, unwilling to run unless she already had, but before he could make sense out of the sprinting shadows someone jumped him from behind. Dexter gave him a short piggyback ride and slammed him headfirst onto the asphalt bike path. He whirled to crush a camouflaged nose and hurtled through the air to crack a slab of ribs with both feet. He grabbed an arm clamped around his neck and yanked the body over his shoulder while another body leaped at him with a kung-fu shriek. This one was slim and obviously female, but when Dexter was done kicking her it would take a good doctor to tell.
More clumps of camo poured out of darkness everywhere he turned. He kicked and hit and heard bones snapping and hoped they weren’t his own. Getting too thick here; time to run whether Mary had or not. He was bolting across the field past a tree when fathom-two told him someone was hiding behind the trunk, but sometimes even foresight sees things too late. His right ear exploded with pain, and he smashed face-down into hard sod. After the grass flickered back into focus, he rolled over and looked up the muzzle of a gun sniffing his face like a wolf with one nostril.
Fathom-two watched the scene in slow motion: it was only a puzzle. The camo-dressed thug hadn’t shot Dexter yet so he probably wasn’t supposed to, but even with his mask on he looked so scared that he might just forget his orders, muzzle trembling, eyes darting left and right looking for help. Fathom-two saw help coming from all directions and said, “This puzzle has one solution.”
Dexter gently pushed the gun to the side, grasped a handful of camo-cloth beneath the chin, and jerked hard. Neck bones cracked, and the head felt heavy as a bowling ball hanging loose like that. He got up in time to plant his shoe in a groin and bash another mask with his fist.
The playing field was alive with shapes moving. He looked for Mary and saw that she was behind him with her back to his, making a four-armed fighter with eyes all around its head. Her silver wire sizzled through the air like a streak of lightning and caught someone who roared like thunder. Flesh isn’t much of a weapon, Dexter thought as his aching hands and feet thumped bone; never leave home without a gun. Bodies littered the ground, but plenty more were coming. He heard vehicles arriving at the school and doubted they were police cars. Shadows scurried from tree to tree.
Mary lassoed a neck with her wire and jerked till blood blotted the mask. “Jesus, they’re all over the fucking place,” she said. “Let’s make a run for it.”
They raced back the direction they’d come, hugging tree shadows along the riverbank. Mary’s legs were short, but they could move. Dexter stayed behind her as a shield in case the bastards used their guns, but the only sharp sounds ringing out were shouts.
They made it to the street and ran on the sidewalk with no cover and nowhere safe to run, and even fathom-two didn’t know what to do. A white utility van nosed out of a side street and blocked their path. Dexter heard car engines firing up in the school lot and heard a twig snap as a shadow darted behind a hedge. He saw a space between two houses that looked safer than some other spaces and he tugged Mary’s sleeve, but she didn’t move.
The van driver opened the passenger door and stared at them. Long white hair nearly hid his face, but what showed wasn’t pretty. His pale eyes flashed pink in the headlights of an approaching car.
“Come on,” Dexter said, but Mary wouldn’t budge. She stood there panting and staring at the van driver while the car crawled past them, just an elderly couple out for a moonlight drive, but Dexter heard more cars coming filled with people who were younger and better armed.
“Come on!” he yelled.
The van driver grinned and stammered, his gray tongue licking tiny jagged teeth while a couple more engines fired up in the distance. Mary suddenly moved. She pulled Dexter to the passenger door, shoved him into the van, and scrambled in on top of him. It lurched forward before she got the door shut.
“I . . . I . . . I . . .” the driver said. “Lost Ones are out tonight and . . . and . . .”
“We figured that out already,” Mary said. “Just get this fucking crate moving.”
He stepped on the gas and Dexter groaned. Both of his arms hurt, but Mary was sitting on the one that hurt worse.
“Bitter Ember, Bitter Ember,” the driver kept saying. “I . . . I . . . I . . .”
“Who the hell is this?” Dexter asked.
“He’s okay,” Mary said, but she didn’t sound very sure. “This is Greg, what, Hampton, Hamilton?”
“It’s Garrick now,” he said. “Garrick Haldan. Father sent me, he’s been watching the New Society Gallery. It’s so good to see you again, I . . . I . . . I . . .” He raced through a red light while his stammer droned out.
“Save the talk,” Mary said. “Just pay attention to your driving.”
“Where are you taking us?” Dexter asked. “Who’s your father?”
Garrick hit the brake and skidded around a corner.
“Michael Grimes,” he said.
***
Grimes tried to hear what Kat was saying, but the big room above New Society Gallery was many miles distant and tightly shielded, and now a rasping noise nibbled at his concentration like an insect trapped inside his skull. It was that damned thimble buzzing with Letha’s signal.
His head pounded when he removed his listening shells, but he smiled despite the pain. This was the perfect
time to show Letha where he was, before Dr. Radcliff and Bitter arrived. He got up and lifted the thimble off Garrick’s projection ruby. The smoke screen crackled with anger, and Letha was already bitching before he got back to his chair. Her anger made his smile bigger.
“I knew you were here,” she said. “Garrick’s been looking guilty like he’s hiding some ugly little secret, and there you are.”
Grimes stuck a cigar in his mouth to give his grin something to chew on. “Weren’t you worried I was dead?” he asked.
“I was hoping, but I know you too well,” she said. “You have no right to be here.”
“Why not? Garrick’s my son too—no?”
“You dirty bastard,” she said. “You know damn well the Lost Ones are looking for you.”
“Of course,” he said. “I was window-peeping on them just a moment ago. They have poor Burne tied up on the ceiling like a fly, and I feel rather sorry for him.” Grimes smiled and chewed his cigar.
“He is a fly and so are you,” Letha said. “They’re going to swat you very soon, and I don’t want Garrick in the line of fire.”
“Oh, I’m not very worried,” Grimes said. “This Cincinnati headquarters seems to be staffed with fools.”
“You better be worried,” she said. “Who’s in charge there?”
“Somebody named Rebus. Ever hear of him?”
“Everyone’s heard of Rebus,” she said. “Rumor has it he’s your old pal Professor Krickbaum.”
“Hmm.” Grimes frowned and tried to light his cigar. “It’s true I’ve seen him project with no apparent medium, but somehow . . .” The cigar wouldn’t light. “Somehow I can’t see that fat silly man . . .”
“I just hope you weren’t stupid enough to give him the code to Garrick’s ruby,” Letha said.
“No, of course not,” Grimes said.
Angry red streaks shot through the smoke screen like a storm of meteors. “You stupid old man,” she said. “You gave Krickbaum Garrick’s code, didn’t you? Where is he?”
“Um, I believe he’s out shopping.”
“At this hour? Damn you, Michael, I’m going to kill you!”
“You needn’t worry about Garrick,” he said. “The Lost Ones don’t even know he exists.”
“By now they know whatever Burne knows,” she said.
“Which is nothing. I taught Burne to know nothing, so relax.”
“He better know nothing,” she said. “I wish you were dead. Why aren’t you?”
“Simple,” he said. “I wasn’t home when my house blew up. I drove away before the Lost Ones came, but I made Burne believe that I returned. I made him believe that he web-tied me in my study, but I think what he tied was that nice Queen Anne chair.” Grimes sighed. “It’s just ashes now, along with all the rest of my things.”
“Sure,” Letha said. “First you cleared out anything worth a dime, and pretty soon some beneficiary who looks just like you is going to collect a pile of insurance money. Tell me I’m wrong. Now you intend to freeload off Garrick and get him killed.”
“What do you mean, freeload? I daresay I lent him a few dollars to build this house.” Grimes finally got his cigar lit. “My plan was for the back door to snap shut and trap the assassins in a nice little inferno, and the loonies at New Society would assume I was dead too. Unfortunately, Ryver smelled a trap.”
“The cops found your bones,” Letha said.
Grimes chuckled. “I’ve always found it handy to keep a skeleton in my closet. Do you recall your old friend, what was his name, Girardi? It was considerate of you to pick a lover precisely my size.”
He pulled a sweet whiff of Havana up his nose and watched the news sink into Letha’s expression. She managed a smile, but it wasn’t pretty.
“But he was much taller than you, my dear, and much more handsome,” she said.
“Perhaps, but the years haven’t been so kind to him.”
Letha’s anger crackled on the screen like flames in the fireplace. Grimes sat back and puffed his corona. It was a warm fire and a comfortable chair and a damned good cigar. No matter how long you lived, there were so few perfect moments such as this.
“The Lost Ones won’t be fooled by a stupid old fart and his pile of bones,” she said. “They’ll be here soon.”
“Maybe so, but I’ll see them coming,” he said. “It’s easy to eavesdrop through Burne’s eyes and ears. Eye, I should say—singular now. You see, I trained him to be a bug on the ceiling.”
“You’re a miserable sadistic old bastard,” she said. “You programmed Burne to betray you, and then you rigged your house to explode after everyone was safely out because you wanted the Lost Ones to capture him. You couldn’t see through their shielding unless he was there.”
Grimes got up and poked the fire. “I daresay Burne wasn’t much good for anything else,” he said. “He certainly couldn’t cook worth a damn. At least I’ve given him some small value.”
“You used to say you loved him like a son,” Letha said. “I guess that’s true enough, because now you’re using your own son just as selfishly. You don’t give a damn about anyone, do you?”
Grimes smiled and watched sparks dance up the flue. “Sometimes love must follow strange maps,” he said.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Mary awoke in a brass bed and couldn’t remember where she was. Sunlight streamed through the curtains of two windows, lighting an antique oak dresser and a matching washstand. Dexter slept beside her beneath a patchwork quilt. The log walls reminded her: they were in Garrick Haldan’s big log house in a woods south of Columbus. Grimes was there too, not dead after all. She lay quietly for a while and reviewed the strange stories he and Garrick had told them, how Grimes had escaped capture and Ryver had survived an ambush, how Johnny Burne hung from a ceiling in a cocoon and Grimes eavesdropped through his eyes and ears.
She got up without waking Dexter and slipped out of the bedroom. The upstairs hallway smelled like animals; maybe squirrels or raccoons were nesting in one of the rooms. She went to the bathroom and showered.
Her toothbrush and fresh clothes were at Dexter’s house. She found a comb with a few strands of Garrick’s long hair and rinsed it under scalding water. He wasn’t the kind of person she wanted to share cooties with. She’d met him a few times during the years she’d lived with Grimes, but barely. There’d never been any hint that he was Grimes’ son. Why keep it secret? In those days she took Grimes’ secrecy for granted, but now she was sick of it.
She dressed and stepped into the animal-stinking hallway. A door near the stairs hung open, and she saw a large room set up as a laboratory, walls lined with cages containing rodents and birds. Garrick sat at a long table and was doing something horrible to a cat. She stared until he noticed her.
“Come in,” he said.
A yellow tomcat was strapped upright to a steel cross, blood trickling from its nostrils. Its legs struggled feebly against the leather straps, and its tail twitched as if it were hunting a mouse, but its head was held still by a metal ring attached to its skull with screws.
The top of its skull had been removed.
“Observe,” Garrick said, pointing a pencil at the cat’s naked brain.
Tiny worms were crawling across the bloody gray tissue. Mary watched one of them bore its way out of the brain and tumble into an enameled basin beneath the cross. The tomcat looked at Mary and meowed weakly.
“Nematoda,” Garrick said. “Roundworms. There are half a million species of nematoda on the planet, but I daresay this one was recently introduced.”
Daresay. Grimes used that word a lot, but otherwise Garrick’s speech sounded nothing like his father’s. Grimes’ words ran like quicksilver from his tongue, but Garrick’s thudded out more like chunks of lead. He always stammered on the word I; maybe he didn’t like himself any better than Mary did.
“I’ve seen nothing quite like them,” he said. He got up clumsily from his chair and motioned to his microscope. “Here, have a look.
The ventral nerve has a large unusual bulb.”
The eyepiece looked greasy. “No thanks,” Mary said.
“They appear to be hermaphroditic,” he said. “The genital gland produces both sperm and eggs. Very convenient, don’t you think? One would never get lonely.”
He grinned and licked his tiny jagged teeth, and his fat gray tongue looked like an eel nibbling pebbles.
“Did you know that our oldest living ancestors are colorless flatworms called acoels?” he said. “We’re all related to worms.”
Some of us more than others, Mary thought. He was too strange to look at after a hard night and too little sleep. Nothing on his face seemed to move except his lips and tongue and his weird eyes. They were gloomy dishwater gray unless a flash of light turned them pink, but even the pink looked gloomy. He hadn’t aged in the ten years since she’d seen him, though his long white hair was even longer. It hung way past his shoulders and looked as if it hadn’t been washed in a while.
“I retrieved twelve worms from Mark Burton’s kitchen,” he said. “One of them I dissected. I’m keeping four of them alive by feeding them ground brains, and three of them are swimming in a Petri dish of blood. I fed one to a toad and one to a gerbil, and the other two I gave to our little friend here. At 9:30 last night I removed the skullcap and placed two worms on the surface of its brain.”
He pointed his yellow pencil at the wormy brain, and the sick cat hissed.
“I estimate that approximately thirty-three percent of the brain matter has already been replaced by nematoda. You can see how quickly they reproduce. Parasitic worms devouring a brain this quickly ought to kill their host, but our little friend is still alive and kicking.”
He stroked the cat’s belly, and it snarled and showed its claws.
“I took two new-generation worms from the cat’s brain and inserted them in a hamster’s skull, and already its bloodstream is filled with eggs. I injected some of the cat’s blood into a rat, a snake, and a pigeon. I’m about to open the rat’s skull to have a look. Would you like to watch?”