“Now I am here, great sorcerer. Prove yourself to me.”
Oliver stepped past the gates. In the event she chose to incinerate him on the spot, he hoped the walls would protect the others from at least that first blast.
“Do you see this coin?” he asked. He pulled a quarter from his pocket and held it up.
“I do.”
“Good. Now watch carefully.”
Using a standard bit of sleight-of-hand—which Oliver did not know but Osraic did, so he may as well have—he made it look as if the coin disappeared.
“Is that not a great trick?” he asked.
She didn’t look impressed.
“That’s a parlor trick, you idiot. Of course I am not impressed.”
“What if I told you it was behind your ear?”
“I will burn you where you stand and eat what’s left.”
“All right, all right. How about this? I can… um… I have it. I can give the coin to you, and then with a word, make it reappear in my hand.”
“Enough of this.”
“Do you have hands? Maybe they’re too big for a coin.”
“You could try some actual magic. Levitate, or destroy a building. Make it rain pheasants. Do something genuine.”
“I’m working my way up to that. Look, do you have anything better to do?”
“All right, but when I remain unimpressed, I’m not going to be providing a third chance for you to act foolish. You should greet your ancestors in the afterworld with some shred of dignity left. Throw the coin into my mouth.”
“In your mouth? Will you feel it?”
“I will.”
“You’re sure?”
“You stall. Throw.”
Promachos opened her mouth wide, revealing a huge purple tongue and a strong sulfurous odor. Her gullet was large enough to fit a small car.
Oliver threw a rock in, instead of the coin. It slid along the tongue and to the edge her throat.
She closed her mouth again, and fixed him with a stern look.
“Annnd, one two three, here’s the coin!” Oliver said, revealing the quarter that hadn’t ever gone anywhere.
“Whatever you threw into my mouth, great Orsak, it was no coin.”
“But it was!”
“I think we’re finished here. You’ve bored me. Goodbye.”
Promachos drew up, and raised her head to call upon her fire breath.
“Wait, wait, wait!”
“Yes?”
“One last chance, Promachos,” he said. “Let us pass.”
“You are issuing ultimatums to me?”
“All right. I’m sorry; I tried. Alavas.”
The dragon known as Promachos was large, but she wasn’t so large that her throat could accommodate the sudden introduction of a massive boulder. Her neck ruptured from the inside out, blasting dragon flesh all over Club Street. Her shocked final expression, as her head collapsed and rolled over unnaturally, no longer entirely connected to the rest of the body, was the kind that made Oliver want to cry.
“Well, that was… awful,” Wilson said, clapping Oliver on the shoulder.
“He slew the dragon,” Minerva said. She ran up and gave him a hug.
“I can’t believe it,” she said. “Are you okay, Oliver?”
“Yeah, I guess. I didn’t really want to do that. Aliens are one thing, but she was… She was majestic. I didn’t enjoy that at all.”
“Killing isn’t something we enjoy, it’s something we do,” Cant said. “And you had to do it, to prove you are Orsak himself.”
“But I’m not Orsak,” Oliver said.
“We all heard what the dragon said. She can only be bested by Orsak, and so Orsak has bested her.”
“Look, whatever. I think if I was him I’d know it.”
Wilson smiled.
“The résumé sort of fits, actually,” he said. “But we can haggle later. Let’s find out what this Kingdom is all about. Or, M Pallas, depending on which storyline we’re going with today.”
Oliver looked past Cant and Wilson and Minerva. The door to Pallas was on the other side of them.
It wasn’t the club he thought he was going to when he left in the middle of the day, and it was probably also not the Kingdom of legend. He didn’t know what it was. But the door was right there, and now he would find out.
“Well let’s go then,” he said.
“After you,” Wilson said.
He and Minerva climbed the steps together.
The doors were massive. He squeezed her hand and smiled.
“This is it, right?” he said. “Are you ready?”
“We’re ready,” she said, stepping back a little. “And we’re right behind you.”
“Yes, Orsak the great should enter first,” Cant said.
“Please stop calling me that,” Oliver said, as he put his hand on the knob.
“Hey, what does the M really stand for? Does anyone know?”
“Maybe it stands for mystery,” Wilson said with a shrug. “Are you gonna open it?”
“Yeah. Come on. Let’s see what the fuss is.”
He pulled on the handle. It opened easily. He stepped inside.
Chapter Fifteen
What M is For
The eatery was empty, as it was well past the breakfast rush and the trickle that constituted the lunch crowd, and there was no dinner served in the place. All the patrons had moved on to other important matters such as attending church services, watching sports teams, mowing lawns and tending to laundry. As one does.
The door, a light metal frame holding glass, rattled in time with the bell affixed to the top of the jamb, notifying any and all that a person had entered. Oliver was that person, and he was extremely confused.
He let the door close, and assessed the situation.
It was a diner. There was no way around that. It was a diner on a rural street in a small town, and it was late afternoon on a sunny day. The tables were Formica with plate metal trim, held up by wide, center legs leading to four-pronged feet. There were chairs with nominal padding, sturdy and just comfortable enough to be enjoyable for the length of one meal, and no more. There were booths as well, along one wall, and a counter near the kitchen, with round, backless stools.
Ready as he thought he might have been to explore the vast terrain of possibilities that lay on the other side of the massive door leading to the interior of M Pallas, this diner was not anywhere on that list. For a lot of reasons. Most obviously, he didn’t appear to be in the city any longer. It wasn’t the middle of the night any more, either. And he was alone. He assumed Minerva and Cant and Wilson would enter right behind him—especially Cant, since this was his quest after all—but that hadn’t happened.
Even his clothes were different: his military outfit had been replaced by jeans, and sneakers, and a flannel shirt.
A woman emerged from the kitchen, a cleaning rag in her hand and a weary look in her eyes. She had her auburn hair pulled back in a tight ponytail, which flattered her round face and her pale green eyes.
It was Minerva. It was also not Minerva.
“We’re closed,” she announced with a practiced tone that was simultaneously welcoming and non-negotiable. “Oh, it’s you. Hi, Oscar.”
“Cydonia,” he said.
She looked ready to say a dozen different things, and those things were all having a quiet and rapid argument amongst themselves. None made it past her lips.
“Have a seat if you want,” she said, nodding at the counter. “Still got some coffee on. Unless you want tea.”
“Coffee’s okay.”
This was important. There was no reason for it to be important, except that even the tiniest of things in this place were huge things. Tea was what he had when he first came to town, and what he would be drinking again when he returned to the city, as he just promised Cydonia he would be doing soon.
When had I made that promise?
There was no promise. This was all backstory that existed in h
is head and not in this rural eatery. It wasn’t real. Neither was the diner, but they were sitting in it anyway.
Coffee was what he started drinking when he decided he couldn’t put mother into a home. Not right away. Too much of who she was, was tied up in where she was. Taking her from the house would have been an amputation.
He could have had tea. The urn with the hot water was there, next to the coffee pot, and the drawer holding generic black tea bags was right beneath it, and he could have asked, but instead he took the coffee.
This was a small thing, and it was everything. It was important. It meant Oliver was confessing something. Unless it was Oscar confessing.
“Stan’s done, but… I can make burnt toast if you’ve got the need.”
He laughed.
“I’ve had my fill, thanks.”
Cydonia set out a white ceramic cup and filled it with stale, bitter black coffee. You could tell the coffee was old from the smell and from the way it coated the sides of the cup, but he wasn’t going to turn it down. It was an excuse to be in the building, which he appeared to need. There was unsettled business here. The waitress/customer dynamic was the only way to the other side of that business, and they both appreciated this.
After the cup came a tin holding a rainbow of sweetener packets, and a spoon. He took a seat on the stool in front of the cup and went about the business of preparing his drink.
Cydonia dropped a folded newspaper on the counter, and a blue pen.
“What’s this?” he asked.
“Saved it for you,” she said. “You know Earl never finishes.”
She meant the half-completed crossword puzzle, which Earl—who sold life insurance out of a small storefront across the street—inexplicably attempted to do in pen. As this was Sunday, Earl hadn’t made an appearance, which was just as well since the Sunday paper didn’t have a regular crossword puzzle anyway. It still existed, only in a magazine insert, and it was much larger and twice as challenging. Earl didn’t visit the diner on Saturdays either, which meant when Cydonia said she saved it for Oscar, she’d been saving it since Friday.
This, too, was important.
She stood with her back up against the wall, the bleach-soaked rag still in her hand looking for a surface to purify. Her expression was emphatically neutral. Oliver was supposed to say something to her here, something important, something they both knew but which had to be uttered before it became real. The words he had to say were magic words; they would conjure the unspoken truth into reality.
He didn’t know what those words were. She seemed to realize this.
“Hey, I gotta get some things taken care of out back,” she said flatly. “Keep an eye on the front for me?”
“Sure,” he said, but she was already through the kitchen door before his response had a chance to reach her.
He watched the door swing back and forth for a while. The way into the kitchen was through a thin plastic partition with a little plastic window and a rubber edge, resting in a couple of socket hinges in the floor and ceiling. It existed only to keep the public out front from seeing the chaos in back, and was otherwise too flimsy to keep out anything stronger than a gentle breeze.
Oliver tried the coffee, and decided that was perhaps a mistake. It was possible to hide a lot of sins underneath a high temperature, but this coffee had crossed that border beyond which no amount of scalding could mask the acrid quality.
The crossword puzzle was a mess. It looked like Earl started strong enough, but two quadrants had wrong answers, and one of those wrong answers wasn’t even a long enough word to fill the required space, which called into question the insurance man’s entire understanding of how crossword puzzles worked.
Earl had also used up the white space around edges of the puzzle to write letters corresponding to one clue or another: it was impossible to piece together what clue the string of letters belonged to, if at all. Oliver wondered if Earl was also playing some kind of anagram game that only existed in his own head.
Earl was preoccupied with six letters in particular. Oliver really couldn’t see what the man was after; the letters didn’t even form a word.
The front door clanged and the bell rang.
“They’re closed,” he said in the automatic response of someone who spent a lot of time in this diner after closing time.
Oscar and Cydonia would sit in the closed diner and talk for hours, Oliver decided. It was safe for them, in the confines of this public space: private, but not entirely private. Maybe that was their problem—they always kept it so safe, when they needed to be taking risks.
When Oliver didn’t hear a response, and the door didn’t reopen, he turned to see where the disconnect might be.
There was a man standing at the door. He was crippled. His left leg was tied in a heavy splint and he had a crutch under his arm. In his right hand was a Smith & Wesson.
“Koestler?”
“Hello, Orson,” the old man said.
He stepped forward and nearly fell over. Oliver hopped off the stool, intending to catch him, but Koestler righted himself, and waved off the assistance.
“What are you doing here?” Oliver asked.
“I… don’t know where here is. I am where you are, which is this curious place, and I am here because…”
He hesitated, either looking for the correct phrasing, or for an answer he didn’t have.
Oliver took note of how tenuous the older man’s grip on everything—his balance, the gun, the crutch—was. Pain was written all over his face. His clothing no longer consisted of the black pajamas he’d last been seen wearing. Instead, he had on hiking boots, baggy dungarees, and a flannel shirt that looked like it was buttoned incorrectly. His hair seemed whiter, and the bags under his eyes more ponderous. He had a brace on his leg—over the dungarees—that looked like it was assembled from the spare parts of a helicopter crash.
“You’re here to betray me,” Oliver said. “Of course. That’s the end of your arc.”
“Yes, that’s right. I… where are we? I don’t understand any of this. My leg hurts so much.”
“Why don’t you put away the gun and have a seat?”
“If you don’t mind?”
“Not at all. We should call an ambulance for you.”
He put the gun into the pocket of his pants, hobbled over to the nearest table and collapsed into the chair, popped up again in surprise, then reached around and extracted the metal box that had been in his back pocket. He relaxed into the seat once more, with the Lot 42 box under his hand on top of the table.
“Is this a trick, of some kind?” he asked.
Oliver took a seat at the table opposite. He slid the unpleasant-tasting cup of coffee across, and Koestler partook of it greedily, as if his being offered the cup was thoroughly normal in these circumstances.
“How do you mean?” Oliver asked. “What kind of trick?”
“I don’t know. Nor do I know how it could be. But the pain from my leg, it’s just cascading up my body in hot strikes I feel to my fingertips and the back of my skull. I can barely concentrate. I’m afraid I may pass out. I’ve never experienced anything like this. I fell from a building once, do you remember?”
“I do.”
He didn’t, but was confident if he were feeling more like Orson than Oscar, he would.
“I broke ten bones and barely survived, and it hurt less than this. Everything is brighter, and heavier and… I don’t like it. And so I ask if it is a trick, because the other consideration is that where we last met, you and I, that place was the trick, and this is the real world. I can’t bear this notion.”
It seemed to Oliver as if the formidable superspy in his presence was shrinking into an old man before his eyes. He was an old man, of the grizzled veteran variety, a holdover from the Cold War, which may have been still going on when Koestler and Orson crossed paths but was now long over. His skin was gray and mottled with old scar tissue, and his shoulders were hunched forward. Some of that may
have been the outward result of the pain he was experiencing.
“I don’t see how that could be,” Oliver said. “We’re in a small town now. I moved here to care for my mother. I didn’t want to, but she had nobody else to care for her.”
“That is good, Orson. A man should care for his mother. Commendable.”
“Yes, I think probably it might be. But I also think she may have died recently.”
“You don’t know?”
“I think what comes next is the part where I decide if I’m going to stay or not. There’s nothing keeping me here.”
“You speak as if your own life is something someone else lived through,” Koestler said.
“That’s sort of accurate. But sorry, that’s the wrong story. The right story is the one where you’re here to kill me.”
“It is.” Koestler tapped his fingers on the Lot 42 tin, lost for a moment in thought. “It could be a trick. We know of a way this could be a trick. The formula.”
“The Lot Forty-Two experiments were about enhancing remote viewing,” Oliver said, feeling a little more Orson and a little less Oscar. “There was no reality-shaping.”
“You’re mistaken. The victims of the experiment: I told you what I heard. Doorways disappearing and so on. And there was more.”
“That’s just a ghost story,” Oliver said. What he didn’t say was that this part of what should have otherwise been a straight spy thriller was thrown in to connect it to the ghosts of Mad Maggie’s, and that was only because the ghost story didn’t have an ending otherwise.
“Please listen. One of the theories promulgated during your government’s secret laboratory experiments was that the test subjects were not in fact visiting distant locations via travel in an astral plane. They were visiting an alternative reality.”
“That’s ridiculous, Koestler.”
“I know how it sounds.”
“I mean it. This is a thriller, not a science fiction story. That would be completely out of bounds.”
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