Avenging Fury

by John Farris

  Meanwhile two of Dr. Woolwine’s assistants lay bleeding to death on the floor of the room in which Gwen had been floating in that shallow salubrious bath, physically weakened by ultraviolet light, which was kryptonite to all doppelgangers. The several lights suspended above the lab tank had suddenly been shattered with enough violence to drive hot shards through the flesh and vitals of the assistants, cutting loose important moorings to the heart.

  Gwen, free of the wires that had monitored her vital signs while she soaked and drowsed, was gone.

  A silent alarm summoned Woolwine. He found her by tracking bloody footprints and her other bath drippings, which had turned to glowing gelatinous splatters on a staircase and the marble corridor floor two flights below. She had returned to the suite that Gwen had occupied before time-traveling to Jubilation County a week ago.

  Now she stood naked in the bedroom regarding herself agleam and fouled with others’ blood in a full-length standing mirror. There were still pieces of tape on her forehead, breasts, and back. She pulled a piece away disconsolately.

  “Two of us? Nay, intolerable conceit! I must be one spirit, one host of flesh and blood.”

  She caught Woolwine’s reflection in the mirror when he paused in the bedroom doorway behind her.

  “W-what have you done?” Woolwine stammered. “They b-bled to death!”

  Gwen turned; Delilah spoke.

  “’Tis the doctor of deviltry and low cunning. Dull me not with melancholy belchings! Did’st think there was dust of forgetfulness ’pon my brain? Destroy me? Know that I have sorceries undreamt of in thy womb of night, and rue thy bloody disposition.”

  “But it wasn’t my idea! I’m a scientist, not a murderer! I could n-never have—I would’ve f-found a way—who are you?”

  She laughed.

  “Has’t thou now cause to steal lustre from a saint? Fodder for jerlings, attend me, for I have temper to take thee unto torment.”

  With that, Gwen changed in two blinks of an eye, shooting up in a pall of smoke until her head nearly touched the trey ceiling of the bedroom; her hair went haywire, as if electrified; it seethed with grave-hoar glimmers of haunted night while her jaws elongated like a slathering wolf’s.

  “Oh my G-God!” Woolwine jabbered, clutching his bald head with both hands.

  Hulking, she limped nearer, licking her wolfish lips; saliva burned him where it splattered. Her hands had turned to long paws and longer claws made to tear food from the quivering bodies of just-caught prey.

  “I am the dark of nature; ageless, ever increasing, iron hearted, with soul of gall. Foe to all that breeds, lives, breathes upon this orb, all madded naked souls that lack o’ shielding spirit.”

  Woolwine’s knees were knocking together; an interesting phenomenon, since he was conspicuously bowlegged. When she breathed on him his frightened face broke out in pustules like the pills on a cheap sweater.

  “D-Don’t kill me!”

  She inserted a claw into one of his nostrils, levered him to the floor.

  “Whatever it is you want, let me h-help you!”

  Instead of ripping the needle-pointed claw up through his nostril and into his brain, she paused. Still looming over him, part wolf, part sty of a woman grossly knockered, yellow eyed, foully humid.

  “Please—I have a pacemaker!”

  Her nostrils dilated as if she’d caught a whiff of some subtle practice on his part.

  “Where lies your worth to me?”

  Some blood was dripping from the nostril that enclosed half of a claw. Woolwine licked it from his upper lip.

  “I can tell you—things you need to know. About your soul mate the Magician, and the girl who destroyed him! Only—please—would you go back to being just plain Gwen? There is just so much of this—I can endure!”

  “Dead, you say? Ill names this day! Who is guilty of the deed?”

  “Your—I mean Gwen’s lookalike. Her homebody! Eden Waring! Ask Gwen about her.”

  The claw was slowly withdrawn. Woolwine fumbled for a handkerchief and plugged his nostril with it. He felt dizzy and cold. Rocky on his feet, he staggered to a silk-covered chaise and collapsed there. He closed his eyes tightly.

  When he was able to open them again he had stopped bleeding and the were-beast stench had faded from the bedroom. Gwen was sitting cross-legged in the middle of a four-poster looking gravely at him.

  “Hello, Dr. Woolwine.”

  “Oh, God. It’s you. I’m so grateful. But—”

  “Delilah said I should talk to you about Eden. But she’s listening. Remember that. Tell me everything that’s happened while I was gone.”

  Woolwine clasped his hands to stop them from shaking, cleared his throat, and took her through the events surrounding the death of Lincoln Grayle. Twice while he spoke Gwen reached up to touch the bandage on the other side of her neck from where Letty Fresno had tweezered out Dr. Woolwine’s implanted Magnetic Flux Inhibitor Unit. Its removal had facilitated the time-traveler’s return from Jubilation County. Now a duplicate MFIU was in place; once again Gwen was beyond the reach of her homebody.

  When he had finished his story, neither Gwen nor Delilah said anything. Woolwine fidgeted, thinking of the bled-out bodies in what had formerly been the “clean” room, wondering what to do about them. Meanwhile there was a play of emotion across Gwen’s face. Her lips moved soundlessly or compressed palely. Her eyelids fluttered or closed altogether for several seconds at a time. Tremors randomly agitated her body and Woolwine was afraid that one of them would end in another horrid manifestation.

  He said timidly, “I’ll do whatever you—I mean Delilah—asks. But I need your help too! I can’t just have corpses lying around upstairs.”

  There was a pause in the interior dialogue between Gwen and Delilah; it was Delilah who looked out at him as Gwen nodded.

  “Bless you,” Woolwine said humbly. “Both.”

  “Lock them away unto stilly night, whence the corses shall be safe removed to clinging earth, death’s chill and silence. Betimes, we find ourselves environ’d in cruel dilemma.”

  “How so?” Woolwine asked cautiously.

  “Dost thou not bear a brain? Gwen is chattaled to another; enfeebled; a doppelganger.”

  “Yes, I know all about her status, but I—”

  “Look you, I’ll be sworn the Avatar shall die! But not at penalty to ourselves. Now they are separate; yet there is peril in the other’s passing, according to primal law. I have tooth that serpents envy, kidney for conquest, spleen of lion’s cast, marrow to match the ravening wolf’s. But I am powerless to ’scape the fate of mortal flesh, should Gwen vanish o’ the instant Death grays the ruddy cheeks of Eden.”

  “Dilemma, yes, I see. A pickle of a paradox, um-hmm. What do you think we—”

  “Ever-fixèd Law inscribes remedy. Gwen will be unfranchised by speaking of her name, to wit: ‘Guinevere.’ ”

  “You’re saying that it’s Eden Waring who has to set her own doppelganger free?”

  “Ay. Therefore to this affair you must with haste draw Eden hence.”

  “I don’t know where—”

  Gwen levitated, still purely naked, now spraddle-legged, eyes growing long and livid in a suddenly refashioned face. In she-wolf style she growled and pissed at him. Woolwine flinched.

  “No, no, just give me a moment to think!” He set his mind to racing, trying to look composed and competent while he riffed prospects or possibilities. A girl who had good reason for not wanting to be noticed. An object of edgy veneration pursued by the mentally unreliable, those who were known in a more distant day as kooks . . . it hit him. He cleared his throat.

  “Provided that Eden Waring is still in Las Vegas, there is someone who might, ah, be keeping track of her. Not from the police. Her name is Virgie Lovechild. She makes her living catering to the absurdist fantasies of immature celebrity worshipers.”

  Gwen settled back on the bed, the tempests in her face subsiding.

  “But if Ms. L
ovechild is able to help me find her, why not simply—I’m speaking to Gwen now—go to Eden yourself and beg an indulgence? As long as my MFIU is implanted, the master/slave relationship is annulled. The two of you apparently never got along anyway. In short, of what use are you to Eden Waring? Or threat? As long as she remains unaware of your present alliance.”

  There was a period of silence. Woolwine cleared his throat a couple of times, not taking his eyes from Gwen. She seemed deep in thought, or discourse with Delilah. Woolwine needed his afternoon medication, but he didn’t dare make a move to leave the room. Gwen, her eyes milkily placid, seemed unaware of or indifferent to his mounting distress.

  She said suddenly and with a happy smile, “Delilah thinks that’s a good idea, Dr. Woolwine. Find Eden and arrange a get-together. Not here. In a place, maybe like at Boulder dam, where she won’t be suspicious about anything and we can get our deal sorted out. It’s okay to explain to her about your magnetic jimmy-jammer or whatever it is because she’ll be wondering why she can’t recall me. Blame it on the Magician, tell her it was all his idea.” Gwen paused. “I’m kind of looking forward to this. Just the two of us, like old times.” She seemed to get a nudge from Delilah, and her lips pressed together. “Then once she names me and I’m not a doppelganger anymore, Eden will be dead meat. That’s a real long drop down the face of that dam.”

  CANAL SHOPPES AT THE VENETIAN • 5:20 P.M.

  Excuse me,” Patrick O’Doul said, “are you Mr. Olds?” Cody paused as he was walking into his gallery and looked back at the boy, who had been sitting on a bench on the canal side of the shopping concourse.

  “Sure am.”

  “Could I talk to you? My name’s Patrick. I’m here at the hotel with my unca Mickey.”

  “What about, pardner?”

  “I won’t take up much of your time.” Patrick seemed anxious that Cody not get away. He had nearly sprinted across the concourse from the bench he’d occupied. “It’s KIND of important.”

  Cody remembered when his own voice had changed, settling into a deeper register almost overnight. Right now Patrick was wavering between tenor and soprano.

  “Well, come on in. Not a painter, are you?”

  “Painter? No, I’m—I’m thinking about being an illusionist. Like my ah, um, SISter.”

  “Your sister’s an illusionist? Would I know her?”

  “Yes—well—that’s what we need to TALK about. Privately?” Patrick looked around. He seemed jumpy. There were four browsers in the gallery, and a collector who was deep in discussion with a sales associate over a Carrie Ballantyne pencil portrait of a cowgirl about Patrick’s age.

  “Guess you’ve got a good start on your future career,” Cody said good-humoredly, “because I’m baffled already. I can give you five minutes. Come on back to the office. Where you from, Patrick?”

  “PaRAMus, New Jersey. But, uh, not lately.”

  * * *

  Fifteen minutes later Cody leaned back in his chair behind one of the desks in the gallery office and looked hard at Patrick’s sweaty face. Patrick had chewed his lower lip nearly raw as he talked. And talked. He winced from the sting as he took a sip of Coke. Then his shoulders hunched tightly as he squarely met the skepticism in Cody’s appraisal of him.

  Cody said, “So you and—Gwen—you call her, and your uncle Mickey staged this illusion to get publicity for your act, only it didn’t go right and half the patrons along restaurant row were blowing their cookies from the aftershock. Instead of doing cooler time right now, through the good offices of the Tustin boys you got off the hook with the Venetian’s brass. But you won’t talk about how the illusion is done.”

  “No, sir.”

  “Meanwhile your sister is missing. So you spent most of the day lookin’ at surveillance files until your eyeballs were bloody tryin’ to learn where she went. But guess what: turns out she was with me part of the time.”

  Patrick couldn’t decide whether to nod or shake his head.

  “Couldn’t be,” he muttered. “Because—”

  “The files showed Gwen and also my date for the evening, who are dead ringers, in two different places at the same instant.”

  “Yeah.”

  “That’s some story, Patrick. Let me tell you what’s wrong with it.”

  Patrick lowered his head.

  “That was no magic trick happened there on the casino floor. I know, I was close-by. It was something real. A phenomenon, far-fetched, out of this world maybe, but real. Wasn’t it?”

  Patrick licked his sore underlip and remained silent.

  “Also, I don’t know where or how you met, but the one you call Gwen isn’t your sister. If you care to level with me about that, I probably won’t throw you out of here.”

  Patrick winced, then shrugged submissively.

  “Okay. Maybe we’re getting somewhere. Now, mind tellin’ what it is you want with me?”

  “They’re . . . twins, AREn’t they?”

  “Can’t answer that one, Patrick. Just not sure.” Cody looked past Patrick at someone who had entered the office. Patrick didn’t look around. Cody smiled, his eyes on Patrick again.

  “Either you’re one of the most accomplished bullshitters I have ever met, or there’s truth in you somewhere that’s dyin’ to come out if you’d only let it.”

  “You’ll just think I’m CRAzy.”

  “Suppose you start over about this Gwen you say you were partnered with. This time tell it to both of us.”

  Patrick raised his head. Eden Waring had walked around the desk and now stood beside Cody, arms folded. She looked curiously from Cody to Patrick.

  5:37 P.M.

  Devon phoned Harlee from the salon where she was having her hair tinted and her feet pampered.

  “Everything all set with Ferdie?”

  “Can’t believe how heavy those GD bricks are! And they don’t come with handles. Nearly sprained my back getting one out of the, you know. I had to cancel with my fencing master this afternoon. Now I’m heading over to Caesars for a cedar sauna, a synchro, and an oxygen facial. What are your plans, beloved?”

  “Ho-hum. No plans. I may pass by Virgie’s when I’m done here to see if she’s all right.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Wednesday is her bowling night. Virgie always comes here first for a wash and set. Her routine is virtually set in stone. But Jacques said she missed her three o’clock, and she didn’t call to cancel.”

  “Why don’t you give Virgie a call if you’re concerned?”

  “Oh, I did. Her personal phone is shut off. I don’t know what to make of that.”

  “It’s probably nothing. One of her headaches. She smokes too much.”

  “Harlee, I’ve been watching the local news here. As yet there’s been no word about—”

  “Don’t. We’re both on the air.”

  “Right. But today is the D-A-Y?”

  “Nothing to worry about,” Harlee assured her. “Flicka doesn’t fail.”

  CONCORDIA HOSPITAL • 6:05 P.M.

  Flicka and Nicole brought to the suite Bertie Nkambe’s first meal since her October 26 luncheon on the lagoon terrace at Bahìa, where she had been shot. Dinner was a blue cheese soufflé with hash browns specially prepared in the kitchen of Peppermill, the twenty-four-hour breakfast eatery that was a favorite of locals.

  As always there were two private detectives from the Blackwelder Organization on shift in the sitting room of Bertie’s suite. Old friends of the Fetchlings by now. One of them had a serious crush on Nic that she had effectively promoted during their visits. She stayed outside with the detectives while Flicka rushed the catered meal into Bertie’s room.

  She was surprised to find Bertie out of bed and sitting on a small sofa, wearing a robe and pajamas. She was still on fluids though, Flicka noted. One of her team of doctors was listening to Bertie’s lungs. From his expression both were in working order again.

  “Well, surprise!” Flicka said with a happy smile; Berti
e responded with a smile of her own while breathing deeply for the doctor. His name was Block or Bach, Flicka couldn’t recall. “But aren’t you rushing things a bit?”

  Bertie touched her forehead to indicate that sitting up out of bed made her a little dizzy, but she was game to try.

  Dr. Block or Bach put his stethoscope in a pocket of his hospital coat and said to Bertie, “Pulse and respiration are fast, which is to be expected. I want you back in bed in fifteen minutes. That should give you time to eat. You’ll probably find you don’t have much appetite at first.”

  Flicka was setting up the catering cart that Peppermill’s kitchen had sent over. One of the perks of celebrity. The hospital had been deluged with get-well and goodwill messages. Flicka knew that Bertie’s e-mail box was full every day. The children’s wing was overflowing with flowers that Bertie insisted be rerouted when they came in.

  Bertie said in a low, hoarse voice, “I’m a pest, but . . . need to go to the loo again.”

  “Where’s Wendy?” Flicka asked. Wendy was Bertie’s nurse on this shift.

  “She had to make a phone call. Some nonsense about . . . a credit card bill.”

  Good old Reese, Flicka thought. Reese would have Wendy in knots on the phone for a good fifteen minutes.

  “Flicka, that soufflé smells so wonderful,” Bertie said, as Flicka lent a hand to raise her from the sofa.

  Dr. Black—Flicka straightened out the identity matter with a glance at his hospital ID—made a couple of notations on Bertie’s chart, which he left at the foot of the bed.

  “My guess is you’ll be off fluids in another twenty-four hours. No pole to lug around on your daily walks.”

  “When do I . . . get this other drain out of my head?”

  “I’d say end of the week. By then—and I wouldn’t have believed it as recently as Monday night—you’ll be good to go.”

  Flicka glanced at the flaccid IV bag on Bertie’s pole.

  “She’s low on Ringer’s,” Flicka said authoritatively. “Should I change it? I know how.”

  “Better leave that to Wendy,” Black said, looking at his pager as he left the room. “See you tomorrow morning, Bertie. Enjoy that soufflé.”