Gatekeeper

by Alison Levy

  “Sorry,” he said quietly. “I didn’t mean to offend you.”

  “No big deal,” she mumbled.

  She placed two plates near the stove top and arranged the buns on top of them before putting two burgers on each plate. After adding lettuce and cheese, she brought the plates to the table, set them down, and shoved one under his nose.

  “Enjoy,” she said.

  The swirling aromas of hot beef and melting cheese filled his nostrils and set his mouth to watering. His empty stomach roared with anticipation. He grabbed the nearest burger with both hands and tore into it.

  The first bite filled his mouth with flavors so rich and juices so savory they brought tears to his eyes. He set his elbows on the tabletop, lowered his head, and heaved a sigh through his nose as one escaped tear rolled down his cheek. With a sharp sniff, he quickly swiped it away, sat up, and inhaled the rest of the burger. He grabbed the second one without pausing to breathe. He had eaten nothing half so good in the last six months. Even as he felt his shrunken belly fill to capacity, he didn’t want to stop.

  “This is delicious,” he said, his mouth full. “Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  The second burger half eaten and his hunger appeased, his attention drifted from the remaining food to Rachel. Still on her first burger, she took small bites and chewed slowly, her eyes trained on the window. The taste of the food, a constant delight to him, seemed not to interest her; the mechanical way she consumed the burger suggested to him that she saw it only as fuel, not as an experience. It saddened him to think that she wasn’t enjoying the meal as deeply as he was. She had created something marvelous but didn’t appreciate it. That was a shame.

  Her eyes lit upon something in the backyard, and her face tightened slightly. “I don’t remember a tree there,” she mumbled under her breath.

  Bach looked and saw a spindly sapling, little more than a leafless twig, emerging from the lawn. It looked lonesome in that bare yard, the tallest plant in a lake of waving grass, but it also looked determined. Despite its isolation, it was managing to grow. He thought he should find it inspiring, but somehow, he couldn’t shake the feeling that it was out of place and should be removed.

  Rachel didn’t look like she shared his distrust. She just looked glazed. “The plants around this house grow so fast,” she mused, still chewing. “I wonder if it’s part of how this pocket dimension functions.”

  To be reminded that he was sitting in a house-sized ball of reality made Bach shift his weight in his seat. He couldn’t stop picturing the house and its surroundings as a toy top, spinning wildly on a jet-black marble slab. The image made him shiver.

  Rachel’s eyes were glossy and distant as she stared at the tree. Now eager for something to break the silence, Bach sniffed loudly.

  “So . . . did you meet with Leda Morley?”

  “Yeah.” The look of deep thought that he had noticed when Rachel first came home returned to her sharp brown eyes as she said, “She’s happy to work on it.”

  Her voice sounded uncommitted, unconvinced.

  Sensing there was more at play, he asked, “Is there a problem?”

  “Well . . . something strange happened.”

  In between bites, Rachel recounted the story of the apparent computer virus that had fired off an email from Miss Morley’s account. Bach listened attentively while shoveling the last few bites of his food in his mouth. As she wrapped up, he leaned back in his chair, rested his hands on his bulging stomach, and turned the events over in his mind.

  “Did it do the same thing to your laptop?” he asked.

  “No,” she said, the second half of her first burger still in her hand. “I keep trying to tell myself that it must have been a glitch in her computer, but it just seems like too big a coincidence.” She took another bite and chewed it slowly, her eyes drifting to the window again. “You’re an oracle,” she finally said. “You learn about things before they happen all the time. To you, life must seem like a . . . rerun.”

  “Sometimes,” he agreed. “My sight-beyond does make it harder to be surprised.”

  She cocked her head at him. “So do you believe in coincidences?”

  “Yeah,” he said confidently. “They happen every day.”

  Rachel took another bite, looked down at her plate, and then pushed it toward Bach, who eagerly accepted. As he took two huge bites of his third burger of the evening in quick succession, she leaned her chin on her knuckles and looked at him thoughtfully.

  “Do you believe meeting me was a coincidence?”

  “No way,” he said, his mouth stuffed full. “This definitely happened for a reason. No way could it be a coincidence that I crossed your path and you just happened to be the person who could not only snap me out of the crazies but could also put a name to my extra sense. Not a coincidence. Nuh-uh.” He swallowed and looked her in the eye. “I guess you could say that I believe coincidences happen but, knowing the things I know, I tend to look at them with a little suspicion.”

  “Right,” she said. “So how would you look at the memory stick and the virus? Coincidence?”

  “He was—hold up!” A rush of stimuli flooded Bach’s brain like a dam had just broken. He put down what little was left of his third burger and stared at the tabletop as the initial wave receded and left a silt of new information in its wake. His eyes vibrated slightly. “I know something. Something about the guy you’re looking for.”

  Rachel straightened up and her eyes zeroed in on him. Her sudden interest was not lost on Bach. Knowing that he had useful information somewhere in his brain, he shoved all other thoughts aside and waited for the bits he wanted, the ones he knew were there somewhere, to surface. That didn’t always work, but this time the pieces he was looking for jumped to his conscious mind almost immediately.

  “The drive’s not his,” he announced. “I mean, you got it from him, but he’s not the one who put all those files on there. But. He did put something on that memory stick to alert him if someone else tried to access the files—fixed it so if someone other than him opened the files, it would send him an email so he’d know where it is, like a . . . homing signal.”

  Rachel squinted, doubtful. “But nothing happened when I opened the files on my laptop.”

  “I know. That is a puzzler. But your laptop’s from the Arcana, right? Maybe your system is too different from his for the homing signal to activate. Or maybe it has something to do with this house being in a pocket dimension. Maybe the signal didn’t activate because your laptop isn’t in the same world. I don’t know. I don’t know shit about computers. Doesn’t matter anyway. What matters is that he knows Leda Morley has his flash drive, and he wants it back.” Urgency crept into his voice as a sense of dread washed over him. “He wants it back, like, now.”

  The alarm in his tone spread to Rachel like a virus; she sat up straight with her hands balled tight, ready to throw a punch. “Fuck!” she shrieked, hammering both fists on the table, and then jumped up so abruptly that her chair toppled to the floor. “I knew something was wrong! I knew it! I shouldn’t have left that thing with her!” She flew out of the kitchen.

  Bach jumped up from his seat, his burger still in his hand. “Where’re you going?”

  “Back to the museum,” she shouted as she threw on her coat. “I gotta catch that guy before he gets to her!”

  Bach’s sight-beyond wailed, alarming him. Heart thundering, he hurried after her. “Should I go with you?”

  “You’d be in the way!”

  The accusation stung, but he realized that she was right. He knew nothing about her job and next to nothing about her target, and his wasted body was a pale imitation of its former self. In his current state, he wouldn’t be much use to anyone. Disrupting Rachel’s work was no way to repay his debt to her. Unhappily resigned, he stood back, well clear of her path, as she charged out of the house, not bothering to close the door behind her. His sight-beyond continued to blare its distress as he watched
her run up the front path into the darkness, where she was swallowed up without a trace.

  Bach stood in the doorway and stared at the spot where Rachel had disappeared, her final words to him echoing in his ears. He looked down at himself. The shower and shave had given him his face back, but his body was another matter: he had very little muscle definition and virtually no body fat; his arms were spindly, his legs were unsteady, and his chest was far narrower than it had been since before he hit puberty. Shoving aside his residual sight-beyond distress, he sighed a tired, depressed sigh. He would have to find another way to help—one that didn’t require physical strength.

  The coat shuffled close to him, headed to the front door. Bach glanced down at it and was pleased to discover that he was no longer afraid. True, there was a demon—no, a daemon—under that coat, but its presence no longer unnerved him. Having seen it, he’d decided that it wasn’t any more menacing than an ugly garden gnome. Unlike all the people he’d met throughout his life, he received no images, facts, or impressions from the daemon, except for the feeling that the creature couldn’t care less that he existed. That suited him fine. It was better, in his opinion, to be uninteresting to inhuman things; he couldn’t imagine that being interesting to a daemon was a safe or healthy way to live.

  As the daemon passed close to him, Bach held out the last bit of his dinner in its direction.

  “Hungry?” he asked politely.

  The coat stopped and its posture shifted, as if the thing inside it was looking up at him. It stood there only a few seconds before resuming its course and crossing over the threshold. From there, it bounced down the front steps and waddled up the path toward the passage.

  Bach stepped out onto the porch and watched as it followed in Rachel’s footsteps and faded into darkness. Briefly, he wondered where it was going and whether he should have tried to stop it, but he quickly decided that it was not his business to direct a daemon. It was soon out of sight and, for Bach, out of mind.

  He looked at the smooshed remains of the burger in his hand. The bun was compressed, the cheese was all but gone, and the lettuce was nothing but a smear of green. He was sure it would still be the most delicious bit of mush he’d ever eaten, but he was full. He was beyond full. He hadn’t eaten half this much at one meal for so long that his stomach had become nothing but a sliver of an organ. Now it was stretched and distended so badly that his torso actually ached. Still, he couldn’t bear to waste such excellent food. He stared at it longingly, painfully.

  “What to do?” he whispered.

  From under his feet, he heard a soft whine. Startled, he immediately dropped to his knees and peered through a crack in the porch floor. Seeing a flicker of movement, a little dart of a shadow, he stood, descended the steps, and looked through the broken cross-hatching. There was precious little light, but after a moment his eyes adjusted sufficiently to see the animal hidden beneath the house.

  It was a puppy. Its fur was covered in mud, but Bach smiled like an enchanted child at the sight of it. He knelt in the dirt and reached his hand through the broken slats.

  “Hi, pup,” he said. “What’re you doing under there, huh?” He held out the remnants of the burger, offering it to the dog on a flat palm. “Are you hungry?”

  The dog whined again. Slowly, haltingly, it started crawling toward him while licking its chops and wagging its tail. It creeped toward the burger, but its eyes stayed fixed on Bach in a silent plea for mercy and kindness. The young man’s heart warmed and overflowed at the sight of another living being looking to him for comfort.

  As the puppy gulped down the morsel and then returned to lick the juice from his fingers, Bach felt his wasted body flush with energy. Very gently, he stretched a few more inches through the cross-hatching and patted the dog on the back of its neck. The animal stiffened at first and flashed its teeth, its fur standing on end, but its snarl quickly melted into a sigh and it leaned into the caress.

  Bach beamed from ear to ear as the puppy tilted over and rolled onto its back, its tender belly exposed for a rub, its tongue lolling through a canine smile, and its eyes wide with instant love.

  11

  STAKEOUT

  The Rigaceen Museum was closed for the night, but a few lights still burned for the benefit of the last employees on the premises. As she approached the building, Rachel recalled her earlier visit and used what she remembered to estimate where Miss Morley’s office might be. Based on her memory of left and right turns in the hallways and the view she had seen through the window, her best guess brought her to the back of the museum. It took half an hour of loitering in the cold evening air before she finally spotted Miss Morley in one of the lighted offices. She breathed a sigh of relief, not only to have found the right office but also to see that Miss Morley was safe. The owner of the flash drive had clearly not found her—yet.

  Rachel picked a spot that she felt would be difficult to see from inside the museum and settled in. Her target was sure to show up eventually, and when he did, she would be waiting.

  The curator’s assistant looked to be hard at work, striding in and out of the room like a woman on a mission with her arms full of books, boxes, and folders of various sizes. She walked with her shoulders back and her head held high and wore an expression of calm determination. Her bearing impressed Rachel. Living in the Nota for an extended period sometimes left her disheartened and frustrated—largely because of how women were treated and expected to behave, and what that did to their morale. But seeing someone like Miss Morley, who displayed an almost Arcanan level of confidence, made her feel that this dimension wasn’t so far behind her own.

  She saw Miss Morley’s pride falter, however, when a chubby bald man in a gray suit walked into her office without knocking and pushed some papers aside so he could perch one butt cheek on the edge of her desk, despite the empty chair right in front of him. At this, the glow of the young woman’s face dimmed and darkened. She looked the man in the eye and held a neutral expression, but her head lowered visibly as he talked at her.

  “He’s a jackass, isn’t he?” Rachel said, her breath now visible in the cold. “If you had a choice, you’d push him off your desk and kick his ass out the door. He’s probably your boss. I can’t imagine you’d put up with him if he wasn’t.”

  The bald man continued talking for several minutes, during which time Miss Morley nodded occasionally but never said a word. At last, he stood up (knocking over a picture frame on her desk in the process, a move he made no attempt to correct), stuck his meaty hands in his pockets, and strolled out the door. As soon as he was out of sight, Miss Morley’s lip curled like a snarling dog’s and she rolled her eyes. Rachel smirked and nodded approvingly.

  Evening wore into night. One by one, the lights blinked out all over the building, and yet Miss Morley’s office still gleamed bright. Rachel found an old crate to sit on and tried in vain to make herself comfortable without compromising her focus. With every hour that passed, there were fewer and fewer people present who might get between her mark and the woman who had his property. Very soon, there would be no witnesses. The later Miss Morley worked, the more she played into the hands of the nearly soulless man.

  Though she was desperate to catch her mark, Rachel was growing increasingly uncomfortable with using a young woman as bait. She knew what the man was capable of; he was not bothered by violence and, thanks to the daemon attached to him, he was single-minded in his pursuit of his goals. Miss Morley might as well be a wounded seal dangling over a shark tank.

  She toyed with the idea of bursting into the woman’s office and telling her she was in danger, but years of training had hammered into her the necessity of a low profile. She had already brought one Notan into her business that day; she wasn’t about to bring another. No, this was her best chance to catch the guy. If Miss Morley had to be bait to accomplish that, then so be it. Squashing her conscience, she hugged herself against the night’s chill and waited.

  It was just past eight o’cl
ock when Rachel felt a soft tug on the end of her jeans. She glanced down and, to her great surprise, saw a familiar brown coat pressed against the side of her makeshift seat. A moment of stunned denial quickly gave way to anger.

  “What the fuck?”

  “Catch,” said the daemon.

  “What are you doing here?” she snapped. “You’re supposed to be at the house.”

  The coat trembled and released its hold on her jeans. “‘Stay close me.’”

  If Rachel could have shot lightning from her eyes, she would have. She could hardly believe the insanity of hearing her own words quoted by a daemon.

  “I didn’t mean you should stay close to me all night,” she hissed through her teeth. “I’m on the job, you pest!”

  The daemon retreated into the depths of the old coat.

  “Catch say,” it protested. “Catch say.”

  “Unbelievable!” she said. “You’ve been around humans for your entire existence. Are you trying to tell me that with all that exposure, you can’t wrap your tiny, daemonic mind around the basic meanings of human speech?”

  “Catch say,” repeated the peculiar, echoing voice. “Catch say.”

  “I—oh, forget it,” she said. “I can’t deal with you now. Either go home and be sure no one sees you on the way or stay close—not too close—and wait for me. Either way, shut up and don’t touch me.”

  The coat obediently slunk away and hunkered down behind the crate, taking great care not to touch her as it moved. Rachel followed it with her eyes and glared until she was confident that it was going to stay still. Only then did she return her gaze to the window above.