“Well, dear, that’s a real comfort. I actually think I would, too. I did have another dream. Do you remember me telling you about the farmer’s market and the goblins?”
“Yeah, sure do.”
“In this dream I saw one of them close up. It wasn’t a goblin at all. It was a man with a really horrible tumor growing inside his face. His cheek was swollen so badly that he couldn’t open one eye. I still don’t know if the dream means anything, but somehow that made it seem more real.”
“I see what you mean.” I wrote down a few quick notes. “I’m not sure what it signifies, either, but it strikes me as important.”
“It did me, too. Now, I’ll call you if the police tell me anything more.”
I ended the call, then leaned back in the leather chair to think. Y was probably right, I decided, about leaving Doyle and Johnson to the police—well, mostly to the police. I saw nothing wrong with passing them information through Ari. Thanks to our interview with Grampian, the cops could issue a search warrant for Doyle and maybe bring him in first. A little persuasion, plus his fear of being in custody with the full moon only a couple of weeks away—he’d probably spill everything he knew about Johnson in the hopes of getting out on bail before the wolf-change began.
And if he didn’t get out in time? If he couldn’t post bail? What were the police going to do if they had a werewolf on their hands? Send him to the SPCA for custody? I made a note to ask Y how we’d handle such an occurrence, then put the matter to one side.
The agency had supplied a laptop for the office. I was just powering it up to contact NumbersGrrl when I heard a rustle behind me. I spun the chair around and saw a blue lizard-meerkat thing crouched behind the wastepaper basket. I raised my hand to execute the ward and the Chaos creature with one gesture, but it whined and rose up on its hind legs to beg. Its slimy green eyes stared at me in terror.
“Listen, you,” I said. “Get out of here now, and I won’t blast you to hell.”
It whined, pissed green slime, and vanished. So did the puddle, I’m glad to say. Johnson and Doyle already knew who I was and where I lived. Since they’d found the office, too, I had very little left to hide. I saw no reason to destroy a thing that so obviously felt fear whether it truly lived or not.
When I logged onto TranceWeb I went straight to e-mail. Our code expert had taken a look at Johnson’s two letters. I transferred the information into a regular file, then got up and opened the door to the outer office. Ari was sitting at my old desk and looking at a computer screen full of Hebrew letters. Just as good as TranceWeb, I thought, when it comes to keeping secrets from me, at least.
“Ari?” I said. “The Agency guy thinks the symbols on Johnson’s two letters represent a stage of the alchemical process. He calls it the nigredo.”
“Which means?” Ari swiveled the chair around and looked up at me.
“Dissolution, basically. The old alchemists summed things up in the formula
solve et coagula
—dissolve and congeal, in English. The nigredo’s part of the
solve
, the dissolving of the
prima materia
so it can be reconstituted in the
coagula
part of the formula.”
Ari blinked, stricken.
“I’ve got all this in a file,” I said. “I’ll print it out for you.”
“Thank you. But why did Johnson put those symbols on the letters?”
“The expert doesn’t know. Finding out is our job, he says.”
I got the reproachful stare.
“But I’ll make a guess,” I went on. “I think Johnson’s telling us his state of mind, but he doesn’t know that’s what he’s doing. Consciously, he probably figured those symbols would scare people, is all.”
“That makes sense.” He paused for a sigh. “In the usual mad way.”
I returned to the office and TranceWeb to check the FAQ on Chaos critters. I read through all the entries just in case I needed the information later—not that it was terribly helpful. For example, no one knew how the Chaos masters had managed to make artificial constructs that digested actual food as an energy source. Our R and D people were working on the problem, or so the FAQ said, but the comment was two years old.
Before I filed my official report, I paused to run a quick SM: Personnel on Sneezy. The contact came so easily that I knew she had to be distracted by some strong emotion. As I focused in, the light dawned. I’d caught her in the middle of having sex—with Doyle. Busy though he was, I could pick up the print of his ugly little mind. I shut off the contact immediately. I’d learned something new about Sneezy, all right. She had terrible taste in men. I wondered if he were living in her elegant house, wherever that was. If so, Johnson had to be off on his own somewhere, as I’d never felt his presence in that location. I would have, too, since he left the psychic equivalent of the stench of secondhand garlic everywhere he went.
I had just finished filing my report when Ari opened the door and stepped in.
“Time to leave,” he said. “I hope you don’t mind, but for some reason I’m quite tired.”
“Gosh, I can’t imagine why.”
“Neither can I.” He looked and sounded perfectly serious.
I’d forgotten about Ari and irony. I smiled and took the laptop with me.
Our next mystery destination turned out to be a big hotel down on Fisherman’s Wharf, right in the middle of a decent sampling of off-season tourists who, I figured, would muddle the aura field better than any electronic scrambler. The room was a definite step up from the bargain hotel of the night before, all decorated in creams and blues, with a sitting area and a good television as well as the usual sleeping arrangements. Ari had an amazing expense account.
Since I technically still served on Chaos watch, we left the hotel so I could take a look around. I led the way through the tourist area, all gray concrete, sleazy shops, and cheap attractions. The aimless mob of sight-seers drifting through could have hidden fifty Chaotics, because I never could have sensed them there. The crowd pulsed with a muddle of thoughts and half-heard conversations, the crying of exhausted children, and the ramblings of men who’d had too much to drink.
We walked to the silence of one of the oldest wharves, where actual fishing boats still docked. The sun was setting out beyond the Golden Gate, turning the dead-calm water into patches of rainbow, thanks to the flecks of engine oil and gasoline floating among the boats. Ari put his arm around my shoulders and pulled me close while we looked north across the bay to the Marin hills, dark and tranquil in the twilight mist.
“Nola,” he said, “do you think you’ll like living in Israel?”
“Say what?”
“Well, it’s very different from California.”
“Ari, what exactly are you—”
“Do you think I’m going to just walk out of your life? When we get this bit of work taken care of, I mean.”
I pulled away and looked up at his puzzled frown.
“A warning,” I said, “I’m not going to marry anyone, not even you.”
“Well, all right. We can just live together, then.”
“I am not moving to Israel with you.”
“Why not?”
“What do you mean, why not?” I wanted to say, “We’ve just met and I hardly know you,” but when I considered my behavior of the night before, those sentiments rang hollow. “My family’s all here, my job’s here, and that’s enough of a reason.”
“No, it isn’t. We can always visit.” Ari grinned at me. “But we can discuss this later if you’d like. We do have other things to tend to.”
“Yeah, we certainly do. Like finding my brother.”
I turned and started back to the hotel. He caught up with me and took my hand, a comfortable fit in his. As we returned to the room, I thought about telling him the truth, that all my other—well, boyfriends for want of a better word—had all wanted to marry me as long as we were together, right together, that is, within a couple of miles of each other. Once they went farther away than that, on a business trip or vacation or whatever, they began to remember how strange I was.
Just like Kathleen, I saw no reason to lie to them about my talents or my family. When they were with me, none of that mattered. But once we’d separated, it only took a few days for the truth to sink in. They had ended our relationship every single time.
The first few hurt. Now I knew what to expect. I reminded myself that I had no reason to worry about Ari’s long-term plans. Let him go back to Israel to report to his superiors, and that would be that.
While he took a shower, I distracted myself by seeing if I could find a show worth watching on TV. If Johnson were trying to see through my eyes with an MP or SM: P, maybe a dose of Looney Tunes or
Star Trek
would make him sign off on the attempt. The limited hotel cable offered no cartoons at all, not even animé. The only
Trek
episode I could find was “Spock’s Brain.” I don’t know why I was surprised. It had been that kind of week.
The hotel, however, did offer free wireless access. I set up the laptop, which of course lacked the listing of all my usual search sites. I could remember most of them—a good thing, too, because I realized I could look for events that might be considered evidence of those deviant world levels. Since the Agency laptop had TranceWeb installed, I logged on and left an e-mail for NumbersGrrl. After I logged off, I got a temporary Yahoo address and hit the surf. I was just taking notes on one interesting “haunted” hotel in the Midwest when I heard Ari come out of the bathroom.
“Find anything?” he said from behind me.
“Yeah, actually, I did.” I turned on my chair and forgot what I was going to say.
Ari was wearing only a towel, wrapped and knotted around his waist. Lamplight glistened on the patches of damp on his chest and back. He picked up a pair of his briefs from the chair by the bed, then looked at me with his head tilted to one side.
“Is something wrong?” he said.
“Oh, no.”
“All right, then. Start thinking about where you want to go for dinner.”
“I’m not hungry yet.”
All at once he caught the drift and grinned at me. “We can always have room service,” he said, “later.”
Fortunately the hotel’s room service stayed available till eleven. Ari fell asleep almost as soon as we’d finished eating. As I was putting the dirty dishes out in the hall, I saw the Chaos critter again. It sidled up to the remains of my salad and whined at me.
“Go ahead,” I said. “You can eat that.”
I’d hidden a half-eaten roll in a napkin just so Ari wouldn’t insist on me finishing it. I unwrapped it and put it out for the creature next to the salad bowl. I left it chowing down and returned to the laptop and my research.
Hauntings have a great many explanations, simple fraud in a lot of cases, brought on by the perpetrator’s desire to be famous or to get money for their story out of the junk press. Memory combined with sincere longing produces “ghosts,” too, when a person sees their dead partner sitting in his favorite chair or hears her voice in the other room. In my early days with the Agency, I’d researched three cases that really did appear to be actual ghosts, all of them violently dead, but even those might have been time-stream scars rather than visitations.
The so-called hauntings that interested me at the moment fell into a different, very rare category. Glimpses and voices, we can call them, of different worlds—the sound of someone walking in the room above, or a glance out the window into a different seeming view, an argument dimly heard on the other side of a bedroom wall. A woman reported standing in a shopping mall and seeing a man walk straight toward her, as if she were invisible; at the last moment she stepped aside and saw him vanish. A teacher and her entire class heard a child crying in the cloakroom of her schoolroom, but when she looked, no one was there.
I gathered a handful of these events, if we can call them events. They all had one thing in common. They’d happened in complicated spaces, a convoluted mall, an old school building bristling with new construction, a sports stadium, a hotel. The locations might have been analogs, in a sense, for those deviant levels that “shot off in all directions,” as Y’s expert had told him.
The role of the portal and its energy field in the case I had in hand puzzled me. The only theory I could come up with was that Doyle and Johnson had somehow invented an artificial way to skip from one deviant level to another and back again. They must have had some sort of talent or access to information about the process to even think of the idea in the first place. If they could control the skips, they could bring their drugs from Kurdistan to the United States without ever going through Customs simply by going into their own world and then out again into ours.
I managed to convert all these observations to reasonable prose and e-mailed them off to NumbersGrrl to get her opinion. By then the clock read one in the morning. I turned off the laptop and crawled back into bed. In his sleep Ari rolled over and reached for me. I cuddled close and drowsed off to the sound of his heart beating.
Morning light and the noise of a busy hotel woke me early. Ari had already gotten up and dressed; he was sitting on the other side of the room talking on his cell phone. I staggered past him to go take a shower. When I was done, I put on the glen plaid trousers and a dark blue wrap top.
Ari was talking on the phone in Hebrew by the time I left the bathroom. Though he never shouted or even raised his voice, I could feel his SPP: pure anger poured out of him. Finally he clicked off with a snarl.
“What’s wrong?” I said.
“Nothing.” He paused for a couple of seconds. “Procedural difficulties.” Another pause. “But I had a good talk with Sanchez earlier. They’re holding a news conference in a couple of hours to ask for citizen help in finding the Silver Bullet Killer. They’re going to flood the TV news services with pictures of Johnson and a description of Doyle, offer a reward, that kind of thing. A friend of the Romeros has persuaded the bank he works for to donate thirty-five thousand. The mayor’s fund is putting in ten thousand more.”