“Yes. Their true form is supposedly horrific, though I have never seen it. They always wear robes and veils.”
“At first I thought they were wearing Halloween masks or something.”
“That sounds about right.”
“They said they were lawyers. They claimed that they knew you.”
Yael shivered at the revelation.
“You are just trying to scare me.”
“Naw. I’d think up something more frightening than lawyers. But I didn’t trust these bastards, even before you told me the Key was... I dunno. Linked to you, or whatever. I couldn’t figure out their angle, why they’d want my help. So, I started thinking...”
Jenny held up one of the ampules she had taken from the safe, which she had apparently stored in the folds of her bandages.
“Rumor around the Waste is your Visitors are real hard to kill. Maybe even impossible, though I’m of the mind that nobody has put in enough effort. There is always more than one way to skin a cat. Believe me.”
Jenny set the ampule down on the shelf beside her bed in a small cardboard box, then extracted another from her ad hoc pocket. Jenny paused and held it to the light so that Yael could see the alien, indefinable color of the liquid inside.
“I’ve heard about these people. They run them like puppets from these satellite machines, except the machines are alive,” Jenny admitted, looking abashed. “Sound crazy to you?”
Yael shook her head firmly. Jenny placed the second ampule in the box beside the first while Yael explained.
“Manifestations of the Outer Dark. They cannot enter the atmosphere; not yet. It is forbidden. So they use people – we called them Avatars, back at home. Those lost in dreams to the Elder Horrors. You are right to call them puppets, because they are little more. As long as their masters care to pull their strings they are effectively immortal, but they have no will, no volition.”
Jenny removed a final ampule and put it with its companions, along with three disposable syringes wrapped in crinkled plastic.
“Ran into someone like that once, a few years ago,” Jenny muttered with obvious, if grudging, respect. “Wish I’d known all that back then. Would have saved me an awful lot of stabbing. I’ve been trying to figure out how to go about hurting something like that ever since...”
“You have such lovely hobbies.”
“...and that’s when I found out about this stuff. Rumor is that somebody used a little AHS-125 to incapacitate a shoggoth. I figure if it works on one invulnerable monster from beyond the stars, then it will probably work on the whole lot.”
Yael shook her head while looking at the three tiny ampules arranged like darts in a small box about twice the size of a match book. They looked like rigid plastic toothpaste tubes, translucent in the center to show the strange liquid they contained. The capped needle on the syringe seemed unnecessarily long.
“This is that ‘Anti-Human Serum’, correct? These ampules are for me?”
Jenny managed about a third of a nod.
“Your share. I found six, we are splitting fifty-fifty. Ain’t about to tackle one of those things with my bare hands.”
“And what am I supposed to do with these?”
“When shit goes down, stick one of your Visitors with a syringe of this, in an artery if you can manage that. It’ll work faster. You may as well fill them now, so they’re ready to go.”
It wasn’t a difficult process. Jenny talked her through it, and within a few minutes, the ampules were empty, and the three syringes were filled with oily liquid. Yael regarded the box with considerably more caution, placing it carefully in the interior pocket on her windbreaker.
“What will happen?”
“They should pass out, swell up, and turn purple. It’s like an allergic reaction, a whole body thing. Works really fast. Seen it happen to junkies. Nasty shit.”
“Miss Frost...”
“...I know, I know. It won’t kill them. Assuming they‘re alive to start with, this crap is supposed to extend lifespan. That’s the whole ‘125’ part. You don’t have to worry about upsetting your poor bleeding heart.”
“Do people actually use this drug for fun?”
Jenny winced.
“Not exactly,” Jenny said grimly. “Not for fun. The thing about 125 – it’ll fix you, no matter what you’re hooked on. Fiending for smack or speed, doesn’t make any difference. Of course, after the comedown, you got a whole new addiction to deal with...”
Yael shifted uncertainly, though the train’s motion remained smooth. She found herself holding on to her anger as if it were something she would regret losing.
“What about the Azure, then? What is that for?”
“There isn’t any.”
Yael studied Jenny’s eyes for any sign of a lie, but she already knew there was no point. Jenny didn’t think enough of the world to bother with deception.
“None?”
“Nope. All I got is the AHS-125.”
“But... Jenny... why?”
Jenny’s eyes narrowed and her nostrils flared, which was more or less the extent of motion currently available to her.
“Those bastards, the what-did-you-call-them...”
“Visitors?”
“Yeah. Those guys. Mr. Yog and Mr. Sothoth. The lawyers or whatever...”
Yael sat down on the edge of the bed, crowding close to Jenny, her head pounding with something that she couldn’t quite remember. It was like beginning a sentence only to have the point drift away, or remembering the melody to a song but forgetting the words.
“What were their names again?”
“Yog and Sothoth. How could I forget names like that? Gave me their card and everything.”
Jenny indicated the pile of clothes that had been salvaged and washed by the hotel staff before they had departed. Yael leaned over, searching for the business card. She couldn’t help but notice how meager Jenny’s possessions were, hardly more than matches and pocket change. The card was in one of her pockets, wrinkled and torn, but legible.
It was indisputably the card of a lawyer representing the firm of Yog & Sothoth. The cardstock was heavy and expensive, embossed with a logo that was hauntingly familiar. A card like this, Yael knew from experience, was meant to make a very specific statement about the wealth of the person handing it out.
Not really the sort of the thing Yael expected to find in the Waste, much less in the possession of Jenny Frost.
There was no phone number or address, but Yael already knew how to contact the owners. The card was frigid to the touch, like a thin sliver of ice. Anyone who fell asleep holding it would enjoy a private audience with Mr. Yog and Mr. Sothoth.
Anyone except for Jenny Frost, who didn’t dream.
“It was weird. I’m wandering around in the middle of a dust storm, trying to find some place that was at least a little sheltered from the wind to set up camp and wait it out. Then the dust clears and these two weirdos in robes are waiting. They have a desk and paperwork and shi-”
“Miss Frost!”
“Right. Sorry. Anyway, we had a little chat. Can’t say I enjoyed it much. Yog, he’s the bigger of the two, he barely talked at all. Sothoth, the skinny one, did most of the talking. His voice...was awful. Don’t ask me to describe it, because I don’t know how, okay? Listening to him sucked. Bastard went on and on. Most of it was about you.”
Her brother had warned her that she would have enemies when it became obvious that his disappearance was inevitable. He warned her not to trust people in general and Visitors specifically. She was surprised nonetheless.
Yael knew with a morbid certainty that the potential of her own disappearance had haunted her brother’s nightmares, because he had written of them liberally in the diary that she was not supposed to know about. He would have disapproved of what she was doing and chided her for taking unnecessary risks. Yael had prepared herself for the idea that he might be disappointed in her, or angry.
She had never considered the p
ossibility that his most paranoid delusions might be proven right.
“I’m certain he had a great deal to say. Mr. Sothoth is in a position to know a great deal. Yog & Sothoth is my family’s legal firm, after all.”
Jenny’s jaw dropped as far as her bandages would allow.
“Your family has lawyers?”
“Stop it.”
“No, really, how much trouble do you people get into, anyway?”
“Be serious,” Yael pleaded. “This is hard for me.”
“I am serious,” Jenny insisted. “If your family wasn’t doing something shady, then why would they need a law firm on the payroll? Normally, people only talk to lawyers as an alternative to jail.”
Yael poked at Jenny’s exposed midsection playfully, causing her to flinch and grimace.
“Stop changing the subject. You still haven’t told me why you helped me.”
“That shit you told me, about the key disappearing if you died? That true?”
Yael nodded, wounded that Jenny would doubt her.
“Thought so. You are too damn honest, Yael. That’s not a problem most lawyers have. They didn’t mention anything about the Silver Key disappearing if you died. They told me where to find you and when you would be there, but nothing about that.”
“Did they,” Yael paused, working through a knot in her throat, “want you to kill me?”
“They seemed to know who I was,” Jenny said blithely. “They told me what you looked like, where to find you, that you had what I needed on your skinny ass. I put the picture together myself.”
“Oh my God,” Yael whispered. “Sothoth was at my Bat Mitzvah.”
“Your what?”
“Never mind.”
“Hey, why are those freaks your lawyers, anyway?”
“Because my family does business with the Outer Dark,” Yael said, shrugging as if the scandalous admission meant nothing to her. “They provide my family with financial and legal advice we couldn’t get any other way. Yog & Sothoth are the oldest and best firm the Visitors have to offer.”
Jenny looked skeptical.
“And what do they get in return?”
Yael’s voice had become very small, so that she could hardly hear it over the sound of train’s ceaseless rattling.
“I have no idea.”
“You had no idea. Bet you have a guess now…”
Yael wrapped her arms around Jenny’s neck and then buried her head in the hollow of Jenny’s uninjured shoulder, bursting into hysterical, uncontrollable tears. The shame of crying in front of Jenny made her weep harder, sniffling and whimpering like a child into bare skin.
“Hey, Yael?” Jenny tried to flinch away, but there was nowhere for her to go. “What the hell is this?”
“Thank you, Jenny,” Yael said, her voice muffled, because her face was pressed into the cotton of Jenny’s faded t-shirt. “I owe you.”
Jenny patted Yael on the back clumsily with her bandaged hand, clearly at a loss.
“What the hell are you thanking me for?”
Yael choked back further sobs, but kept her face in the hollow of Jenny’s shoulder.
“You saved me.”
Jenny laughed, wriggling free of Yael’s embrace.
“I didn’t kill you, Princess. That’s not the same thing.”
“It is,” Yael insisted, wiping her face with her hand. “It means a lot to me, Jenny. I don’t – that is, I haven’t – well, I don’t have many friends. Any friends. So I appreciate it.”
To Yael’s astonishment, Jenny blushed bright red and swore under her breath.
“I am a little worried about Fenrir, though. Are you sure he can follow the train tracks all this way?”
“Don’t worry for Fenrir, worry about him, that’s my advice.”
“I feel bad, though, leaving him out there...”
“Why don’t you go for a walk, Princess,” Jenny muttered, rolling over in her narrow bed. “I wanna take a nap. All your chatter gives me a headache.”
Amused by Jenny’s forced anger, Yael obediently put on her shoes and gathered her things, slipping her gas mask onto the top of her head. She paused at the sectioned cabin door, then hurriedly ducked over Jenny’s bunk to give her a quick, chaste kiss on the cheek before fleeing into the hall.
***
The train was made of pitted dark iron and the track squealed and complained beneath its weight, racing across a landscape so blighted that it seemed to belong to another world. The cars were huge with narrow hallways that rocked gently from one side to the other. Navigation was aided by brass railings set along the length of the cars. There were eight cabins on each of the side of the corridor, sealed with identical wood folding doors. Yael found the hallway deserted, and paused to glance out a rattling window at the Waste. It was almost pretty in its stark emptiness, when she had the opportunity to observe it from a respectable distance.
She had to wrestle with the door at the end of the car for a moment before she managed to force it open. Yael stepped out into the open space between the cars, little more than a metal grating laid over the junction with a pair of guardrails that made it marginally safer. If she had thought the train was loud in the cabin, Yael found herself awed by the sheer magnitude of the noise outside, a massive sound that resonated in her chest and brought half-remembered ancestral nightmares to the surface. The smoke that the engine belched was black and fetid with coal, and every exterior surface of the train was coated in a thick layer of soot.
Making her way carefully from one car to the next, Yael was grateful for her mask.
When she emerged in a dining car, replete with oscillating chandeliers and tables with special mountings to hold crystal and silver, she felt significantly less gratitude. The waiter in the tuxedo appeared decidedly hostile, from what she could see of his pinched face behind his absurd mustache.
“Miss,” the waiter sneered archly. “You are underdressed.”
Yael glanced down at the scuffed surface of her windbreaker, her threadbare pants, the tights beneath turned the no-color of the Waste. She stared forlornly at her rain boots, which she had just recently repaired with duct tape, and had to agree with him.
“You have a point, sir,” Yael conceded. “I am simply passing through, however. I will not trouble your diners.”
“The cars beyond this are first-class. Certainly you could have no business there.”
The elaborately dressed diners were staring, some in annoyance, while others seemed amused by her plight.
“I am a passenger on this train. I was informed of no such restrictions to my movements,” Yael snapped, suddenly determined to hold her ground. “Who are you to bar my way?”
The waiter grabbed at her shoulder, but Yael shrugged free of his grasp, his fingers finding no purchase on the slick fabric of her windbreaker. He lunged at her again and she sidestepped him easily, causing him to stumble into one of the tables, upsetting several wine glasses and scandalizing two manicured ladies. The waiter extracted himself from the wreckage of the table spouting apologies, his face beet red and the veins in his neck bulging. He stalked toward Yael with his fists clenched, enraged and goaded by the indignant remarks of the female diners. Yael wedged herself into one corner of the dining car, uncertain and indignant.
“You may be a passenger, Miss, but I am an employee of the company. Therefore I am afforded the right to expel passengers from the train at any given time,” the waiter snarled, rolling up his sleeves as he advanced. “Perhaps I should leave you in the Waste? You would be more at home there, I would imagine.”
Yael tried to time her dive to scramble around him for the far door, but it didn’t work out as she had hoped. She felt a strong tug between her shoulders and then he picked her up as if she were no more troubling than any other refuse he was forced to discard.
The ground outside the door was moving too fast for her to make out anything clearly, but the soil was the washed out grey sand of the Waste. Yael grabbed frantically at the do
orjamb, the waiter’s coat, anything at all to keep herself inside. She could hear nothing beside the thunder of the wind and the train as they struggled, Yael halfway out the door of the Black Train, her fingers clutching at the doorframe while stray glasses and utensils clattered to the ground several feet below and were lost, to the wheels and to their rapid passage.
“Consider this a lesson,” the waiter said smugly, kicking one of Yael’s hands from the door, “in remembering one’s place.”
“Aptly put.” A man with frighteningly pale skin and an archaic suit rested one arm gently on the waiter’s shoulder. “With that in mind, would you care to unhand my employer’s guest?”
The waiter froze, holding Yael halfway out of the train, while the wind screamed through the partially opened door. The anger drained from his expression like water down a drain, to be replaced with slowly dawning horror.
“O-of course, sir.” The waiter set Yael gingerly down on her feet. “Please convey my apologies to your employer. Had I only realized, I would not have – had I not been deceived by her appearance – ”
“My employer cares nothing for your apology,” the man said with surprising venom, offering his white-gloved hand to Yael. “But I’m certain that there is another who is deserving of it.”
The waiter turned to Yael, his face a study in mortification, sapped of any emotion other than raw panic, his skin glistening with a patina of sweat.
“Miss,” the waiter began, dropping his head in a mock bow, “if you would accept my apologies...”
“Acknowledged,” Yael snapped. “Not accepted.”
Yael allowed the man in the immaculate antique suit to lead her through the dining car. The remainder of the diners in the car were careful to avert their eyes.
“Thank you,” Yael said in a low voice, once they were at the far door of the car. “I appreciate your intervention.”
“Think nothing of it.”
“No, really. If you hadn’t given him that story, I don’t know what...”
The man looked back, not smiling, but his eyes sparkled with suppressed amusement.
“What story is that, Miss Kaufman?”
Yael blushed as if she were the one caught in a lie.
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