Poison Sleep

by T. A. Pratt

  “Sometimes it snows in her dreams,” the Giggler said. “Or the wind blows, or it rains. Those are always the bad ones, when the weather starts.”

  “Who? When who dreams?”

  “The enemy of the friend you haven’t met. The man in black’s enemy,” the Giggler said. “The woman who dreams and weaves the world around her. The woman in yellow with violet eyes. Her.”

  “This is different,” Nicolette said. “The last few times it’s been the same, once you strained out the craziness. This is new, though.”

  “Bring me a puppy,” the Giggler said. “A stupid, loyal one.” He grinned at Nicolette and cut an enormous fart. Nicolette flinched, startled by the noise or by the echo of her earlier statement, Gregor wasn’t sure which.

  “One last question, and you can have anything you want,” Gregor said. “When will I meet this man, my new friend?”

  “Why? You planning on going somewhere?” The Giggler laughed again, throwing his head back and wrapping his arms around his belly. Bouts of humor like that usually lasted half the night with him.

  Gregor walked away, Nicolette following. “Should I watch the door for surprise visitors, boss?”

  “I don’t know,” Gregor said, getting into the elevator. “I don’t know if I even believe him.”

  “He’s never been wrong before,” Nicolette said. “Confusing, sure, but we’ve always made sense of it eventually.”

  “Maybe those oatmeal cookies are interfering with his vision.”

  They returned to his office. Someone stood in front of the windows, hands clasped behind his back, looking out at the freezing rain and the city lights below. Nicolette whipped a chain of paperclips out of her pocket, a miniature scourge with a diamond-tipped pin wired onto the end, but Gregor put a hand on her forearm before she could ripple any nasty magic across the room. The person at the window wore a black coat made of vinyl or plastic, bunched tight at the waist and flaring out around his legs. His bald head was albino-white and looked soft as an uncooked biscuit. Or a mushroom. He turned and nodded to Gregor. His eyes were the yellow of jaundiced skin. “Hello,” he said. “My name is Reave.”

  “I’ve been expecting you,” Gregor said. “I think we’re meant to be friends.”

  6

  M arla almost knocked on the door to her own office, but thought better of it at the last moment, and just barged in. She wasn’t sure what to expect—Ted slumped behind her desk with a needle in his arm, or asleep on the beat-up old couch, or practicing forging her signature in the checkbook. Instead she found…much less than she was expecting. “What happened to my mountains of crap?”

  Ted turned from a row of filing cabinets along one wall. “I filed them.”

  Marla mulled that. “Those file cabinets were filled with old carpet samples and comic strips cut out of fifty-year-old newspapers.”

  He nodded. “I put those away in some banker’s boxes Mr. Rondeau found for me. I wasn’t sure if you wanted to keep them or not, but—”

  She waved her hand. “No, no, they were left by the woman who used to run this club, I just hadn’t gotten around to cleaning them.” Marla had to admit she’d found the clutter and detritus somewhat comfortable. While she wasn’t the sort of magician who directly thrived on chaos, clutter, and rubbish—that was more Ernesto’s specialty, or that girl who ran with Gregor—she did prefer unpredictable, messy environments from a purely aesthetic standpoint. But having a wrecked office was ultimately more annoying than comforting, and if she wanted the soothing comforts of junk and decay, she could always just go home to her apartment.

  “I’ll toss them out in the Dumpster, then,” Ted said. “I hope you don’t mind, I cleared off the rolltop desk in the corner there, and hooked up a spare phone, so I’d have a place to work.”

  Marla crossed the room and looked at the desk. “Huh. There was a desk under all that, uh…what used to be here?”

  “Fabric remnants, mostly,” Ted said. “I put them—”

  “In banker’s boxes, right.” She looked around. The office wasn’t exactly spotless—the shelves were still crowded with hunks of exotic rock, tinted glass bottles, hand-bound books, and the traditional mummified alligator, though hers wore a little straw hat emblazoned with the word “Orlando.” Most of it looked suitably occultish, though it was all left over from Juliana’s tenure as owner of the club. But the dust was cleared, the piles were organized, and the top of her desk was actually visible. “This is good, Ted. You might work out. Do you drive?”

  “I—of course.”

  “Good to hear it. Top drawer, there’s a set of keys. I need you to drive me across town. I’ve had enough of tromping through the goddamn snow today. And grab that shoebox.”

  Ted retrieved the keys and picked up the shoebox containing Genevieve Kelley’s worldly possessions. “I talked to Mr. Rondeau,” Ted said. “He let me take a shower in his apartment upstairs, which was wonderful. But when I asked him about my wages, and benefits, and hours, and…he wasn’t very helpful. He said he was on call 24 hours a day, and that the last time you let him take a vacation he was nearly killed.”

  “That wasn’t a vacation. It was a business trip. Come on, we’ll talk on the way. Oh, wait.” She knelt by the small safe behind her desk, spun the dial a few times for the look of the thing, and then subvocalized the real command that opened the lock. She reached into the safe for a banded wad of cash, turned, and tossed it to Ted, who managed to catch it with minimal fumbling even with the keys and shoebox in his hands. “You’re a consultant, so we don’t do any of that tax withholding crap. You’re responsible for reporting your own income to the government. Or not. Though I’m sort of a government myself, and I encourage people to be community-minded and pay up.”

  “You’re…a government?” Ted said, still staring at the wad of cash in his hands. It was probably a lot of money, Marla supposed, though it was just the take from one slow evening at one betting parlor down by the bay. Marla ran a lot of rackets.

  “It’s complex, Ted,” she said, shutting the safe. “Stick the money in your pocket or something and let’s go.” She led him through the club, pausing briefly to smile at the sound of Rondeau cursing in the bathroom. “Rondeau!” she shouted. “Ted’s driving me to Langford’s, so I can talk to him about that thing!”

  “How nice for you!” Rondeau said. “I’ll just be here wrestling the Skatouioannis!”

  “I trust you mean that metaphorically?”

  “Go away! I need some alone time!”

  “Skatouioannis?” Ted said as they got on the freight elevator.

  “Greek word. Means ‘Shitty John.’ It’s like a demon made out of crap.” Marla stabbed the button for the parking garage, a real subterranean bat cave sort of place, with a tunnel that came out of a garage a few blocks away. “I’ve never actually encountered one, don’t even know if they exist, but Rondeau read a story about one once, and now he’s convinced that’s the reason the toilets are always backing up.”

  Ted quirked an eyebrow. “This is a very odd workplace.”

  The elevator doors opened, and the silver Bentley gleamed before them, sleek and seemingly long as a yacht. Even after a morning’s hard drive over salted roads, it was spotless—just a little enchantment laid on the car by its former owner. It was probably the world’s only all-terrain Bentley. Marla wasn’t particularly into cars, but she could appreciate fine workmanship, and this car was an unsurpassed blend of engineering and magic. It couldn’t actually fly, but riding in it, you got the feeling it wanted to. “Yeah, it’s a weird place to work,” Marla said. “But there are perks. For instance, you get to drive a car like that.”

  Ted drove safely and sedately out of the city center, which pleased Marla, even though she was in a hurry. The Bentley was nigh indestructible, but she was glad to see him treat it with care. “Do you mind if I ask where we’re going?” Ted said.

  “To see a consultant who does some work for me. Guy named Langford. He has a lab uptown.�
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  “Ah,” Ted said. “I’m still not clear, exactly, on what business you do.”

  “I’m not into organized crime, if that’s what you’re worried about,” Marla said. Which wasn’t exactly true—she’d inherited a few not-strictly-legal businesses from her predecessor, Sauvage, including several betting parlors and some drug trade, though limited strictly to gentler substances, like hallucinogens and pot. Those could be abused, sure, but they weren’t a debilitating cancer on a city the way crack or meth or heroin could be. But she wasn’t involved with the mafia or any of those hard-core types, which was what Ted was probably worried about. “I own a lot of real estate and some local businesses, and I’m heavily into civic pride. I deal with important people in city government and do my best to protect the best interests of Felport. There’s not really a name for the job I do.” There was—chief sorcerer and protector of the city—but it was a little early to get into all that with Ted. “I need somebody to help me deal with the mundane shit, drive me around, keep things organized, make calls, etc. You can crash at the office for a couple of days, then we’ll get you set up in an apartment in the building where I live. You can stay right next door to me, I just need to get some of the junk cleaned out of the rooms. It’s not fancy, but it’s better accommodations than Dutch Mulligan’s grate. Your salary won’t be huge—what I gave you today, every week or so—but your housing will be taken care of.”

  “What about time off?”

  Marla stared at him. He glanced away from the road at her, then back to the road, then back at her. “What?” he said.

  “Haven’t you had enough time off lately, Ted? If you need a few hours here and there to deal with personal shit, yeah, we can talk about it. I’m not inflexible. But this isn’t a 9-to-5 job. It’s an all the time job. I sleep about four hours a day. I can teach you some techniques so you can get by on that little sleep, too. You’ll need it. If you don’t like the gig, you can go back to your life of leisure.”

  “I’ll give it a try,” Ted said, though whether he was thinking of the wad of cash in his pocket or the cold months of winter that still stretched ahead, Marla wasn’t sure.

  “I don’t mean to be harsh,” Marla said. “But I don’t want there to be any misunderstandings. I need you to lighten my load, not complicate things.”

  “Is there any possibility for, ah, advancement in this position?”

  You’re the personal assistant for the most powerful sorcerer in Felport. How much more advanced do you want to get? “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. We’ll see how you handle this. If you last a month, we can think about your future.”

  Ted parked on the curb in front of Langford’s lab, a low, unassuming building that blended in nicely with the various doctors’ offices on the same street. Langford was a doctor, too, sort of.

  Marla buzzed the door, and it clicked open. She was surprised—Langford had a bunch of insects with their senses jacked into his own consciousness that he used for surveillance, but Marla had expected the cold to keep the bugs inside. Then she noticed the glass lens set in the wall. An ordinary camera. Trust Langford to build in redundancies. She went in, followed by Ted, who carried the shoebox holding Genevieve Kelley’s effects.

  The inside of the building was one large, cluttered room, all the interior walls knocked down. Metal shelves stood on all sides, and various long workbenches and lab tables were arrayed at seemingly random intervals throughout the room. The back wall was covered in stacked cages, from Chihuahua-sized to one that could have held a couple of mountain gorillas, though all but one were empty. A yellow-eyed coyote paced the length of the cage, and Marla wondered if it was a skinchanger or just an ordinary animal. Langford sat at a stool before a workbench scattered with shiny metal components, soldering something and humming to himself. He might have been sitting that way for hours. He liked to work, and as far as Marla could tell, he didn’t like doing much else. He was a weird guy, with a tendency to stare at people like he was thinking about dissecting them, but he was fast and effective, and Marla counted on him. He was probably as powerful as any of the city’s most prominent sorcerers, but as far as she knew his interests didn’t run toward city management, big business, or organized crime, so he didn’t take a hand in governing.

  “That’s not Rondeau,” Langford said, not looking up. “New apprentice?”

  “He’s Ted, my personal assistant,” Marla said. “Listen, I need a rush job.”

  “You always need a rush job,” Langford said. “Your personal assistant knows not to touch anything, right? I know Rondeau had to learn that the hard way.”

  Rondeau had nearly lost a finger to one of Langford’s experiments, an experience that had finally stopped him from poking around the lab’s shelves.

  “Ted’s solid,” Marla said. She walked over to Langford and snapped her fingers in front of his face. “Hey, there’s a human being talking to you now. Can I get some attention?”

  “I can pay attention to many things at once,” Langford said. He looked up at Marla, though, and today his eyes were silver. Langford had a vast array of colored contacts, each pair magically altered to enhance his senses in a different way. She wondered what silver did, but asking Langford would just lead to a long lecture on the subject, and she didn’t have time. “What’s today’s emergency?” he asked.

  Marla glanced toward Ted, who stood holding the shoebox and staring at the coyote. “Hey, Ted, leave the box here, and go wait in the car, okay?”

  He nodded and slipped out of the room.

  “Here,” Langford said, rising and walking over to a silver refrigerator. He took out a small vial of clear liquid. “Put this into Ted’s food. He’s got prostate cancer, and without this, he’ll die. But this should clear it up.”

  Marla blinked at him. “Say what?” But she took the vial.

  Langford tapped the spot between his eyes. “These are diagnostic lenses. They scan for unusual masses and inconsistent densities, among other things. Cancer is easy to see with them.”

  “No, I figured that part; I mean, you have a cancer cure? What the fuck, Langford? Why isn’t this in every drugstore in America?”

  Langford shrugged. “It’s not science. Or, it’s only partly science. It reprograms the cancer tissue and convinces it to be more community-minded, gives the chaos a plan, but it’s mostly magical, so I can’t exactly get FDA approval.”

  “Still, you could dump some in the municipal water supply, at least!”

  “It’s not easy to make in quantity, Marla. Even that vial is dear, but you’re my main patron, so I’m willing to part with some of the substance to keep your assistant alive, and, I trust, earn some personal gratitude?”

  Marla nodded slowly. She’d follow up about this another time. Langford had weird priorities sometimes, and curing cancer might not be high on his to-do list if he had some other, more interesting project on his table. “Do you think Ted knows he has cancer?”

  “He’s probably shitting blood by now, so I suspect he’s worried, but perhaps too afraid to go to a doctor.”

  Or too poor. Or he just figures shitting blood is the sort of thing that happens when you eat out of garbage cans and live in alleys. “Right,” Marla said. “Thanks, Langford.”

  “Yes, yes. What do you need? I am working on something.”

  “A woman escaped from the Blackwing Institute this morning. Her name’s Genevieve Kelley. She’s—”

  “I know who she is,” Langford said. “Dr. Husch has me in periodically to make sure the homunculi on her staff are functioning properly, and we sometimes consult on other cases, if Husch thinks there might be a physiological component. Kelley’s case has always interested me. She escaped? Fascinating.”

  Marla snorted. “You could call it that. The thing is, I saw her today. I was walking in the city, when everything around me changed. I went…someplace else. But it wasn’t anywhere on this Earth.” She described the strange buildings, the groves of trees, the cobblestones, the wind
, the black tower. “Genevieve was there. I think it was her place.”

  Langford nodded, then stared at the ceiling for a moment. Marla waited. She was used to this. “She disappears, sometimes, in her sleep,” Langford said at last. “I’ve hypothesized that she has access to some sort of conditional universe, a little bit of pinched-off reality furnished by her subconscious, filled with comforts and monsters. Or possibly a place created by stretching reality, the way you can press your finger into a sheet and create a little cone of extra volume by straining the fabric.”

  “And what happens if you poke too hard?” Marla said.

  “What you would expect,” Langford said. “You poke a hole in the fabric.”

  “That’s what I figured.”

  “I wonder how many other people have been pulled into her world since she escaped?” Langford said.

  Marla sat down on a bench. “Shit. I didn’t even think about that. But why should it just be me? Gods, are people just popping into her world at random?”

  “It may not be totally random. There could be some sort of vector. A particular place that gives entrance to her world, or a touch—did you have any contact with her before you found yourself in her world?”

  “No, I never—” Marla paused. That same hazy image, like a picture from a dream, came to her. There was a woman, laying in the snow, and Marla had draped her coat over her. But now, thinking back, the woman was familiar, she was—“Hell,” Marla said. “Yes. I saw her in the snow. I bet I even touched her. Why didn’t I recognize her?”

  “You probably did. You probably just don’t remember that you did. Dreams are hard to remember, Marla—they go into short-term memory, and unless you make a special effort to remember them, they disappear from your mind. I’ve always suspected her power is linked to dreams. The place Genevieve took you sounds like a dream world, something beyond her control, something she experiences as reality. But it’s a dream she can pull other people into. If she’s a reweaver, as Dr. Husch believes, it may be a dream she can bring into this world.”