The Bone Triangle

by B. V. Larson

  I shrugged. “A wealthy man learns not to flaunt it,” I said. “I prefer to get honest reactions from people.”

  “Smart,” she said, walking up the driveway.

  We passed the powered iron gates, which swung closed behind us. In the middle of the large circular drive was a fountain. I’d had it cleaned out a while back, but now the water merely trickled from the centerpiece. The koi fish in the bowl swam lazily in a murky morass of lily pads and algae.

  “Hmm…” she said, taking it all in. “I think you need to fire the gardener.”

  I cleared my throat and mumbled in agreement. I wondered what she was going to say when she saw Ezzie’s scorched-carpet trail across the living room.

  I thought carefully about my next move. I had a long list of people I needed to talk to. Dr. Meng had, as far as I could determine, made two attempts on my life in a week’s time. There was no reason for her to stop now. Logically, if she kept taking shots at me, eventually one of them would succeed and her problem would be solved.

  I knew who was responsible for these attacks, but I couldn’t very well march into Meng’s office and talk to her about it—not even with an armed team behind me. Especially not with an armed team behind me. Inside her sanatorium, she was an empress. She could mesmerize any allies I dared take into her domain and force them to shoot me in the back. Meng could control people’s minds. She could give them commands they would continue following even after they’d left her presence.

  Once, I’d been under the influence of her powers, and I’d been a witless guest in her locked, padded rooms. I did not question her strength. If I went to the Sunset alone, her minions would attack me, even as her assassins did now. But it would be worse, as there would be a crowd of them. They would be fanatical in her service, and I could not hope to overcome them all.

  She was angry with me because I’d gone into her domain and bested her once. I’d nearly killed her, in fact. But I could not hope to repeat the deed. At our last meeting, she’d been lulled by the fact that she believed I was in her power. This time, I would have no such advantage. The moment I arrived, the fight would be on. I was immune to her powers, but I would be alone. Even if I went heavily armed, it would be a bloodbath, and I didn’t want to kill innocent people under her influence—or die myself in the process.

  I sighed. This wasn’t going to be easy. I had several other problems as well. One of these difficulties was chattering brightly and feeding her cats in my kitchen. Jacqueline was undaunted by the scorch marks and the lack of furniture. She seemed genuinely excited by my adventures. The physical evidence she saw of them around the house only piqued her interest. I supposed I should have expected that reaction. People with powerful artifacts frequently became daredevils. I’d never been sure why I wasn’t affected that way. This was another of my personal mysteries.

  “Cheer up, Quentin,” Jacqueline told me. “Let’s have a drink and talk about our next move.”

  Her pretty face made it easy to smile. I sat on the couch with her after removing all my sheets and pillows. I threw them in the washer and dumped in a double load of detergent. When I returned I found her scolding Flasher, who’d had an accident on my imported tile.

  I enjoyed her company and soon I was in a much better mood. I tried telling her my house was a dangerous place to be, perhaps worse than the Triangle itself, but she wouldn’t listen. As far as she was concerned, she was immune to danger. If things became dicey, she’d simply vanish. Maybe she was right, but I wasn’t so sure.

  We ordered takeout and talked for an hour or so.

  “The trouble is, we need information,” she said after we’d carefully discussed the events of the past few days. “You have several enemies, but this Meng person seems to be the worst. I’ll go in there and check the place out, if you want me to. She can’t grab my mind if she can’t even see me.”

  “No,” I said. “That would be a bad idea. There are cameras everywhere. Even if you did get through, what would you do? I can’t ask you to kill her, and it’s unlikely she’d accidentally say something useful while you haunted her office.”

  “Hmm,” she said, sighing. “You’re right, my power is best used for assassination or theft. Not the most positive options. I mean, if you knew where there was a key or something, I could go get it. That would be about it.”

  “A key to what?”

  “I don’t know. I’m just saying—that’s when I could help you.”

  I thought the possibility over, but nothing useful popped into my mind.

  We talked next about the monster in the Triangle. Whatever it was, the phenomenon didn’t seem to be related to Meng’s vendetta against me. It had been killing people in the area long before I reached the neighborhood. The attacks had become more frequent recently, but I wasn’t sure if this was related to Meng’s assassins or Ezzie’s disappearance.

  “The only person who likes you in this town—besides me, of course—is this Rostok guy, right?” Jacqueline asked.

  I shook my head. “There is someone else. Gilling is his name. He leads a group of minor rogues. We’ve helped each other in the past.”

  “Does he know much?”

  I nodded appreciatively. “Yes, in fact I think he knows as much as anyone does about the strange happenings in this town. I think I’ll contact him. Thanks for the idea.”

  She beamed. Sometimes, she seemed too young for me, even though we were only a few years apart in age. Early thirties and late twenties were different, especially when you’d lived through as many odd events as I had.

  “How do we get ahold of this Gilling person?” she asked me.

  “We can try to phone him, but he’s more into his artifacts. Like me, he has more than one. He’s left something with me that allows me to contact him.”

  She bounced on the couch, coming closer to me. She leaned closer still and whispered conspiratorially. “What’s his best one do?”

  I smiled. “He can open rips in space. Rips between this world and others—even between one spot on Earth and another.”

  “Wow,” she said, nodding. “That is true power.”

  “It takes some setup, though,” I said. “But once it’s working, he can move an army from one place to another.”

  “Let’s summon this jinni,” she said excitedly.

  I began to stand up, but she grabbed my hand and pulled me back down. I looked at her in surprise.

  “There’s something we’ve got to do first,” she said.

  Then she kissed me. It was a real kiss this time, not just a peck of gratitude or a distraction while she reached into my pockets.

  Surprised, I recoiled a fraction, but then relaxed and went with it. We kissed nicely for about ten seconds. By the end of it, I was ready for more.

  Evading my grasp, she bounced up and headed for the cellar door. I stood and took a few steps after her.

  “Um,” I said, bewildered. “What was that about?”

  “We’ve both been thinking about kissing. I just wanted to get it out of the way, so we could think clearly about our next mission together.”

  I blinked at her. I was not feeling less distracted. If anything, she’d added a whole new dimension to the thoughts churning in the back of my mind. Sighing, I followed her down the charred steps into the cellar.

  “Where exactly are you going?” I asked her.

  “I don’t know, but I’ve been listening to your stories. Just about everything weird that happens here starts or ends in this cellar, doesn’t it? I figured whatever you use to contact Gilling has to be down here.”

  I frowned and nodded. Her logic was irrefutable. Gilling’s book was down here; I’d always kept it downstairs. Gilling liked the cool, dry environment of the cellar, declaring it safe for an ancient volume of parchment. I didn’t know why he cared about the conditions under which the book was kept, as all artifacts of power were essentially indestructible. Maybe he did so out of force of habit.

  After getting to know him better, I�
��d learned that Gilling had a number of hidden objects, one of them being a collection of old books. He liked to read from them when he created new rips in space, like some medieval sorcerer. The books contained old French poetry, and he had always said reading them helped him concentrate. I’d suspected he liked the atmosphere it created—he was quite a showman.

  Unlike any of the other artifacts I’d met up with, these two books were connected somehow. The books were identical copies of The Flowers of Evil, a book of poems by Charles Baudelaire, published in 1857. They could be physically separated, but any action performed on one book affected the other. Therefore, when I picked up the volume from a high shelf on the dusty, empty wine rack and opened it, I knew its companion volume was opening wherever it was at this moment.

  These two books intrigued me for several reasons. First, because as far as I knew, they were the only artifact that operated as a single entity, despite the fact the two books were physically separated. All the other artifacts were a whole piece that could not be torn apart by any known force. I’d tried to shoot holes in them, burn them, clip pieces off with wire cutters, and more. But I’d never managed to do so much as scar an artifact of power. I’d even used the technique to prove that a given artifact had power, even if I didn’t know what the power might be. If a piece of paper didn’t burn, for example, I knew it had some hidden secret ability.

  “Another impressive thing about the books is the fact that the link between them seems to transcend any distance,” I told Jacqueline. “Even if you step through a rip and page through one of the books while standing under the light of an alien sun, the book’s twin will page right along with yours. As far as I know, they are the only means of communication between two different worlds.”

  It took a few minutes to explain all this to Jacqueline, who looked at me and the book with wide, excited eyes. She kept watching it, as if expecting it to shower her with sparks or something.

  “You mean when you open one, it opens the other? When you leaf through the pages, the pages of the second book move by themselves, as if ghostly fingers are touching them. Freaky! I want to see it work.”

  I took the book down from its shelf then, handling it gingerly. Somehow, the idea that it might start struggling with me of its own accord had always creeped me out a bit. I didn’t really like using it. I’d once handled a large black scorpion with my bare hands at a zoo. The book felt like that to me—like a living, dangerous thing that had a mind of its own.

  “Well?” she demanded, her voice hushed but full of excitement. “Are you going to do it or not? Open that thing up and start paging!”

  I opened the book and paged to the first poem. Jacqueline watched with shining eyes.

  “It’s not doing anything,” she said in immediate disappointment. “What’s it supposed to do? Do you just riffle the pages until someone notices?”

  I shrugged. “I guess that could work, actually. But we have a system. If I open the book to the first poem, it signals him that I want to talk. In practice, he usually comes to visit after that.”

  “Oh, really? How dull.”

  “Well, we have a system worked out in case he can’t communicate in a normal fashion,” I said. “Either of us can leaf to various passages. The page displayed will show a word or a message. Usually, the title of the poem on a given page provides the meaning.”

  She stared at the book for several seconds. She stepped closer, and her breath puffed on my fingers. I found her proximity pleasantly distracting.

  “It’s not doing anything,” she said in a husky whisper, still staring at the book. “Oh, there it goes! That’s so freaky.”

  My eyes had wandered from the book to her hair, which had many stray strands I found entrancing. I snapped my attention back to the book. It shivered and squirmed in my hands.

  It was the oddest sensation to hold something that should not be capable of movement, but which writhed gently in one’s hands. I could feel the stroke of invisible fingers on the pages.

  I tried to ignore the tingle in my palms and the sensation of superstitious dread that crawled over the back of my neck. I behaved coolly, although I had the strong desire to toss the book on the floor. Moving the book as a whole had no effect on its twin. Only bending it, opening it, or leafing through it was mirrored by the state of the other.

  To my surprise, the book did not open to the first page of the first poem. That would have been a simple acknowledgment, indicating that Gilling was going to call or come to see me. Instead, the book flipped through half the pages of its volume before coming to rest, displaying a poem that was at first unfamiliar to me.

  “What’s he saying?” Jacqueline demanded excitedly.

  “Um, Causerie,” I said, reading the poem’s French title. “It means ‘conversation.’ He wants to talk using the book.”

  “Why? Is he in some kind of trouble?”

  “Hold on, the pages are flipping again.”

  Jacqueline lifted a hand and let the pages riffle past her fingertips. She laughed delightedly.

  I watched the pages closely. Causerie was in the middle of the book, but now we were moving quickly toward the front. It finally stopped at Don Juan aux enfers.

  “Don Juan?” Jacqueline asked in confusion.

  “Yes. ‘Don Juan in the Inferno’—in hell. It means he’s in trouble.”

  It was my turn to flip pages, as the book was still now. I paged to Le Vin du solitaire, “The Wine of the Solitary Man,” as way of asking if he was alone.

  He flipped to Sépulture. I frowned in worry.

  “Something’s wrong?” Jacqueline asked.

  “Definitely. This poem is about the death of a cursed poet. He’s indicating he’s in a prison of some kind, in deadly danger.”

  “We should go help him.”

  “But how? We are off the grid with this book now, as I’ve never tried to have a full conversation with the books. We talked about it as a possibility, and came up with a few signals, but it is hardly a perfect medium for exchanging information.”

  “Let’s tell him we’ll come help,” she said.

  “I don’t know how. None of these poems are about hope of rescue.”

  “Let me see,” she said.

  I gave the book to her with some reluctance. She paged through it, back to the poem about Don Juan’s plight. “Here, right at the top of this page. Let’s try this.”

  I read the English translation of the passage:

  A great stone man in armor leaped aboard;

  Seizing the helm, the coal-black wave he cleft.

  But the hero unmoved, leaning on his sword,

  Kept gazing at the wake and deigned not look aside.

  I eyed her critically. “What are you trying to say?”

  She smiled. “That we’re coming to help him, and he shouldn’t worry.”

  I grunted. I liked the sentiment, but I wasn’t sure exactly how I was going to pull off this miracle.

  After a while, the book stopped sending us messages. We tried a few more things, but got no response. Worried, I pulled out my cell phone and began doing some much more mundane communicating: I called Gilling’s friends. They’d always been easier to find than he was. Abigail told me he’d vanished several nights ago. I realized that was the night the cat-lady had visited me at my house. I nodded thoughtfully. Meng wasn’t Gilling’s friend. He’d been my ally in the past, and she knew it. She might want to kill him almost as badly as she wanted to get rid of me.

  I was getting angry. It was one thing for Meng to send her mind-slaves after me, seeking revenge. I’d expected that for a long time. But it was now clear she planned to make a clean sweep of it and erase any rogue she didn’t like. This amounted to a war on our kind.

  “What are you going to do?” Jacqueline asked after I explained the situation to her.

  “I’m not going to sit around and wait for her next brainwashed killer.”

  “I bet she’s behind the monster in the Triangle, too,” she sa
id.

  “I don’t know about that. Whatever it is, it seems to be eating people at random. Besides, that’s not her power. She influences minds. She doesn’t summon interdimensional monsters. At least as far as I know, she doesn’t.”

  “Who else should we call for help?”

  I thought about it. He was trapped in another world. Maybe Meng had sent an assassin after him. Gilling was resourceful, but he wasn’t a fighter. His primary power was the ability to switch worlds, and he’d probably done so in a hurry to escape. Maybe he was stuck out there, in some other place.

  “Wait a second,” I said, standing up and beginning to pace. “He said he was in hell. Historically, that’s a hot place to be.”

  “Not if you talk to the Vikings,” she said with a half smile.

  “I’m guessing he means he’s in a hot place somewhere. He’s trapped there. Rostok told me to look for a hot world, to use a rip to search for places where Ezzie might have gone.”

  “Ezzie?”

  I took a moment to explain again about Ezzie, the wandering lava-creature that had burned my Berber carpet into a charcoal slag.

  “Oh yeah, that thing. You think Gilling and this rock slug are in the same place?”

  I shook my head. “No way to tell. But I need to follow up on a suggestion I received from Rostok. I’m going to have to talk to McKesson about it.”

  I’d been avoiding this, I realized. McKesson bothered me. His goals always came first, above the needs of all others. I doubted he’d save my life if it made things difficult for him in some way. With all that said, he was the best at what he did: keeping the monsters out of our world. For years, he’d doggedly policed the fractured border between Las Vegas and all the horrors that tried to break in. If someone from our side was helping others move back and forth across his border, he’d want to know about it, and he’d take action.

  I picked up my cell, waved for Jacqueline to stay quiet, and called the detective. He answered on the second ring.