Authors: Tim Akers
"That was perfectly clear," I sniped. He grimaced like a schoolmarm.
"Hold still," he said, then held the mask about an arm's length away from my face. "Look at the words without looking at them. Unfocus. Just let your head talk directly to the..."
"Look, this is bullshit. You told me what it means. Cull. I get it. I don't need to..."
It fell on me like a nightmare. The room disappeared and I was filled with the smell of blood and fire. Ashes in my mouth and the sky was coiling cinder. The earth below me sagged under the weight of blood and my veins crumbled like dry leaves. I gasped, but the only air was thick as steel wool, and just as harsh. On my knees and I could feel the life being dug out of me, out of my heart, out of my blood. Behind me I felt death reaching back for generations, rooting out everything I had known or been or remembered. It was like a fire that burned through time. And before me, nothing, nothing, just the empty night and nothing.
And then I really was on my knees, and Wilson was shaking me with both his stone-hard hands. The mask was on the floor between us, the words in my head coiling like that sky of cinder. I hurled myself back and banged into the cheap iron of the bed.
"Well," Wilson said, standing. "That's the thing about the Celesteans. They said different things to different people." He carefully picked up the mask and wrapped it in a bit of sheet he tore from the bed. I realized I was still staring at him, and tried to compose myself. "Don't. Just relax. Let it get through you. Let it go."
I watched him numbly as he went around the room. He got the chests open, finally. He went through them meticulously, unfolding and then refolding things, rearranging the contents, open pouches, sniffing, closing. My mind was a smooth stone in a babbling brook, the room around me sliding coldly over without penetrating. It was minutes before I understood the things I looked at. I stood.
"What the hell is that thing?" I asked. My voice was harsh, like I'd been crying.
"What we were supposed to find," Wilson answered. "The question is why. And if we were the ones who were supposed to find it, or if he left it for someone else."
I rubbed my hands together and stretched my shoulders.
"I'm ready to go," I said. Wilson shook his head.
"Not yet. This is what we were meant to find, but..."
"I'm ready to go, Wilson. As in, we're going."
He put a hand on my shoulder and squeezed. It hurt.
"Jacob. This isn't the worst thing we've seen. It's likely not to be the worst we'll see before this is over. You need to pull yourself together."
"Sure. But first we're going to go somewhere else." I made for the door. Wilson stopped me.
"First we're going to search the rest of this house. Then we can go."
"You said that we wouldn't find anything else. That we were meant to find that. So. We found it."
"We did." He gestured to the chests. "But what about those?"
I looked over his shoulder. "Looks like clothes to me."
"Yes. Clothes that have been recently packed, and then left behind." He spread his hands in a question. "Why?"
"I don't know. Maybe he forgot them."
"Jacob. Is there anything about Ezekiel Crane that makes you think he would just forget his clothes?"
Grudgingly, I admitted he was right. I didn't say anything, though.
"Which means that he left them behind. By mistake or by plan. And there's nothing in them to make me think it was planned. To me it looks like he brought them here from some great distance, unpacked them while he was here, and then repacked them with the intention of taking them somewhere else. And then he didn't."
"So," I said, slumping my shoulders. "We search the rest of the place."
Wilson nodded. I gave the bundled lump of the mask one more nervous look.
"Locked rooms first, please?" I said.
"That's fine with me. And look," he said, then opened one of the chests. There was a revolver laying on top of the carefully folded shirts. "A present."
I tossed my water-logged iron on the bed and holstered the new revolver. Didn't bother checking the load, or the balance. Just hoped I wouldn't have to draw it. Mostly wasn't sure that I had the heart to draw iron right now. The Celestean nightmare was still howling at the edges of my mind. I didn't trust myself with a weapon. Distastefully, Wilson picked up my old pistol from the bed and stowed it in his coat.
"Always leaving things around, Jacob. You should know better."
"Whatever," I said, heading for the door. "Let's get this over with."
Whatever had been locked in those rooms was long gone. The rooms were devoid of furniture, although the windows were boarded up from the inside. The paint on the floors showed heavy wear, like someone spent all their time pacing back and forth, window to door to window to corner to door. That was the only difference in each of the rooms, actually. The pattern of wear on the floor was of varying complexity. And all of the rooms smelled, though not unpleasantly. Like fresh soil, and the harvest. It reminded me of summers in my youth, out on the estate. Back when we had an estate, and I had summers. Wilson stood in the door to each room, sniffing carefully at the air and studying the floor. He never went in. After the third room I got tired of standing in the hallway and pushed past him into the room. He frowned, but let me go.
"So, he was keeping someone in here?"
"Maybe. It doesn't seem like security was terribly good."
"A padlock doesn't strike you as good security?"
He shrugged his complexity of shoulders. "Those windows could be opened pretty easily. The nails are tiny and the boards aren't flush." Grimly he walked into the room and went to the window. With two fingers he tore a board free and peered out into the light. "Easy enough to undo."
"Remember the toys. Maybe these were kids he had in here. They wouldn't have been strong enough to do that."
"Cheery thought," Wilson said with a sigh. "The foot traffic isn't consistent with that. Big feet made these tracks. Heavy feet."
"Maybe. So if the window isn't any good, why the lock on the door?"
"Maybe it wasn't to keep people in here. Maybe it was to keep people out of here."
"You think Crane had a lot of curious visitors?" I asked.
"Don't you find him curious, Jacob?" Wilson set down the board and quickly exited the room. "I think you're right. I think it's time for us to be on our way. This place makes me oddly uncomfortable. Let's finish up."
The last of the locked rooms provided no additional insight. Without much hope, we turned the knob on the second of the unlocked rooms and threw open the door. It was the smell that got me first, before the door was even fully open. That butcher's smell: spilled meat and blood.
There was only one body, in the center of the room, arms and legs spread and chest bloody. Wilson bounded into the room, steel out, spider arms flickering across the floor and walls. I had the new revolver in my hand. The balance was good, I noticed without noticing, the nightmare forgotten.
"No one else," Wilson said. "Come on."
Of course Wilson didn't recognize him. He'd only seen Gray the one time, on the docks. And the way Gray Anderson looked right now, his own mother would have turned aside.
His eyes were twisted in fear and shock, but the rest of his body looked perfectly relaxed, in spite of the blood. Someone had shoved a ball of twine into his mouth. He was dressed in the Wright's vestments, simple brown and black. I always knew Gray claimed to be a Wright who got away from the Algorithm, but I had never imagined him dressed like this. I wondered how he would have felt, to be found like this. Also wondered why someone had taken the time to dress him up, just to kill him.
There was a single wound, an improbably large puncture wound to the center of his chest. The weapon that made it was still there. From here it looked like a copper tube, plugged with glass. Around the injury was a sticky ring of blood, dry and black. Nasty.
Wilson was ignoring the body. Naturally, because the rest of the room looked like a mad scientist's drunken fantasy, in the process of being dissected. Brass pipes lined the walls, stacked to various depths and of progressive height. Bits of the ceiling had been knocked out, to accommodate the larger items. Each pipe was enclosed in a tangle of tubing that led to the next pipe, or fed from the previous one. Each pipe was open at the top, and cut at an angle, away from the center of the room. Something was passing between the pipes, a sound, like a hurricane heard from far away.
"I don't think this is what he was expecting, when we took this job," I said. Wilson was circling the room, touching the pipes lightly with the talon tips of his spider arms. "Guess I couldn't get him out of this trouble."
He stopped and looked down at the body, recognized him finally. "He was coming back here, wasn't he? After we left on the boat this morning?"
"Yeah. Damn it, Gray. Why couldn't you just be happy living in shitty little houses, doing shitty little jobs?"
Wilson came and stood next to me. He laid an arm across my shoulders.
"Because he isn't you, Jacob. Most folks want to better themselves."
I shrugged his arm off. "Maybe don't give me shit right now, Jacob. This guy was my friend."
"You're a terrible person to friend, Jacob." He turned back to pipes. "Friends of yours keep ending up dead."
"Show a little respect for the dead guy in the room, man."
"Dead guy'll still be dead tomorrow. There's something with these pipes."
"Is there something about them that could have shoved a copper tube through Gray's chest?" I asked. "Because if not, I'm not sure they're immediately relevant."
"Could be," he answered, shrugging. "See if you can find some kind of valve. Or a control panel. Or maybe -"
He stopped moving, but his voice continued around the room, ghosting from pipe to pipe, quieter and quieter. Wilson turned to look at me. Rather needlessly, he held a finger to his lips. Quiet. Got it.
The anansi's voice tumbled away into silence, but the background hurricane kept rolling. I bent my head to it, trying to pick up snatches of sound. My eye was drawn uncomfortably to Gray's restful corpse at the center of the room. Maybe his voice, the last seconds of his terrified life, caught up in this garden of pipes and held forever in brass? I shivered and put a hand on Wilson's shoulder. Pulling him close, I whispered directly into his ear.
"Why do you think Crane would leave this contraption behind?" I asked. Wilson's voice, when he replied, smelled like insect wings and dust.
"Because it's heavy, idiot." His lips hardly moved when he spoke, though his teeth were bared. I was reminded of just how many teeth he had. Wasn't usually this close to them. Their bright white enamel was veined in black that seemed to pulse with each word. "You don't just lug equipment like this around every time you get spooked."
"Which means he might come back for it? Or that he planned to be here for a while?"
Wilson shrugged. The noise in the room was picking up. He squinted at me nervously.
"Or that he doesn't mind it being found. Like the mask. He wants someone to find this." He looked around at the pipes and their tangled feet. "I can't for the life of me tell what it's meant to do, though."
"Can we get back to the dead guy at..." I stopped, because something tapped against my foot. I looked down to see a ball of twine, sticky with spittle and blood. I looked over at the body. It was looking at me, running a dry tongue over its lips. Gray's lifeless, bloodless lips.
"You have forgotten so much about us, Veridon," it said. "What we are. What we do." The body struggled to one elbow, it head lolling across its chest. "How we do it. I am disappointed."
The pipes behind me jangled as I backed into them, my hand clenched around Wilson's shoulder. He shrugged me off and shuffled around the perimeter of the room. The body followed him with one lazy eye, then turned back to me.
"Although I hadn't expected to see you again, Jacob Burn. I really thought the river would take you. Appropriate, I suppose. Unexpected." It coughed, and dryness filled the air, like a tomb unfolding. "Your friend can stop that."
I looked up at Wilson. He was fiddling with the pipes, though he didn't seem to have much direction. Just pulling on tubes, rattling brass. He shot me an angry look and kept at it.
When I looked back at the body, something had changed. The face was bulking up, the skin blossoming in a frost that spread until the skin was pale and bright. The skull lengthened and became narrow. I was reminded of The Summer Girl, the child becoming the woman becoming the singer. The body locked eyes with me and smiled.
"He doesn't have to. It was just advice." The voice expanded, filled the room, the words resonating through the air and into my bones like lightning, close and dangerous. "Something to keep him from hurting himself."
Wilson stumbled back, falling over, his head coming to rest against the body. That heavy voice rolled with laughter, and the legs began to twitch. Wilson jumped up and circled back to me. He gave a meaningful look at my hand. Of course. The revolver. What was I thinking?
I raised my iron and sighted. The body watched me do this, calmly, appraising each action. As I cocked, it nodded once, the smile unwavering. The report shook the room, flash and bang washing out the spiritual whirlwind of the pipes. When I lowered my hand, part of the body's face was missing. I watched as it grew back, like water closing over a blade. The edges of the wound skittered as they sealed shut.