by John Shirley
Bleak felt as if he'd been slugged in the stomach. He'd been judging his parents pretty harshly, with their “he was killed in a tractor accident” talk. But what would he have done, in their place?
He wanted rum himself now. He got up and got himself a glass of water, because his mouth felt bone-dry, and to give himself time to think. He drank some water, which tasted of rust, and said, “Coster—you're saying my parents allowed them to take my brother?”
Coster turned the glass. “Like I said. We didn't give them a lot of choice.”
It explained a lot. A lot of inexplicable silences; a lot of ellipses in his history. Silences that made a bleak history bleaker. A lot of quiet misery on the part of his mother; the bitter stoicism of his father. Their dismay when they started to realize something was “off” with their remaining son. Their clinging to church.
Bleak's father was dead, six years now, of a heart attack. His mother was still alive but he hadn't been in touch with her for years. Which might be passive aggression on his part, he knew. Angry that they had sent him to that military school; hadn't accepted him as he was.
He should get back in touch with her. Tell her what happened to Sean. If it was true that Sean was alive.
“When was the last time you saw...Sean?” Bleak demanded. Coster shook his head. “That's enough. I want money. I want—” “Shoella!” A shout from the front of the house. “It's Oliver!” “We're in the kitchen!” Shoella called.
Oliver appeared in the doorway to the kitchen. Same baseball hat, same baseball jacket. Looked at Coster. Wrinkled his nose. The ferret on his shoulder wrinkled its nose too and ran around to the other shoulder.
“Don't worry about our guest here,” Shoella said. “He's...” She waved her hand dismissively. “Harmless.”
Is he? Bleak wondered.
“I was coming to see you—and I ran into something going on, just a few blocks from here. The guy at the center of it must be one of our people, but I don't know him.... Cops and firemen...”
“What?” Shoella sat up straight. “Why didn't Yorena tell me? Someone acting out around here. Showing his especiality? “
“He sure as hell is. He's at Sol's Restaurant throwing fire imps.”
Coster chuckled and waveringly lifted his glass. “Here's to fire imps.”
Shoella looked at Bleak. “We got to go see this. I need to know all Shadow people. Best you go too. You're powerful, Gabriel, I might need you.” Bleak didn't like the idea. “It'll attract CCA.”
“He's right,” Oliver said, raw mistrust showing in his glance at Bleak. “With him along, they could be all over us. Besides—he keeps himself aloof from La'hood. I don't see how we trust him.” An undertone of simple jealousy in his voice.
“He's not so aloof—he's here,” Shoella pointed out. “I want him there. We may need his power.” “It's a risk. If CCA is still looking for me in Jersey...” “It just started,” Shoella put in. “We could be gone before they get there.” Oliver looked exasperated, realizing she'd made her mind up. He had long ago accepted her authority.
Shoella stood up. “I'm protected from CCA now, Gabriel. I got the ancestors protecting me. How you think you get here safe? I talked with the ancestors, and we are safe. Come on—we'll take my little truck. You, Coster—wait here, yes? But I won't have you alone inside my house, I'm sorry. It's a nice day out in the backyard. There's a garden. Here...” She opened the cabinet, gave him the rum bottle. “Take it out back, and this water bottle—we back in maybe thirty minutes. I'm going to lock the house up.”
Coster made no objection to being treated like a troublesome stray dog to be locked in the fenced yard. He went meekly in the back, carrying his bottle and cup, and Shoella locked the house's doors.
Oliver and Bleak waited at the gray truck as she locked up the house. As they stood there together, Oliver said softly, bitterly, “I suppose you know that Shoella's in love with you.”
Bleak shrugged, wondering why Oliver was bringing this up now. “Sometimes I thought so. If she is...1 don't think I'm ready for it.”
“I don't think you're good enough for it, man,” Oliver said bitterly. “She's—” He broke off, as Shoella strode up to them.
They got into the gray truck and she drove them toward the rising column of smoke.
***
LONG ISLAND. CCA FACILITY 19. About that same time.
“We'll be going north, tonight, Loraine,” Helman said. They were waiting in the hall outside Containee Investigation Room 77, waiting for the guards to get Soon Mei settled in the concrete chair.
“You recall I mentioned a trip in the offing. In fact”—he smiled mischievously—”we're heading for the north pole.”
She blinked. “We skipped the arctic survival class in CCA training. Probably because there isn't one. But if you're serious...”
“I am—but actually we're going close to the magnetic north pole. First leg will be the base by Goose Bay.”
“What? That place in Quebec? I thought the Canadians got it shut down.”
“President Breslin talked them out of it. He's so very persuasive.” Helman added with satisfaction, “Because they're all afraid of him, of course. You've read Soon Mei's file? Know what she's capable of?”
“I did, yeah. She seems to be authentic.”
“You're either authentic or you're not. She is authentic, I assure you. As you will see.” He looked at an electronic clipboard he was carrying—no briefcase this time, Soon Mei having no need of “cuing materials” or summoning scepters. “We're going from Goose Bay via special transport. Going far north, to Ellesmere Island—what's left of it. Then up to Mount Eugene.”
Loraine shivered, anticipating the cold. She'd been raised mostly on military bases in California. An “army brat.” But she decided she was being childish. “How do I prepare? Do I need special clothing? It's all frozen up there, isn't it?”
“Not this time of year. Loraine”—he lowered his voice—”we've found the artifact itself, you know.”
“The what?”
“Ah, right, you haven't been fully briefed. Yes, we found it a few months ago. It was referred to in Newton's letters, and the other documents. The partial diagram. I'll show you a summary file. You need to know—because you and I are going to be there to stake our claim on it.”
He winked at her. And she thought, He really is socially clueless.
“But why me?” she asked. “I don't mean to be uncooperative. General Forsythe assigned me to work with you. But I'm a field agent, not a scientist. If there's an...an artifact—it's an archaeological question. That's not my strong suit, believe me.”
“We want you fully briefed, Loraine. And we want to see how you do up there—we monitored you, medically, during your encounter with Bleak, you know. We've got some very interesting readings.”
“Monitored me?”
He ignored her implied question. “Just head to Area Twelve, upstate, get the transport, we'll meet at Goose Bay oh nine hundred tomorrow—”
“Dr. Helman—I don't like being monitored when I don't know about it. I'm willing to volunteer for medical monitoring, but—if I haven't volunteered, it just doesn't seem right. I doubt if it's regulation.”
“You shouldn't make knee-jerk pronouncements like “I don't like being monitored,” my dear. They're absurd, truly they are. You really should stop being so naive. We're all being monitored, one way or another—and if we're under that radar right now, we won't be for long. To object is inherently unpatriotic, since monitoring protects the nation. As for regulations on surveillance, they're all provisional, depending on the needs of the current administration. The president has sent us all notice to that effect. Ah—here we go.” The door was opened from the inside by a small, dark man in a black beret and Special Forces uniform.
“Almost ready, Doctor,” the soldier said. Sewn on one shoulder was one of the colorful patches that the different military and intelligence projects used to enhance esprit; this one had an image
of a knight holding a shield in front of the planet Earth. Below that, in gold, the words SERVING IN SILENCE.
“It's a curious thing,” Helman remarked, as they went into Room 77, “how very powerful, and yet how very limited too, the so-called supernatural is.”
They were in the familiar concrete room, Loraine and Helman, with the concrete chair, but another person was being strapped into it by two Special Forces escorts. The black berets were stocky, grimly silent Filipinos. This time the ShadowComm containee was a small, vaguely Asiatic-looking woman of about forty. She wore a blue frock and thongs. No makeup. Her short gray-black hair was patchy; she seemed to have cut it out randomly in spots, somehow. Her eyes darted about and her lips moved as she whispered to herself. The suppressor hummed behind her.
“What I mean about the Hidden,” Helman said, as he frowned over the electronic clipboard, “is— well, on the one hand we get good results with Soon Mei here. Ghost-Enhanced Surveillance can be very effective. It's one of the reasons we get funded year after year. We've got General Erlich and Swanson threatening our funding if CCA isn't more useful against terrorists—GES did find one terrorist cell for us. But specific information can be difficult to get—the ghosts are individuals themselves...and they are almost always befuddled.”
Loraine had had a crash course in ghosts, the last few days. She'd been skeptical, then amazed, when she'd seen how much CCA used them. She'd seen video of Ghost-Enhanced Surveillance; had read the files. From what she knew of the metaphysics of ghosts, their erratic usefulness was no surprise. According to the UBE/GES manual, most souls, detached from the body, passed into particular levels of the Hidden, and from there reincarnated, or were drawn into some higher plane. Or into the Wilderness. But earthbound ghosts were souls who clung tenaciously to the material world— they were particularly fixated, neurotic people, who identified with their own little problems and refused to leave them behind. They were too self-obsessed to provide clear information consistently.
Loraine glanced at Soon Mei. The woman twitched in the chair, her lips moving, eyes darting. Seeming indifferent to Helman's remarks.
“Still,” Helman said, switching off the suppressor, “Ghost-Enhanced Surveillance can locate people for us—but not just anyone. Those with supernatural powers seem to know when a ghost is shadowing them, and after a brief window they ward the surveillance away. So we shift to
technological surveillance, for someone like that. Or we use a special monitor like Orrin Krasnoff. Even someone as powerful as Sean has difficulty tracking some individuals—he has a particular blind spot when it comes to Gabriel Bleak. Krasnoff is really the best we had for direct cognitive projection, but he's going to be useless for a while.” “And-Gabriel Bleak?”
“We have someone working on the Gabriel Bleak contact right now. Let us see what we can find out with Soon Mei—and tomorrow morning, we will head north...to see the crack in the dam. And now—Soon Mei...you know what to do. If you want your reward this evening.”
“I want something better quality,” she said, in a creaky, little voice. “And new things to look at, while I...while I trippy-trip-trip.”
They're giving her drugs, of some kind, Loraine realized.
Helman caught the look on Loraine's face. His lips formed a bent little leer he probably thought was wry. “Oh, yes—addiction has real power over the psyche, Loraine. Indeed, we use many narcotics in our programs here. They are especially useful for someone like our Soon Mei, who likes to 'chase the dragon.'“ He didn't seem to care that he was talking about Soon Mei's addiction in front of her, as if she were a lab animal unable to understand. “A mind freed by opiates makes many psychic connections, we find. Often many unwanted connections, it's true. But Soon Mei has a gift for controlling the spirits she meets. Earthbound spirits. Don't you, Soon? She's a sort of hyperskilled spirit medium. And she works best when she's a bit on edge, motivated to focus.”
Helman looked at Loraine appraisingly, as if he was trying to decide how she was taking all this.
Loraine thought, I've got to stop coming across like everything here's a problem forme. It's dangerous. She nodded in as businesslike a way as she could. “I see.”
Helman turned to Soon Mei, muttered a few instructions, then went to the wall and dialed down the lights. He opened the narrow overhead shaft but kept a sheet of tinted glass in place so that the light came down murky green.
A full minute more, and ectoplasmic strands descended from the skylight, to stretch probing fingers down into the room within the green shaft of light.
The ectoplasm purled and roiled, in no hurry, like drops of milk spilled in water. Faces formulated from the ectoplasm. The eyes came first, looking fearfully to the left, the right...and piercingly into Loraine's heart.
That's how it felt, anyway. When the ghosts looked right at her, they looked not at her face, but into her heart—where she felt a jab of icy needles.
Faces detailed around the eyes, then parts of ethereal bodies formed, usually clothed according to ghostly memories. The crowd of forms never stayed completely in focus; some drawing back from theo others in revulsion, others twining around one another in a glutinous dance.
“The time has come, Soon Mei,” Helman said. “Send them out to find Harry L. Zelinsky for us. He is in Canada, somewhere in Vancouver, but we don't know exactly where, they keep shifting his safe house.”
Zelinsky! Loraine thought. The leader of the opposition to President Breslin. Accused of embezzling—probably framed—he'd fled the country a year before to avoid jail. He still spoke to the American public through the Internet, and Canadian media, though the webs of censorship tightened every day.
Directed by Soon Mei, the ghosts fled up the shaft in search of Zelinsky, and a thought came to Loraine seemingly from nowhere.
Where is my duty, really? Am I really serving my country this way?
***
AT ALMOST THAT SAME moment, in New Jersey.
Why did I come? Bleak wondered. He stood in a small crowd with Oliver and Shoella.
They watched a perspiring man capering on the sidewalk of a business thoroughfare four blocks from Shoella's house, in front of a burning building. The man was shaking his shoulders like a stripper, laughing and crying at once, silhouetted against the burning inferno that had been Sol's Restaurant. He was a long-haired, thirtysome-thing man with chipmunk cheeks and a belly that sagged over his wide leather belt and an old INSANE CLOWN POSSE T-shirt. Cheap single-color tattoos decorated his thick, pale arms. He was shaking his arms as if to get something out of them, doing a dance like a child having a tantrum. Sweat splashed when he whipped his head about, and it pasted his long brown hair to his head and neck.
Bleak knew the restaurant, a popular comfort-food family spot, built in the 1950s, with curving pseudo-space-age lines of red panels and curving chrome, Sputnik-shapes projecting from the SOL'S sign. Now the low, sweeping building roiled and rumbled with smoke-streamed flame. A window burst out, glass tinkled into the parking lot, glinting with firelight. They could feel the heat of the fire sixty feet away.
Yorena sat on the branch of a small elm nearby. Bleak and Shoella and Oliver and Oliver's ferret —its eyes catching the flames—watched as fire trucks roared up and police cars blocked the area off. 13' Cops were putting up street barriers and telling the small, gaping crowd to stay back, nothing to see here.
A middle-aged woman with dyed-blond hair, wearing a Sol's waitress uniform, stood just in front of Bleak, watching the fire, wringing her hands. “We asked him to leave because he was ranting about how he was a great songwriter and no one appreciated it and they stole his ideas, and we said, 'Quiet down, stop yelling,' and he said he didn't have to, and then he said, 'It's happening to me, finally it's happening,' and he started throwing fire-things around.... Oh, Lord, that job was all I had.”
“And I don't see much of anything,” Bleak said, aside to Shoella, keeping his voice low. “I mean —no 'especialities.'“
Two
pale uniformed cops, glistening with sweat themselves, were approaching the capering man, one with a Taser, one with a gun drawn.
“How do you think Sol's got on fire in such a short time?” Oliver insisted.
“I don't know—a firebomb maybe.” Bleak was scanning the sky for helicopters or UAV drones. He really shouldn't have come. A man who had, perhaps, helped kidnap his brother had been right there in front of him. And he'd left him unattended somewhere. Who knew what the guy might be doing? Was he contacting CCA—maybe trying to get more money that way?
Oliver shook his head. “I sawit. It wasn't a firebomb.”
“I think I'm leaving. We should all go.” Bleak wanted to get back and talk to Coster, pay him if necessary.
“That's what he was doing right before the fire started inside,” the waitress said. “Throwing himself around like that. I got to go home.” But, stricken, she just stood there, staring at the capering man. “How I'm going to pay my...”
“Reach out into the Hidden, here,” Shoella whispered, to Bleak and Oliver, watching the cops approach the capering man. “You can feel it.” She glanced up at Yorena on her perch. “It's something new—he'sjust gotten this—”
The ferret on Oliver's shoulder stood up on its hind legs, making high-pitched chi-chi-chi sounds. And Oliver said, “Yeah. Something's building up...about to let go...reaching the flash point.”
Bleak felt it too. He looked into the Hidden and saw the energies boiling around the capering man...as if the man's contortions were bringing it to a boil.
The cops were shouting—and that's when Bleak saw the fire imps.
The sweaty guy in the INSANE CLOWN POSSE T-shirt suddenly stopped moving, stood there in quivering rigidity with his arms held straight out, palms up—and hunkering in his hands were burning tumor-purple creatures, each about the size of a human heart. Probably most people here couldn't see them, as the ShadowComm did: squat, little, purplish fiery mockeries of humanity.