Vicious Grace bsd-3

by M. L. N. Hanover

  “He doesn’t know it,” I said, “but he sort of does.”

  “Hmm?”

  Aubrey was standing by the coffee table, looking down at the papers and printouts. I gestured toward the drawings.

  “Grace,” I said. “But not. Close, but never quite right.”

  Aubrey nodded and pointed to the table before him.

  “He’s been reading up too,” he said.

  “On?”

  “Schizophrenia. Dementia. Compulsive personality disorders.” Aubrey cocked his head, reading the title of a book. “Dream interpretation.”

  The kitchen was a mess. Piles of old dishes teetered by the sink. The smell of spoiled food thickened. Dark brown beer bottles stood in uneven ranks on the countertop. A few had the labels picked off. One was broken. Out the back window, a small yard had been neatly kept not too long ago. I didn’t see anyone back there. In the living room, Aubrey whistled low. When I got back, he was holding up an old-looking leather-bound book. The title on the spine was worked-gold Gothic lettering and looked German to me.

  “I’ve heard about this book, but I’ve never seen a copy,” Aubrey said. I stood beside him. The title page sported a woodcut print that looked at first glance like a human form, until I noticed that all the parts—arms, legs, improbably oversized penis—were also drawings of buildings and people, like one of those optical illusions where you could see something as either a face or a collection of objects. The title was Der Körper und der Geist, and below that, in smaller, bright red letters: Ein Versuch auf dem verklemmten Leviathan.

  “It belonged to the grandfather,” Aubrey said. “His name’s on the flyleaf.”

  “Any idea what it says?”

  “The title translates to ‘Body and Spirit,’ but the subtitle’s new to me. Versuch is experiment or trial, but I think it can also mean essay. So, I guess an essay or an experiment of the something-or-other Leviathan?”

  “Look at its hands,” I said. The woodcut was rough, the printing old. If I hadn’t seen them in a different context earlier in the day, I would have thought the strange, almost disjointed fingers were just bad technique.

  “Good call,” he said, his voice grim.

  I was about to reach for my cell phone with the idea of getting Ex and Chogyi Jake up to speed when a sound came from behind us, familiar from a dozen action flicks: the slick and clatter of a round being racked in a shotgun.

  ELEVEN

  My body dove forward, pushing Aubrey down, almost before I knew I was doing it. By the time my conscious mind caught up, I was crouching between coffee table and couch. My weight was on my fingertips and the balls of my feet. Aubrey lay half behind the couch, his breath ragged. I wanted to look at him to make sure it was just surprise and caution, that I hadn’t hurt him, but my head wouldn’t turn.

  In the dark frame of the hallway, the man with the shotgun stood. He was broad across the shoulders and belly with a neck as wide as his head. His eyes seemed to tremble in their sockets, and his face was flushed the deep red of rage. His bathrobe and T-shirt were stained by grease and time. As I watched, he took another step into the room, growling like a dog. He swung the shotgun toward me, the barrel deep as a well. I flipped the coffee table up between us and dropped low as the blast reduced it to splinters. Then, against all common sense and instinct, I leaped forward.

  His eyes widened, and he took half a step back. He’d started racking a second round, but I had the barrel in my hand, the heat searing my skin like I’d grabbed a skillet. He was easily one and a half of me, but I twisted, pointing the barrel at the ceiling. I drove my knee up toward his crotch, but I didn’t have the leverage to put any power into the blow. We were both holding the shotgun now, fighting for it. I tried to push him back, but he rose up over me, pressing down until my wrists ached. His breath stank of whiskey. His eyes were bloodshot.

  He charged with a roar, bulling me forward into the ruins of the coffee table. I kept hold of the shotgun and let myself fall back, the force of his attack and my weight both pulling him forward. As he fell on top of me, I tried the knee again with much more satisfying results. We were locked together on the floor so close that I felt his gasp of pain against my cheek. I twisted my body, pulling my arms in between us and digging a straight-fingered hand in under his ribs. I heard Aubrey someplace to my right and felt a shudder as something hit my assailant’s back. It didn’t matter. He’d flinched back from my hand strike, and I could squirm out from beneath him. Small, younger, fueled by magic, I was on my knees before he could get his hands under him. I dropped an elbow onto his left kidney twice, then pulled the shotgun away from him.

  When he could finally roll over, it was too late. I had a fresh round racked, and the barrel digging into the flesh of his throat. The fight was over, and I felt myself starting to tremble and pant in its aftermath. He sneered up at me, his lips in a squared gape of defiance and rage. And there was something else. The knowledge that his death was a finger’s twitch away. Something that looked like relief.

  “David Souder?” I said between pants.

  He nodded, the movement translating itself to my hand along the length of the gun.

  “I’m Jayné. Hi. We’re here to help.”

  I HADN’T gotten out of it totally unscathed. A splinter of coffee table had gouged a deep red stripe down my back, and the fall had driven a small finishing nail into my shoulder deep enough that only the small silver head showed like something equal parts body piercing and Home Depot. We got it out with a pair of pliers. The palm of my right hand was cooked red. I sat at the kitchen table, holding a Ziploc bag of ice cubes. My T-shirt was blood-soaked and torn. David, once he’d calmed down a little, had offered me an old gray University of Michigan sweatshirt that was too small to have ever been his.

  The good news was I’d had several tetanus shots within the last year, didn’t seem to have soaked up any of the shotgun pellets, and wouldn’t have to go to a hospital to have little bits of metal spooned out of my flesh. Go me.

  “That was incredible,” David Souder said as Aubrey applied a square bandage to the circular burn on the man’s neck. “The way you threw that table. And when you jumped? I mean you are goddamn fast. Are you a black belt or something?”

  “It’s a long story,” I said.

  “Stop moving,” Aubrey said.

  “Sorry,” David said.

  “The short version,” I said, “is that we’re working on a problem, and we have pretty good reason to think it involved your grandfather. And because of him, you.”

  “Who put you up to—”

  “Stop moving.”

  Aubrey stepped back. He didn’t look happy.

  “All right,” he said. “Move. That’s the best I can do.”

  David put a hand to the bandage. I had the feeling he was less checking how it felt than whether it really existed.

  “Who put you up to this?” he asked. “Was it Alexis?”

  “No one put us up to it,” I said. “We were looking at something else. It involves a building your grandfather designed right before he died. We had some reason to think you were involved, even if you didn’t directly know you were.”

  David looked from me to Aubrey and then back. With his fear and anger gone, he looked much less dangerous. His bulk made him look like a young Winston Churchill. His eyes were puffy and red-rimmed, and the way he held himself spoke of a profound exhaustion. He brushed at his robe with a wide hand, as if he could erase the stains with his palm.

  “You’re really not . . . I’m sorry. But I can’t believe this is really happening.”

  “I know. It’s weird,” I said. “How long has it been since you slept?”

  “Three days this time. I’ve made it four or five before, but I was just starting to fade when I heard the two of you talking. You really know what’s going on? What’s wrong with me?”

  Aubrey looked at me, his expression a question. How much do we tell him?

  “We’re putting it together,”
I said. “How about you tell us a little about what’s been going on with you. Compare notes.”

  “I can get you something to drink,” Aubrey said.

  “I’ll make some coffee,” David said, hauling himself up. “You two take decaf?”

  We both agreed it would be fine. He lumbered over to the stove and started a teakettle to boil, his brows knotted. He was silent for so long, I felt like I had to prompt him.

  “It started about a year ago,” I said.

  “Yeah. It did. It was about eight months after the last part of the divorce. Alexis moved down to Dallas. We didn’t have any kids, and I never really liked her dog. It had been a long time coming, and with her gone I thought it was just some kind of delayed stress thing. Bad stuff happens and you seem all right for a while, but then it comes back up? I did that a lot when I was a kid. I was half expecting it. So when I started having the nightmares, I didn’t really think much about it.”

  His voice was calm enough, and steady, but I felt like he was leaving out bits and pieces. Dropping half-thoughts out through the cracks between words. I’d been that tired a few times, but only a few, and not for long.

  “Somewhere August, September?” I said.

  “I don’t know. Somewhere in there, yeah. It started off just being a sense of waking up trapped. Like the blankets were too heavy, and I couldn’t open my eyes. But I knew where I was. I knew who I was. I figured it was a kind of metaphor. You know, you feel trapped and smothered in a relationship, and so you dream about being trapped and smothered. Pretty straightforward.”

  He opened one of the cabinets and took down two mugs. There were other dishes, but none of them clean. He picked up a third mug off the table and rinsed it out.

  “I was just using this one,” he said. “It hasn’t been sitting here like the others.”

  “Okay,” I said. His embarrassment was touching in a weird way. For someone who’d tried to kill me less than an hour before, he seemed vulnerable and more than a little lost.

  “So,” he said. “Well, I figured it was a phase. I could tough it out. But they kept getting worse. Going on longer. Sometimes I’d wake up in the middle of the night screaming. I wasn’t just stuck in bed anymore. I was buried. Like something out of a Poe story. I was in a coffin and I could hear the dirt hitting the lid. The more I had the dreams, the less I could rest, and the less I could rest, the worse they seemed to get.”

  “Did you hear any voices in the dreams? Words, maybe?”

  “No,” David said. “Just this sense of being buried alive. But then it got worse. I wasn’t alone in the coffin anymore. There were other things. Bugs or spiders or something. I don’t know. And then I wasn’t me anymore.”

  He stopped to rinse out a gravity funnel and stick a fresh filter cone in it. He put it on top of one of the mugs. Not his.

  “I haven’t told anyone about this stuff,” he said. “I probably shouldn’t be telling you.”

  “Do it anyway?” I asked, and I got a smile out of him.

  “I knew what it meant when I started dreaming I was Grandpa Del,” he said, pouring fresh coffee grounds into the funnel. He sounded angry, but I knew better. I knew shame when I heard it. “There’s a . . . there’s a history of mental illness. In the family. Okay?”

  “Mine too,” I said. It was mostly a lie, depending on how pious someone has to be before you start looking at them funny. But it was a small one, and David seemed to unwind a notch.

  “Well, you know then,” he said. “Dad only talked about it when he was drunk. About keeping the great architect from letting it show. All the crazy things he did. Grandpa thought there were demons. Real demons. That they were always trying to get inside of you and make you do or think things. That they could make people into werewolves and vampires and all that. It wasn’t a metaphor for him. He really thought it was true.”

  David shook his head and gave a little half-grin. How crazy is that, right? I smiled back.

  “When I started dreaming, I knew what my subconscious was trying to tell me,” he said. The smile was gone. His voice was gray as slate. “It was happening to me. I was going crazy too.”

  “You never thought maybe your grandfather was right?” Aubrey asked.

  “Sure I did. For hours at a time,” David said. “After a really bad dream, I’d think it was all stone-cold true for three, maybe four hours. That’s how I knew. That I was next. And the dreams were getting violent. The thing in the box with me wasn’t bugs anymore. It was some kind of . . . I don’t know. Something huge. And it was mad at me. I mean really mad.”

  The kettle whistled, and we all jumped a little. David turned off the heat, picking up the kettle’s black handle with a fold of his robe. He poured a little water into the funnel, steam wafting up over his hands.

  “I started missing work. There was this woman I was going out with, and I broke things off with her. I didn’t want her involved in this. Wasn’t fair to her.”

  “Did you go to a doctor?” Aubrey asked.

  “No. I felt like if I didn’t tell anyone, maybe it would all go away. Stupid, I know, but . . .”

  He shrugged. The truth was doctors probably would have thought the same things he did.

  “What happened next?” I asked.

  David shrugged, then switched the funnel to the second cup, dribbling a small line of coffee across the table between them.

  “It got worse,” he said. He wiped the spill with a sleeve. “I started getting this constant feeling that I should go . . . somewhere. Like I was being called. The thing in the coffin wanted me to go somewhere and do something. It didn’t seem angry anymore. Not exactly. More commanding. That’s normal with schizophrenia, you know. Command hallucinations. Something outside of you telling you what to do.”

  He added more water to the top of the funnel and then handed me the first mug. When I took it, a little stab of pain went through my shoulder where the nail had been, but I tried not to show it. The coffee was surprisingly good, especially for decaf. Not at all bitter, and with a smoky undertone that caught my attention. He must have seen my reaction because he smiled a little.

  “Do you know what it wanted you to do?” Aubrey asked.

  “No. It was trying to tell me, I think, but mostly I just knew I was supposed to come. To be there, wherever there is. I started constructing it in my mind. I had this sense of the place, you know. There were days I’d go into work, and instead of doing anything, I’d just draw this vision in my head over and over. Trying to get it right.”

  “And the book?” I said.

  “Which book?”

  “Your grandfather’s book. The one in German.”

  A look of chagrin passed over David’s face as he switched the funnel to the last mug. He added more water. I had to think the coffee grounds were getting pretty much used up by now.

  “I had this idea,” he said. “If I understood the way my grandfather went crazy, maybe I’d at least get a little insight into what was coming next. How it would all go. I had some boxes in the attic. That was in them. I don’t know any German, though, so it didn’t help.”

  “Here’s the thing,” I said. “You’re not crazy. Neither was your grandfather. The place you’re drawing? It’s Grace Memorial Hospital. Your uncle . . . sorry, your grandfather redesigned the place back in the forties. And there really is something weird and powerful that’s buried there. And it’s alive.”

  David sighed.

  “No,” he said. “Thank you, but no. That won’t work.”

  “I can get you pictures of Grace Memorial,” I said. “Or don’t trust me. Google Maps is going to have a street view. Go look for yourself.”

  “What if it is? What does that prove? That as my brain started breaking down, it grabbed anything related to Grandpa Del. Including some building of his I’d seen and half forgotten.”

  “You’re pretty rational for someone in the throes of a schizophrenic break,” Aubrey said.

  “I think I am,” David said. “
But I would, wouldn’t I?”

  I leaned back in my chair, coffee mug in both hands. The movement sent little sparkles of pain through my back and shoulder. I ignored them.

  I’d been where David was now. I knew what it felt like to fall down the rabbit hole. Only I’d been lucky. Aubrey had been there to help me, and through him Ex and Chogyi Jake. There’d also been a truly ugly vampire named Midian Clark whose company I still missed. He was one of the bad guys, but we’d still been friends, just for a while.

  David, though, hadn’t had anyone. The weird hidden world had washed into him, and he’d made the only sense of it he could. He saw what he was prepared to see: a slow, creeping madness. And over months, he’d turned in on himself and made it almost true. I couldn’t help wondering what I would have done in his place. Proving to myself that riders existed had almost gotten me killed, and I’d had guides and allies. If I’d been on my own, I might have come to the truth. Or else my doubts and disbelief might have gone septic too.

  “We can agree that you haven’t told anyone else about what’s been going on? At least not in specifics?”

  He nodded.

  “Cool. Hang here,” I said, and put the coffee mug on the table with a thump.

  Stepping outside, I was astonished by how late it was. The sky was already crawling toward a steel blue twilight. The air smelled damp, like it had rained when I wasn’t watching. The conversational barker had gone away or been put in a house, and the distant throb of outsized car speakers rose and fell in its place. I went to the car, popped open the passenger-side door, and took out my laptop carrier. I opened the computer as I walked back through David’s house, stepping carefully over the scattered papers and the fragments of coffee table. I had the file pulled up and ready to play when I got to the kitchen.