Finch by Jeff VanderMeer (15 page)

The bodies.

Correction. Body.

The gray cap's body had disappeared.

Finch stood there a moment, brought up short. Trying to process
that sudden ... lack. Then realized: Heretic must have removed
the body. If not, they'd send Finch to the camps. Scapegoat.
Returning: the chill that had come over him talking to the redtoothed Partial. It hit him as it hadn't before. This case was a threat to his life. To the little security he had. His apartment. His
relationship with Sintra.

But the man was still there, under a blanket someone had thrown
over him. The dead man satin the chair next to him, smiling. In the same
position. The blue of the preservatives still stippling his features.
The man laughed again. Blindingly, unbelievably bright, a light like the
sun shot through the window. The night sky torn apart by it.

Finch went over and pulled the blanket back from the man's face.
Sat on the couch, looking at the body. He would have to meet with
Heretic soon. The thought unnerved him. Wished now he'd asked
Wyte for the whole flask. Wished he could just go home. Find Sintra
waiting for him.

"You know what those nonsense words mean," Finch said to the
man. "You know why it's important."

Peaceful. The man looked peaceful, to be so dead. How perfectly
preserved in the light from the open window. Ignoring how that light
changed as it was interrogated by the space between the twinned
towers in the distance.

Finch got down on his knees. Searched the body again. Not the
careful search of yesterday. Fuck the spore cameras. Fuck the Partial.

Roughly, he rolled the body over and went through the pockets. As
if he'd killed the man himself.

There must be something else.

But, no, there wasn't. Just lint in one pocket. A few bits of sand and
gravel, maybe a grain of rice?, in the other.

He began to rip up the fabric. It tore easier than he would've
thought. Hurting his hands. Red lines on his palms. Aching
wrists. Still nothing. No hidden pockets. He forced himself to stop
tearing.

The upturned corners of the man's lips seemed to say, "You'll never
solve me."

I'm not a detective.

But he would be judged as a detective. Convicted as a detective.

A desert fortress. The HFZ. A phrase. Never lost. Falling from a great
height. A gray cap even the gray caps couldn't identify. An operative
from Stockton who was on the same trail. Another operative, probably from Morrow, attacked by Stockton spies and appearing in a dead
man's memories. Now disappeared.

Stark. Bosun. Bliss.

It would drive him mad, he realized. If he let it.

I need a better gun.

Looked at his watch.

5:20.

Time to leave.

Let the horror show begin.

ack at the station.

5:50.

No sign of Wyte. The other detectives had left, too, except for
Gustat, who was frantically packing up his things. Finch looked at
the smaller man with a kind of scorn. Gustat ignored him in his haste.
Strange horse-like footfalls across the carpet. The croaking bang of
the door behind him.

Then it was just Finch.

Soon the curtains at the back of the room would part. Night would
truly begin.

Wyte had placed a hasty typo-filled report on Finch's desk about
the situation in Bliss's apartment. "John Finch" typed at the bottom.
Brave of you, Wyte. A blotch of purple obscured a few words in the
middle. A smudged green thumbprint on the left corner. Wyte had
tried to wipe it away, which just made it worse.

Under it, another sheet, handwritten, with some crude facts about
Stark.

"Stark is now the operational head of Stockton's spy network."

Stating the obvious. No one started liquidating the competition
unless they were already secure in their position.

"He carries a sword."

Who didn't, these days? Thought about pulling his own sword out. As
he did several times a week, when he thought the others weren't looking.

"He has a taster for his food . . . He's a psychopath . . . He's been
well, practically everywhere and nowhere, if Wyte's
seen . . . 11
information was correct.

Nothing solid. Nothing that linked Stark to the case except Bliss
saying Stark had asked him about those words they'd found on the scrap of paper. Bellum omnium contra omnes. Wondered what Bliss
would've said if he'd shown him the symbol too.

Finch kept a stack of cigars in his desk in a box converted to the
purpose. He took one out. Trillian brand. Several years old. Common
and popular in its day. A little dry now.

Nothing new in this city. Not whisky. Not cigars. Not people.

The kind of thing his father used to say.

He cut the tip. Used his oil lamp to light it.

The ash was even. The burn slow. He puffed on it, waiting. The
congregation will be here soon enough.

His thoughts went back to Wyte's flask. In a flush of inspiration,
Finch went over to Blakely's desk, opened the top drawer. Sure enough.
Something plum-colored in a bottle. Homemade cork. He pulled it off.
Took a whiff. Rotgut, but good enough. Took a couple of swigs right
from the bottle. His throat burned. His tongue felt numb.

Saw double for a second. Another puff on the cigar fixed that. Went
back to his desk.

Waiting this way, helpless, his vision became apocalyptic, false. In
his mind, mortar fire rained down on the city. Artillery belched out a
retort. Blasted into walls, sending up gouts of stone and flame. The war
raged on, unnoticed by most. He was an agent of neither side. Just in it
for himself.

Tried to think past the evening's torment. The walk back to his
apartment afterward. In the dark. Thought of who might be waiting.

If he didn't screw up before that.

A little after six, the gray caps began to arrive. The night shift.

The first one pulled aside the curtain. Had emerged from the awful
red-fringed hole at the back. Perfect parallel to the memory hole. Only
much larger. Finch could see the gray cap's face under the hat. Pulsing.
Wriggling. The eyes so yellow. What did they see that he could not?

The gray cap stepped forward, onto the carpet.

In the light of day, on certain streets, Finch could almost pretend that
the Rising had never happened. But not here. Not now. Any fantasy was
fatal. Any fear.

Finch walked out onto the carpet. Puffing. Feeling the brittle squeeze
in his chest even as he released the smoke from his mouth. Let the
cigar burn down toward his fingers to feel the distracting pain.

A strong scent of rotting licorice as the gray cap pushed past him.
Ignoring him as it sat down at a desk. Gustat's desk.

One.

Nine more. One for each desk. Along with whatever familiars they
had decided to bring with them.

Finch wished he had a club. A knife. Anything. The fungal guns
didn't work against gray caps. Thought again about the sword. About
bringing it across Heretic's rubbery neck.

He drove the image away as irrational. Heretic had asked him to
be here. If Heretic ever wanted him dead, he'd send a present to his
apartment. Or dissolve him into a puff of spores in front of the other
detectives.

Five times he'd stayed after hours. Survived each encounter. But
talking to a single gray cap during the day was different from being
among many of them after dusk. It brought back memories of the war.
It reminded him of night duty in the trenches, the crude defenses
House Hoegbotton had created for its soldiers. Sighting through the
scope at some pile of rubble opposite. Hoping not to see anything.
Feeling the sweat and fear of the others to each side. The flinch and
intake of breath at the slightest movement.

Two.

Three.

Four.

Moving past him. Soft rustle of robes. Hushed sigh of their breathing,
as if they slept even while awake. Oddly heavy footfalls. A smell that
ranged from sweet like syrup to rank and disgusting. Did they control
it? Were there signals they gave off humans could never read? Those
eyes. That mouth. The ragged claws on the doughy hands.

Sitting at the desks like distorted reflections of their daytime
counterparts. He had never learned their names. Thought of them
only by the names of the humans who'd been assigned the same desks.
Or once had. So there sat Dorn, and there sat Wyte, and there were
Skinner and Albin.

The fifth was Heretic. He'd brought something with him. On a
leash. Finch didn't know what it was. Couldn't tell where it started or
ended. It had no face, just a sense of wet, uncoiling darkness. Like an
endless fall off a bridge at night, under a starless sky, into deep water.
That one glimpse and Finch never looked at it directly again.

The light in the room had faded to the dark green preferred by the
gray caps.

"Do you like my skery, Finch? Do you find my skery pleasing to the
eye?" Heretic asked in a voice rough yet reedy, standing in front of
Finch. Emphasis on pleasing to the eye. As usual when Heretic tried out
a turn of phrase. "No? That's a shame. The skery is a new thing, and
useful to us. Very soon, it will save us a lot of effort, allow the Partials
to do other work."

Finch had no answer for that.

Together, Finch, the gray cap, and the skery went to his desk. At
night, Heretic walked with a kind of effortless forward movement.
More at ease and more deadly. As if daylight affected a gray cap's
equilibrium.

Heretic sat down, dropping the leash. The skery went right to Finch's
memory hole and began worrying the edges with its wet gobble of a
mouth. Cleaning it of parasites.

Finch put out his cigar in the ashtray at the edge of the desk. Stood in
front of Heretic. Take the initiative. In a calm, flat voice, he said: "I went
back to the apartment. The body ... one of the bodies was missing."

"I took it away." A clipped quality behind the moistness. Some
continuing thread of amusement. The eyes looked as though
embedded in a rubber festival mask. "We're testing the body for a
variety of --." The word sounded like tilivirck.

Finch nodded like he understood.

"We also harvested another memory bulb from the man."

Utter paralysis. Unbidden: an image of Sintra's face as he entered
her. The way she sighed and relaxed into him. As the blood of his
tears dropped onto her cheeks, her lips.

"What did you see?" Finch asked.

Heretic shook his head. A simple motion rendered alien, frightening.
"Perhaps you should tell me first, Finch. What you saw."

"It's in the report," Finch said. Too quickly.

"The report. It's all in the report. How could we forget? Perhaps
because the report was disappointing. Very disappointing, and not
what we've come to expect from you." Still a secret amusement there,
mingled with the threat.

His stomach lurched. The room felt hot. At the other desks, the
last of the gray caps had sat down. At their feet, their familiars curled,
mewled, foraged.

"It's only been a day," Finch said.

"Finch," Heretic said. "Are you telling me everything?"

Bliss had disappeared from a ten-foot-square room. With no windows.

"I left out nothing important," Finch said. "Up to that point."

Heretic said something in his own language that sounded like a
child arguing with a click beetle. Then, a half-expected blade held
to the throat: "What about the scrap of paper the Partial says you
took from the body?"

The symbol. The strange words. What would Heretic tell him about
the Silence if he asked? Nothing. He'd kill Finch. Or worse.

Out of sudden fear, a strange calm. Later, he realized it felt like
losing control even as he gained it. An echoing faint laughter that
became the sound of hammers working on the two towers in the bay.
That became water slapping against the wall in Rathven's basement.

Words left his mouth. "There was a man in the memories I
recognized. I didn't put it in the report because I wanted to investigate
first. It related to the paper in the dead man's hand." Lying.

Falling through cold air and he couldn't feel his legs.

"Explain."

"A man called Ethan Bliss." And then the flood: "A Morrow agent
active for Frankwrithe & Lewden, during the War of the Houses. I tracked
him down today with Wyte, but he ... slipped away. I'm following up. I
put in a request for his file along with my report."

If we can't find him, we'll go after Stark.

Heretic seemed to consider that, then asked, "And the scrap of paper?"

"I'm still investigating what it means. I'll put it all into my report
for tomorrow."

"And the list I gave you, of people who lived in that apartment?"

Finch relaxed a little. "I'm still working on it. By tomorrow afternoon
I should know more." If Rathven's finished by then.

Heretic considered this statement for a long time, then said, "You
have withheld information from me. You haven't even finished with
the list. From now on, you will report every day. You are to tell me
everything. Do not leave it to your judgment."