Gatekeeper

by Alison Levy

  “Out okay?”

  Rachel set her jaw and glared at the rumpled coat. Her blood was starting to simmer again. “What did I just say about repeating what I say?” she said through her clenched teeth. “If you keep doing it, we’re going to have a problem. You don’t ‘want’ that,” she said cuttingly, leaning closer to the coat. “Do you?”

  The daemon shrank away from her and burrowed deeper into its coat. “No want,” it agreed.

  Rachel’s anger began to subside. This, at least, was progress.

  “Let’s try again. What do daemons do when they aren’t tempting people?”

  “No do,” was the quick response. “No sleep, no eat.”

  “Okay, that’s a start. So what do you need?”

  The colorless eye blinked several times as the daemon considered the question. “Place,” it finally replied. “Empty.”

  Rachel’s blood cooled and her eyes softened when she heard the dejection in the daemon’s voice. Clearly, the creature was as uncomfortable with this situation as she was. She rubbed her forehead and tucked her hair behind her ears as she drew a few deep breaths.

  “All right,” she said softly. “Let’s find you a place.”

  She led the daemon up the stairs to the second floor, the carpeted steps creaking under her bare feet with each step she took. In her wake, the little green creature hopped from one step to the next, careful to keep its coat tightly wrapped around its bulky body as it went.

  At the top of the stairs, Rachel pointed to the left. “My room’s there, at the end of the hall. I don’t want you in my bedroom or my bathroom, but there are three other bedrooms and a second bathroom up here that no one uses. There’s one bedroom right here and two more down that way. You can use one if you want.”

  The daemon hesitantly shuffled through the open door of the room in front of them and glanced around the tiny space. It was furnished with nothing but a twin bed, a dresser, and one end table. There were two small windows, a closet, and a cracked mirror on the wall that was half-covered by long strips of peeling yellow wallpaper. Past the closet door, which was hanging by one hinge, Rachel could see several pieces of men’s clothing on wire hangers—remnants of the last person to be assigned to this house. The room must have been more appealing when he lived here. Now, the continuous leaks in the roof left pools of water in the mattress and chair cushions, and the mold created what Rachel imagined must be thick, if invisible, toxic clouds in the air.

  The daemon stood still for a moment and then suddenly shuddered. It backed through the doorway and burrowed down into its coat.

  “No,” it anxiously told Rachel. “No. No.”

  She raised an eyebrow. “What’s the problem?”

  “Fleshes here,” it told her.

  “No,” she countered, a little puzzled. “No humans live here. Not anymore.”

  “Fleshes here,” it repeated. “No want.”

  There was that word again. A daemon that wants and doesn’t want . . . and it’s living in my house. She huffed and rubbed the back of her neck. “Okay. There are two other bedrooms this way. They’re no bigger than this one but—”

  “No,” it said. “No want.”

  “So what do you want?” she snarled. “Where the fuck am I supposed to put you?”

  The daemon recoiled, its coat wrinkling as it endeavored to make itself as small as possible to escape her wrath. Rachel felt another unwelcome stab of pity and worked to cool her temper yet again.

  “There’s another option,” she said. “Follow me.”

  She led the daemon down the hallway and opened another door, revealing a narrow set of stairs that led up to a third floor. She trotted up the steps, trying to ignore the complaints of the water-stained wood under her feet, and the daemon followed.

  At the top was a small attic. The space was cluttered with old furniture, rolled-up carpets, taped-up cardboard boxes, and dust so thick that Rachel’s feet left clear prints on the wood floor. She ducked her head a bit to avoid an overhead beam as she waved the daemon into the room.

  “How about this space?” she asked it. “It’s all I’ve got. If you don’t want to stay here, I’ll have to put you in the crawl space with the dog.”

  The riot daemon shuffled about the poorly lit area. A moment later, it straightened up to its full height. “Yes,” it said. “Stay.”

  “Glad to hear it,” Rachel said. “At least up here you’ll be out of the way. I don’t need you getting underfoot while I go in and out.”

  “Go in?”

  “Yeah, I have to work. I still have two assignments to finish this week. I can’t finish either one sitting around here.”

  She walked down the attic stairs, and the daemon, after a brief hesitation, followed her, bouncing from step to step like a tiny, awkward kangaroo.

  “I have to find a guy who’s been tampering with interdimensional passages, and I have to find a gatekeeper who has somehow managed to slip under the Central Office’s radar,” Rachel explained. “I don’t have a name or a lead on either one, so I’ve really got my work cut out for me.”

  “Catch go?”

  “That’s right.”

  “We go?”

  She stopped midstride and looked over her shoulder at the daemon, who, a few stairs above her, was almost at her eye level. “Huh?” she said, forehead furrowed.

  “We go?” it repeated.

  “Uh . . . no,” she said pointedly. “Why would you go with me?”

  The daemon pointed at her phone.

  “The message?” Rachel asked. “What about it?”

  “Catch watch,” it said, pointing at itself.

  She was supposed to monitor the daemon—that’s what the message said. Apparently the daemon had been paying attention before. But “monitoring” it hardly meant keeping it on a leash. “You’re not going, Daemon,” she said. “You’re staying in the house.”

  It tilted its head. A black-streaked pink eyelid slid over its colorless eye, blinking from right to left. Rachel wrinkled her nose.

  “Look,” she said sternly, leaning over the green creature. “Let’s clear this up right now. You will not follow me everywhere I go. I can monitor you just fine so long as you stay in this house. I sleep here and my stuff’s here, so even if I go out, you can be sure that I’m coming back. I’ll monitor you when I’m here. Do not follow me.”

  “Catch watch,” it repeated. “Catch—”

  “Stop!”

  The daemon shriveled down to half its size and closed its eye again, but this time Rachel felt no pity for the creature.

  “You’re only here because I’ve been ordered to take you in,” she said, poking one finger at the daemon’s closed eye. “Got it? You are not a houseguest. You are a burden. Remember that. Okay?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good.” She ushered it back up the stairs to the attic. “I’m going out soon. You stay here.”

  “Yes.” It shuffled away into the shadows, carving a trail in the thick dust on the floor.

  As the daemon came to a stop in the darkest corner of the room, Rachel’s temper subsided. The situation could be worse. At least the creature would be stowed away in the attic and not in her closet. She turned her back on her unwanted visitor and headed down the stairs. It did not follow.

  THE STORM OUTSIDE finally broke as Rachel wolfed down the last of her breakfast, and a mad rush of rain plunged from the sky. Along with the frantic pounding on the roof, she could hear trickles of water dripping down in several rooms where the house had failed to keep the elements out. While cleaning up, she wondered if it was raining outside of the pocket dimension. Rain in the pocket dimension did not always signify rain anywhere else, and since she still had two assignments to complete, she had to dress appropriately for the Notan world.

  Thinking of those two jobs snapped her mind to attention. She picked up her phone with one hand while using the other to select a local news station on the wall screen—she figured a weather report would eventually
appear—located the assignment files on her phone, and sat back down to review the facts.

  The human mark didn’t have a name, but there was a photo. That alone told Rachel he was Notan and not Arcanan; if he had been from Rachel’s dimension, his face would have been identified by recognition software. He was a thirtysomething man who was showing some hints of middle age around his eyes and at the edges of his white-lipped frown. His short, dark hair was graying prematurely, and his bushy eyebrows were a nearly solid gray above his hard eyes. According to the information in the file, he had been trying to open interdimensional gateways. Authorities weren’t sure if he was trying to summon something or attempting to travel to some of the dimensional spectrum’s other layers. Either way, they wanted him stopped. That could only mean that he had come very close to succeeding. This wasn’t some hobbyist messing around with interdimensional passageways for a laugh; he was the real deal.

  Rachel clucked her tongue. Collectors weren’t often sent after humans, and when they were, it was usually in pairs. That the Central Office had deemed this assignment suitable for only one collector suggested that the man wasn’t dangerous. Still, Rachel hated human marks. Daemons, even broken daemons, were fairly predictable, but humans . . . you could never be sure what they would do. And all she had on this man was his photograph. No name, no address, no nothing. There were a few suggested areas to check out in the folder (probably places where he had tried and failed to open a gateway), but they were at opposite ends of the city and had already been checked out. Not very promising.

  She opened the other file. The gatekeeper bloodline in question was charged with guarding an ancient Egyptian daemon called Apep. Due to its irreparable defect, Apep had been sent to the wastes, a dimension at the far end of the spectrum where broken daemons slowly decayed and returned to the primordial ooze.

  According to the file, many thousands of years ago, Arcanan authorities had severed Apep from its ability to move between dimensions and attached that ability to a human woman. Her descendants continued to carry the ability, unused but never discarded, and that had kept Apep trapped in the wasteland where it could do no harm. One branch of the family had, until recently, lived in Istanbul. Two months ago, the last three members of the family (father, mother, and teenage daughter) had been murdered. The Notan police report called it a probable mugging gone bad. The thief had stabbed the mother first and then fought with the father while the daughter ran. He’d overpowered the father, killed him, and then chased down the girl, whose final screams had brought bystanders to the scene, though not in time to save her life. To the best of the Central Office’s knowledge, this unlucky family had been the last descendants of the original gatekeeper chosen to seal the daemon away. But if that was true, then the daemon would have been loosed upon the earth the moment the poor girl’s heart stopped beating. Apep was still imprisoned in the wastes, however, and that meant there was at least one living member of this gatekeeper bloodline. Rachel was now charged with finding that living relative.

  “How is this even a job for daemon collection?” Rachel grumbled. “Somebody screwed up.”

  Screwup or not, the job now had her name on it, and that made it her problem. At least for this assignment, she had a possible place to start. With one eye on the wall screen, still watching for a weather report, she closed the file on her cell phone and scrolled down the contact list. When she found the name she wanted, she pressed the send button and held the phone to her ear as it rang.

  “Historical records,” said a woman’s voice, polite but bored.

  “Extension 184, please,” said Rachel.

  “Hold,” droned the voice.

  While waiting for the connection to go through, Rachel listened to the combination of heavy rainfall outside and dog food commercial on the screen. The dog in the ad was a big, goofy-looking yellow thing with a glazed expression, not at all like the sharp-eyed dogs back on her family’s farm. She wondered briefly if the dog under her porch was staying dry in this weather before a series of clicks on the phone announced that the requested extension had been reached.

  “Historical records,” said a different voice, this one male. “This is Wentrivel Paavo len Wentrivel.”

  “Hey, Paavo,” she said, trying to force a smile into her voice. “It’s Wilde Rachel.”

  “So it is!” he brightly replied. “Well, this is unexpected! How have you been, Rachel?”

  The overly friendly tone of his voice did not escape her notice, and she shifted her weight uncomfortably because of it. He was using informal honorifics and pronouns, implying that they had a closer relationship than they did. Rather than get into an exchange of pleasantries, she launched directly into her request.

  “I have an assignment with no leads that I don’t know how to jump into,” she told him. “Does your office keep records on gatekeeper families?”

  “Yes,” he said, and to Rachel’s relief, his tone shifted from personal to professional, his language formality rising a level. “We don’t monitor them, though. We just keep records of lineage.”

  “Can you check on this gatekeeper bloodline for me and let me know if there’s a surviving branch on record?”

  “Sure.” There was a shuffling noise on his end, as if he was moving things around. She heard a computer boot up and then heard the soft bap-bap of his fingers on the keyboard. “What’s the daemon?”

  “Apep. A-P-E-P.”

  “Got it,” he said as he typed. There was a brief pause and then he said, “Apep, also called Apophis.” He let out a low whistle. “It’s an old one. I should’ve known it would be. Only the oldest daemons have names.”

  “The last known gatekeepers died recently,” Rachel pressed on, “but the daemon hasn’t crossed over. That means the bloodline’s not extinct, right?”

  “Typically, yes. Let me check something.” The keys clacked and he hummed a bar of music. “Hmm . . . I’ve got the family tree on my screen and it doesn’t look good. It’s been over four thousand years since a woman was chosen as gatekeeper for Apep, and her descendants have been struggling to hold up her mantle ever since.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Branch after branch of this woman’s family tree has turned up dead over the centuries,” he said. “The three murder victims in Istanbul were the only known descendants. Well, the only direct descendants,” he clarified. “According to our records, the Apep gatekeepership passes only from mother to daughter—duplicating with each birth so each woman holds a copy—so any branches that were the product of male descendants wouldn’t be included in this record. Hold on.” The keys bapped and blipped enthusiastically through the cell phone as Paavo hummed.

  Rachel waited, biting her lip to suppress her irritation.

  “Okay,” he finally said. “I’ve found eighteen direct-descent female lines on this family tree.”

  Eighteen. The musical sound of that number flushed the grating noise of Paavo’s hum from Rachel’s ears.

  “Great!” she said. “Any of them local?”

  “Hold on,” he said. “Seventeen of them are extinct.”

  “Seventeen! Are you sure?”

  “Very sure. We have confirmed deaths for most of them, and no daughters born to the others.”

  Seventeen dead branches. Rachel’s stomach felt like it was full of lead.

  “What about the eighteenth?”

  “At first glance, it looks extinct, but we don’t have a confirmed death on one female descendant of that particular line. This is probably the bloodline the Central Office thinks is still around.”

  Probably. The success of this case hinged on a “probably.” Rachel cursed under her breath. Well, she thought, clenching her teeth, if “probably” is all I have, then that’s what I have to pursue.

  She slumped into the sofa. “So, who’s the gatekeeper? Where do I find her?”

  “Don’t know,” Paavo said simply. “All I’ve got is a record of a woman with a missing granddaughter four hundred years
ago.”

  “Four hundred.” Rachel groaned. “Are you serious? If there is a surviving gatekeeper, she could be anywhere in the world. What makes the Central Office think this is even close to the right spot?”

  “They’ve got oracles and those ‘otherworldly’ types at their disposal,” Paavo said. “Someone with higher knowledge must have zeroed in on that area.”

  Rachel rubbed her eyes and exhaled through her teeth. “Why couldn’t that higher knowledge give me a name to work with? I’ve got no hope of tracking this woman down.”

  “Well . . .”

  Rachel heard Paavo’s fingers punching at keys again.

  “I think I can narrow down your search a little bit,” he said, sounding smug.

  “How?”

  “The woman you’re looking for is of African ancestry.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “The original missing girl disappeared from a West African town in the seventeenth century. That area was a well-documented site of slave-trader transactions. She was probably sold and transported to the American colonies on a slave ship. I wonder if . . .”

  Rachel perked up. “If?”

  “If I can find any records of slave auctions around that time,” he said. “Records from seventeenth-century America are spotty at best, but there might be something.”

  The hopelessness of this case weighed heavily on Rachel’s shoulders. The more she heard about it, the more likely it seemed that she would be saddled with searching for this gatekeeper for the rest of her term of service. But Paavo was offering to help, and however fruitless his assistance might turn out to be, she did feel a little better knowing someone else was on the job with her.

  “That would be great,” she said sincerely.

  “It’s a long shot,” he warned her. “Even if I find the girl listed at an auction, you might not be able to find records of her children and grandchildren. Finding a currently living descendant from a slave auction record is difficult.”

  “It’s the best lead I’ve got,” she said. “Would you mind helping me out?”