Fathomless (19 page)

Unless Eddy really did have godly vision, she couldn't see the gleam in Orne's eyes that Sean caught from a couple feet away. Or maybe the gleam wasn't conspiratorial, just a reflection of the sunset.

In any case, when Sean had Nevermore'd Orne out of the seed world, Eddy only warned him once not to test the key idea. Orne had scored points by semi-backing Marvell, but mostly she was excited to think he might have hung with Benjamin Franklin.

Sean didn't have to look far for a key to model his imaginary one after. An antique monster stuck out of the china cabinet in Helen's dining room. He borrowed it the next morning, and since they always ate in the kitchen, no one missed it.

Orne was a genius. After a week of practice, snatched half hours in his room or on the beach while Eddy and Daniel were off together, Sean had mastered spinning pencils, levitating feathers, and making mini grit vortices by twirling a finger over the sand. He played it safe, though, and never extruded more than the knob tip of his psychic key—his harvesting image—above his fist.

By Sean's third meeting with Orne, Eddy was comfortable enough to let them out of her sight for a few minutes. They walked under the trees of Nyarlathotep's “chapel,” and in a harsh crow whisper, Sean told Orne about his success with the key image. Orne didn't commit himself in words, but he smiled approval. Then he showed Sean another wonder of the seed world. Just a few crow hops inside the wood was a chestnut tree. Orne patted its trunk. “From the library, looking at the left window, you can see this chestnut. It's the tree that has the artist's signature embedded above its roots.”

Orne didn't mean a written signature but an amber glass rondel bearing the impression of a horned owl. That was how Plantagenet Howell had marked all the windows he'd designed and fabricated. “But you can't see the signature from the seed world?”

“Come this way.” Orne circled the trunk to a gap that accessed the hollow interior. “Too small for a man. Perfect for you.”

Sean proved it by stalking into a miniature cavern complete with woody stalactites and shelving mushrooms; the floor was compacted leaves that smelled like plum cake. A honey-gold shaft of light drew his eyes to a tiny window opposite the gap: the rondel! That shaft became the only light as Orne knelt before the gap. “Go to the signature,” he said.

Up close, Sean could make out the impressed owl. “I'm there.”

“Tap it.”

Sean pecked the rondel. The amber glass went clear white and impressionless. He peered closer and let out a wordless caw. The rondel now acted like a wide-angle lens through which he could see the entire library, from the fireplace to the conference table, from the double doors to Eddy on her stepladder, one hand applying the stethoscope, the other pressed to his (real body's) back. More, he could hear the ticking of the mantel clock, the creak of the ladder as Eddy shifted her feet, her muttered, “Come on, come out of the damn woods.”

He pivoted to the gap entrance, in which Orne was a single eye. “It's a spy-hole!”

“Your window into the library. You could use it to check on things if Eddy wasn't on sentry duty. And when you master casting your consciousness into the seed world from a distance—”

“Then I could spy on the library. Even on Order meetings. Wait, does that mean you can spy on them?”

“Not in this body, which is the only one you call me to. I designed the spy-hole that way, so you could be sure the Order was safe from me.”

“But not from me?”

Orne's laughter echoed in the hollow tree. “Does the Order need to fear you? Come, let's get back into Eddy's sight.”

Poor Eddy. When Sean told her about the rondel spy-hole, she was back on the teeter-totter about Orne. On one end of the tilt board was her determination not to believe a word out of his mouth, and on the other end were the words out of his mouth. It
seemed
like he'd deliberately made a spy-hole only Sean could use. But what if his whole story was a lie and he could still sneak into the seed world in Sean's crow or that second avatar he'd pointed out? And even if they put a surveillance camera on the
Founding
, couldn't Orne trick them? Have a dozen ways in, a hundred spy-holes? “Maybe it's time to talk to Helen,” she said.

“Not yet.”

“Why?”

“I feel like I can trust Orne. I mean, he's trusting me. Marvell sure doesn't. You know he's put a padlock on the wine cellar?”

“No, Helen did.”

“He must have told her to.”

“Paranoid.”

“Ask Daniel. He knows how Marvell looks at me in class, like I'm a time bomb. And look, I don't even totally blame him. But I'd rather hang out with someone who's not scared of me. Somebody who'll actually answer my questions.”

“But are his answers the truth? Plus we've got to cut down on these late-night chats, or I'll be so exhausted, Helen will know something's up. And you'll keep falling asleep in class, which isn't helping you with Marvell.”

Sean agreed to an hour a seed world session. So the next trip, right off, he spit out the question he'd been swallowing, afraid there was no good answer. “So, not judging, but while you were watching your line for magicians, didn't you kind of stalk some of them?”

Orne lay stretched on the ground. “If you mean I watched certain descendants closely, yes.”

Sean had been doing this stiff-legged crow strut on the turf beside Orne, not because he was on edge, just because it was fun. He paused by Orne's cocked elbow. “And if they turned out to be magical, did you contact them?”

“Before you, there were three who'd have made strong magicians.” Orne spoke in a lazy drone. “The first was Constance, but I never approached her. She'd been raised to dread her parents. The second was her son, Thaddeus. I didn't meet him until he was forty and a Congregational minister much more comfortable in the job than I'd ever been. I didn't disturb him. It takes more than raw ability. Disposition is vitally important. A certain dissatisfaction with the mundane. A capacity for recklessness.”

“You think I've got those?”

“I know you have.”

“And that makes me like you.”

“Very much like me.”

Point for Marvell? Point for Orne? Points for both? “Who was the third descendant?”

Orne plucked a stem of cloverlike blossoms from a nearby shrub. He twirled it, then nibbled a blossom. “You'd like this, I suppose. Quail do.”

Who cared about quail clover? The way Orne stalled, Sean had the answer he'd expected. “The third one was my mother.”

“Katherine Krol, as she was then.” Orne sat up and offered Sean his right arm. When Sean hopped onto his wrist, he lifted him so they could look each other in the eye. “As with you, I watched her from infancy. As with you, when she was sixteen, I made contact.”

“With an ad in an old book?”

“No. I vary my method to suit the target, if you'll allow me to use that word.”

“You already did,” Eddy said from on high.

Orne smiled at her cloudy shadow. “You've been so quiet, Eddy, I forgot you were there.”

“Never mind me. Tell Sean.”

Orne propped his arm on an up-bent knee to steady Sean's perch. “Kate's school hosted an art show, at which her paintings won the top prizes. I left a note on one saying I was interested in buying it, and her father phoned me the next day.”

“My granddad Stewie.”

“An understandably cautious man, but my credentials were enough to get me invited to the house. I owned a gallery in Burlington, you see.”

“Since when? Since you knew my mom was into painting?”

“No sooner than that, I confess.”

“So you only bought the gallery to stalk her.”

Orne sighed. “I don't fully understand what you mean by
stalk,
Sean. For me, it implies violent intent, like a tiger stalking prey.”

Or a lion. “What I mean by it is sneaking around after someone because you're all crazy obsessed.”

“So obsessed you do them harm in the end.”

“Maybe.”

“Then
stalk
doesn't apply to my relations with Kate. I helped her sell her paintings, earn a scholarship to an excellent school of design. If any harm was done, it was to my own plans.”

Eddy was so into this conversation, she couldn't just lurk. “How?” she boomed, and “How?” Sean echoed.

“By the time I talked to her about becoming a magician, she'd already chosen another passion. She—”

“Wait,” Sean croaked. “You told my mom you were her great-great-times-nine? You told her about magic and the Outer Gods and all?”

“I did. And then I took back the telling.”

“What—?”

Orne raised his left hand. “Give me a chance, Sean. I'll finish the story. Briefly for now, but with all points covered.”

Sean clapped shut his beak.

“Kate had great magical capacity. She had curiosity, drive, and courage. But her curiosity was for this world, and her drive was to wake people up to what's gorgeous in a pebble, if that was what she decided to paint. And for that, she had all the courage she needed.”

If Orne had never told the truth before, he was telling it now. “Since I was real young, I knew Mom could see stuff other people didn't. She put this glow in her paintings, and they hummed. I could feel it, like they were alive, buzzing.”

“I could feel it, too,” Orne said. “From the start, in a stuttering manner, Kate put magical energy into her work. Full immersion in magic she didn't want, but I was able to give her two gifts. First, I taught her how to consistently access and transfer energy. Second, I obliterated the memory of what I'd told her about our relationship and the magical world. All she kept was the trick of channeling magic into paint, and I imagine she thought of that as technique, not sorcery. She went to Rhode Island for school. I closed my gallery and, as far as Kate knew, moved to Prague to open another. Occasionally we'd exchange letters. Postcards. Maybe you could find me among her effects as Samuel Grimsby, and your father would recognize that name as well.”

Eddy coughed, distant thunder. A crow's throat couldn't get tight, obviously, or Sean would have been coughing, too. Instead he hunched his wings and tucked his beak into his breast feathers.

Orne set him on the turf. “It must be time for us to go. Eddy?”

One more roll of thunder, then “Yeah, pretty much.”

No, it couldn't have been an hour. “But afterwards, you still watched her?”

“No. Kate had made her choice. And after you were born, I had you to watch. Say the word, Sean.”

There had to be a hundred more questions he should ask. He couldn't put any into words, though, so he cackled: “Nevermore.”

Orne vanished.

Eddy rapped on the glass-to-her, sky-to-Sean. He shook himself, then arrowed for the palm in the crescent moon. He popped through into his own body, whose throat was tight beyond tight, almost closed, and whose face streamed fucking tears.

 

14

After
escaping from Eddy's solicitude, Sean spent a sleepless night trying to figure out why Orne's story had shaken him to tears. He couldn't remember Mom mentioning a Samuel Grimsby, but “Grimsby” had been out of her life for a while by the time Sean was born. Besides, kids didn't care about old guys from their parents' pasts, so even if she'd talked about him
around
Sean, he likely wouldn't have paid attention. Funny. If Grimsby/Orne hadn't helped Mom get into the Rhode Island School of Design, she probably would never have met Dad. No Mom and Dad, no Sean. At least, not the same Sean. For good or bad, that made Orne responsible for his existence a
second
time.

Head aching, he finally dry-swallowed aspirin and dozed through dawn. The headache followed him to breakfast, and he was ready to thank any god, Outer or otherwise, when Marvell called to cancel theory class. Helen gave Eddy the day off, and then she and Daniel decided to hang out on the beach until he went to Geldman's at three. Sean tried to beg off. Eddy wouldn't let him. Fresh air would be better for him than lying around. Besides, she wanted to kayak, and she needed a partner.

Well, minus his ocean phobia,
Daniel
could have been her partner. When they got to Arkham Harbor, Sean was glad he'd squelched the snarky comment—Daniel had to be genuinely terrified of the water or he'd be stripping down to his mandatory neck brace and jumping in like everyone else who'd ditched work this sweltering Friday. The swim beach on the south side of the jetty was a refugee camp of umbrellas, sun shelters, coolers, and folding chairs; on the north side, off the launch beach, kayakers rolled to cool off from their treks through the parking lot. With only a light breeze to drive it, the incoming tide was languid enough for Daniel to hike to the end of the jetty. Weird, if you thought about it. You'd think he'd sit on the boardwalk under a café awning, safely away from the water, tall drink in hand. Daniel Glass, preppy man of mystery.

He wasn't close to winning Weirdo of the Day, though. While Eddy fussed with her deck rigging, an unbeatable contender slouched down the launch beach toward the waterline. The guy wore a Windbreaker zipped to his jawline, and a knit cap, and leather mittens. Seriously, mittens, the kind where you could pull back the top layer to expose fingerless gloves, but he had the top layers in place, as if a blizzard were raging and he feared frostbite. He also wore wraparound shades, probably a good thing—his freakishly flat nose, wide lipless mouth, and receding chin didn't leave Sean eager for a look at his eyes.

The guy passed five yards away, but even at that distance he gave off such a reek that Sean had to cover his nose. The smell was a compound of dried cod, and sick sweat, and a cheap sandalwood cologne that made the whole even worse than its parts. He scrambled upwind to escape the foul wafting, and he wasn't the only one. By the time the guy flopped down at water's edge, he had half the launch beach to himself.