Paranoid Magical Thinking (Unknown Kadath Estates)

by Zachary Rawlins

  April, even in her manic state, is incapable of being on her own. She had probably made it as far as the sidewalk that I was currently walking on, strewn with blackened pieces of ancient gum and flecks of paint. Then they had scooped her up, so fast and quiet it would have been as if she disappeared. They had been probably been watching for an opportunity like this, when she was outside and alone.

  There was a patch of blood on one section of pavement, slowly turning brown in the cool air. It had not been easy, taking April.

  Kim told me all about it while she did a slap-dash job of patching me up. Kim had followed April to the front door, hanging back far enough that she did not seem to notice. Despite my general resentment of our apartment manager, I had to admit that she was cool-headed and practical. If she had not gotten the plates of the car that went speeding away, April kicking and screaming inside the padded confines of the back seat, then I probably never would have seen her again.

  There was no way I could rescue April by myself. Fortunately, I had no intention of doing so, and for some reason, the residents of the Estates were determined to help.

  They had given me exactly what I needed despite my earlier idiocy. Not only did I have an address to work with, but I also had Holly’s gift shoved awkwardly in my pocket like a rolled up newspaper. Josh had supplied the address, but there was no way he would have given it to me without Holly’s intervention. Josh was still annoyed regarding our disastrous trip to the Underworld, and he seemed to be the only person in the Estates who did not care about April.

  I weighed options while I walked. I could head directly to the address that Josh had acquired from a car rental agency. It could have been fake, but Josh snooped through the utility records and decided that the location was probably in use. I was inclined to agree with him. They couldn’t take her directly back to the Institute. There is only one way in or out of that place: a Black Train.

  I had an indeterminate number of hours, no more than a day, then April would be lost forever. The trick I had used to free her from the Institute was strictly a one-time deal. There was no way it would work again. I would lose her and eventually they would catch with to me, if they cared enough to bother. Knowing Crowley, I thought he might consider me worth his while.

  Whatever I found at the address, it seemed safe to assume that I would not receive a friendly reception. There would be a number of armed men, at least. I wasn’t exactly in tip-top shape at that particular moment. My side had given up on coagulating, and the bandages Kim wrapped me in were stained dull red. Holly had given me a handful of pills and I had taken them without questions or water. The pain was muted and distant, like bass from a passing car. I did not feel up for rescuing anyone, but nobody asked for my opinion. There was a certain savage joy in disregarding my own impending doom.

  My other option was a long shot, a crazy gamble, a move that could alienate me from the residents of the Estates. A move could get me killed. However…

  I would feel a lot better if I wasn’t the first person through the door when things got ugly. That’s just the kind of guy I am.

  I looked up at the sky and tried to figure out if I was lucky enough to pull off what I had in mind. I did not get any sort of celestial revelation, so instead I let my feet decide. They took me toward the river, to the other side of the Enchanted Wood.

  I hurried on my way through the forest. I did not like anything about that place.

  She was sitting by the lazy rivulet of water that crawled along the confines of the culvert, one of the few areas colonized by enterprising ferns and vines, not far from her squalid camp and army-surplus tent. Her feet were bare and dangling in the water, her blond hair tied back with a dull metal cord. There was a makeshift cattle prod laying on her bedroll, and a pile of discarded wallets in the mud next to the river. A clasp knife sat on a mound of dirt piled on the concrete embankment covered with dark stains, waiting for cleaning. It was probably for the best that her hoodie was red. She had her arms thrown back on the ground behind her, and I could see her bruised and scratched hands, her body covered with a smattering of Band-Aids.

  In other words, it looked as if Jenny had recently gotten off work.

  “Do you have brain damage, Preston?” Jenny asked idly, not bothering to look in my direction. “Some kind of death wish? Because you keep comin’ round, it won’t end well…”

  As if I needed to be told. Jenny didn’t think enough of other people to make it worth lying, which was a little like being honest. I was counting on that.

  “I need your help,” I said, deciding that if I was gambling, then I was going all in. “And I have something you want.”

  Jenny swished her feet around in the murky river water, looking amused.

  “I guessed you wanted help,” Jenny said, her hand resting nearer to the clasp knife than I was comfortable with. “I can’t imagine what the fuck you have that I would want, though. You wanna enlighten me?”

  I sat down near her, careful to avoid touching the river. I definitely did not want whatever diseases you could get from the water in the conduit.

  “Holly told me why you came to this city. I know what you are looking for. I happen to know that they have what you need, right where I need to go.”

  At the very least, I had her attention now. Jenny was almost as curious as she was suspicious.

  The King in Yellow. One of four remaining manuscripts, the first act partially translated into Latin by the late Doctor John Dee. Not that you would know who that is. Including the original second act, unabridged.”

  Jenny would not have made much of a poker player. Her face told me everything before she managed to look away, splashing her feet in the river in surprise.

  “Why should I care about some stupid fucking book?”

  “You need it.” I felt increasingly confident. “And I know where it is.”

  The look that Jenny gave me was full of questions, so I told her a short version of the story. Jenny nodded once or twice, but whatever thoughts she had, she kept to herself until I was finished. Then it was open season for skepticism.

  “Why would they have the book, though? I thought they were here for April. Kinda suspicious that suddenly your problem is my problem.”

  “April has an affinity for languages.”

  “So what?”

  “You are aware that the book you are looking for is written in a language no one can read, yes? The whole second act, the part that you need. The first act is translated into Latin, so at least there is that. How is your Latin, Jenny?”

  Jenny’s eyes were flat and devoid of curiosity, brutally practical and self-interested.

  “Are you saying your old friends want April because she can read the book? I still don’t understand why they would care about it.”

  I did not like Jenny’s expression, but I nodded anyway. Whatever she was planning was the least of my worries. As soon as Jenny realized that I was lying, it would become my paramount worry, but if I had April back by that point, then it didn’t really matter.

  “You know about the book. They do as well. And they want it for the same reasons,” I said, making it up as I went along. Nobody had actually told me what was so important about the book. “You help me find April and help yourself to The King in Yellow in the process. You gonna do it, or what?”

  Jenny laughed, a sound as brittle as leaves crackling underfoot.

  “You already owe me pretty big, Preston. And I don’t think I like you very much. Remind me. Why should I help you?”

  “Because you won’t be able to get anything from me if I’m dead.”

  “Unless I was holding out for your kidneys…”

  I lay down against the cool of the culvert lip, ivy tendrils tickling my back through the tears in my shirt. The concrete felt good against my aching head. There was no part of my body that did not hurt, from the awful pounding in my side to the blisters on my feet. Only the pills Holly gave me made it at all bearable.

  “I don’t kno
w what you want from me, Jenny. And I don’t care. You can have it, whatever it is. Just help me find April.”

  Jenny stared off into space with her feet in the polluted river for a long time, and I did not push it. If Jenny refused, then I didn’t have any other cards to play besides knocking on the damn front door.

  “I don’t get you, Preston. I really don’t,” Jenny said, sighing and reaching for her sneakers. “At least tell me that you know where we are going.”

  ***

  “Sarnath.”

  “Come again?”

  “Sarnath,” Jenny repeated herself, shouting over the sound of the train. “It’s the neighborhood we’re going to, jackass. That’s where this address is. It’s in one of the old parts of the city, on the eastern ridge, above the water. Most of Sarnath is factories and shit, you know? But the area we are going is a little different. Kind of a red light district. Lots of hookers, particularly the underage kind.”

  “Sounds like your kind of place.”

  Jenny dug her elbow into my side.

  “You want my help or what?”

  “You know I do.”

  “Then lose the fucking attitude.” Jenny cracked her knuckles. “I’m not gonna do you favors and listen to you talk shit.”

  Jenny constant shifted in her seat, manically chewing her gum and fiddling with her hair. Her dilated pupils suggested that her mood had been chemically improved. With someone else, I might have thought she was afraid. But all I saw in Jenny was a restless sort of excitement that would last only as long as this held her attention.

  I wondered if Jenny knew how to be afraid. Fear is something that people who have never seen the Restricted Ward at the Institute don’t really understand. Can’t blame them – I sure didn’t until I saw it for myself.

  I shook my head to dispel troubling thoughts, then checked my pockets confirm that I had my tools. For the tenth time since we sat down, I scanned the faces in the train, matching them to the mental database I have been building my entire life. One chance encounter is okay. Two is suspicious. It is better if there is no third time. Third time is the charm after all. A magic number. Ask anyone.

  The woman with mirror glasses, for example, who did not exactly disappear beneath the train wheels.

  “How you wanna play this?”

  Jenny crammed another piece of gum into her mouth after she asked the question. That made three so far.

  Magic number.

  “I don’t know,” I lied. “I thought I would improvise.”

  “Really? I guess you plan on going in first.”

  “Well…”

  Jenny grimaced.

  “You’ve got a gun, right? ‘Cause these guys, the way you make ‘em sound, they’re gonna have guns.”

  I shook my head slowly, as if the idea had only now occurred to me.

  “I’ve never even shot a gun before,” I lied. “I wouldn’t know how to use one”

  “For fuck’s sake, Preston,” Jenny hissed. “You are a goddamn charity case.”

  I hung my head in mock shame.

  “Sorry, Jenny.”

  “Not yet, but you will be,” she said, coolly inflating a pink bubble and then popping it. “I promise you that.”

  I hung my head still further.

  “I can’t handle something like this.” I lied as if I truly regretted the deficiency. “That’s why I had to ask for your help. I’m not a tough guy. I’m no good at hurting people.”

  The best lies are self-deprecating. People are always eager to feel superior. Jenny sighed and snapped her gum, sitting back against the rattling plastic wall of the subway and thinking it over.

  “Lay it on thick, why don’t you? I don’t know why I let myself get involved in your bullshit, Preston. But since I’ve decided to let you string me along, we are at least going to do it my way.” Jenny leaned forward, as animated as any cartoon and just as prone to violence. “Here is the plan.”

  ***

  It wasn’t much of a plan.

  The guy looked surprised until the moment that his face made contact with the brick wall. I had previously been blissfully unaware that the sound of teeth being knocked out was both distinct and gruesome. The drug dealer that Jenny was mugging screamed and flailed like this was news to him, too.

  I am not sure how she did it, but it took Jenny all of ten minutes to find a dealer in the dreary main square of Sarnath, a barren concrete space dotted with troubling statuary, then lure him down a crooked side street. I stood guard at the mouth of the alley, feet planted in a puddle of what I hoped was not urine, while Jenny proceeded to rob, interrogate, and beat the peddler far more than I would preferred. She emerged from the alley with massively dilated eyes, bruised knuckles, and the address for his supplier.

  It wasn’t a long walk. Three blocks north, in a stately old office building that had seen far better days.

  The foyer we crossed had probably once been a lovely expanse of marble dappled with sun from the skylights, but it had suffered decades of neglect. There were occasional hints of former grandeur in the arches of the ceiling and the tile mosaics beneath a patina of indecipherable graffiti. The floor squeaked beneath our feet as we hurried across, squelching through pools of questionable water and skirting bundles of paint-flecked cords. Huddled shapes watched from encampments in the lobby, but none made any move to stop us.

  Of course, if I saw Jenny coming, I would be unlikely to get in the way.

  The button around the elevator flickered orange when she pressed it with her index finger, the nail partially coated with chipped black polish and bitten ragged. Jenny chewed her gum and smiled at herself in a fragment of shattered mirror as the elevator shook and rattled to life.

  I could not shake the feeling that I was seeing Jenny for the first time, cracking her knuckles in the pockets of her red sweatshirt, as eager as a child in a room full of toys. I would be lying if I said she did not scare me.

  The eleventh floor was not as decayed as the lobby, but I wouldn’t have cared to live there. I hung back, as we had agreed, keeping three doorways distance between us in the hall, stepping carefully to avoid jury-rigged wiring, pools of brightly colored mystery liquid, and miscellaneous debris. While the building had begun as office space, at some point in the recent past it was crudely converted to residential use. The hallways were crowded with bundles of utility cables and PVC pipe carrying water and sewage. I could feel the pressure of eyes watching through peepholes and a sort of resigned fear, but I saw no one, and heard nothing except the sounds of Jenny chewing gum and sneakers padding across the stained carpet.

  The supplier had the apartment at the end of the hall. It might have been the nice unit at some point in the past, but now all that meant was that the door had less trash piled in front of it than others. I wasn’t sure how she planned to get inside, but Jenny didn’t hesitate. She walked right up to the door and pounded on it as if she were certain that the people inside would open for her. Eventually, someone inside must have said something, because she stopped battering the door.

  “I wanna get high,” she said simply, in answer to a question I could not hear.

  There was another pause, another half of the conversation I couldn’t hear. Jenny responded by stepping back to stand in full view of the peephole, then lifted the front of her black skirt and smiled as if she had heard a particularly good joke.

  There was a rattling as various bolts and chains were released and pushed aside hurriedly, by someone who was under the mistaken impression that they wanted that door open in a hurry. Jenny hardly waited for the door to open before she slid inside. I took a couple cautious steps toward the door, but it snapped closed with a finality that let me know that I was not getting in short of kicking it down. I was reduced to standing outside, leaning against the doorframe and trying to look like I belonged, hoping that Jenny would make this fast.

  She didn’t, but no one tried to challenge my presence there. It was quiet for so long that I started doing a little dan
ce without realizing it, shifting my weight from one foot to the other in an embarrassing shuffle. The first noises that I heard could have been anything – an argument, maybe, or someone crying. Somebody having a good time in the bedroom, or a bad time in the bathroom. Hell, it could have been the television, even after the screaming started.

  Shows these days can be very violent, you know.

  Behind the door I heard a series of thuds, each louder than last, like something heavy rolling down the stairs. The last impact had a wet finality to it that was sickeningly familiar. I wasn’t surprised at all that it was Jenny who opened the door, her bruised hand leaving a dark red streak where she touched the door frame.

  “All clear,” she said cheerfully, rubbing her injured hand. “Come in and help me toss the place.”