Premonitions (6 page)

I can’t do this. I can’t have this now.

She pressed her ear to the door. The thin material, barely better than cardboard, let everything through, and she heard what might have been a fourth voice joined to the others.

If they come in here, I’ll scream, I swear.

Without turning her back to the door, she crossed the small room to the dresser, pulled open the top drawer, and took out a plastic zipper bag.

From outside, the voices quieted until Karyn couldn’t hear them anymore. Maybe the Annas had gone. Maybe they were all out there having a beer together. Karyn knew they weren’t real, and she was even fairly sure they were harmless, but she couldn’t make herself check if they were still out there.

After what felt like a long time, she sat on the edge of the bed, staring at the zipper bag and running her thumbs over its contents.

“I hate you,” she said.

In truth, she wasn’t sure what she hated more—the necessity of the bitter concoction, or the undeniable fact that there was noticeably less in the bag than there should have been. She’d gone to see Adelaide—when? Four days ago? Something like that. Ten thousand dollars down the tube for a stash that ought to have lasted six weeks, or a month at the least, and at the rate she was going she’d be out again in a little over a week. Three years ago, ten grand would have lasted all summer. Where did that trend end up? Would the stuff eventually stop working entirely? Sick dread, a coil of barbed wire, twisted in her belly. She’d been there before, visions crowding on top of each other until they drew an opaque veil over reality entirely. Going back to that was unthinkable.

She took a chunk out of the bag and, grimacing, put it on her tongue. The bitter, oily taste that flooded her mouth as she crushed the fragment between her molars nearly made her gag, but she washed it down with a long slug of gross chemical water.

There. That’ll get me through tonight.

“Hey!” Anna’s voice—singular, thank God—from the living room. “You home? How about a beer?”

Karyn stowed the blind
back in its drawer and swallowed a couple of times to try to clear the taste from her mouth, then went out. With no Karyn to talk to, Anna had gone directly to the refrigerator. She held up a bottle.

“You drinking?”

“Yeah. How’d it go?”

“None of the usual suspects are giving me anything.”

Karyn suppressed a groan.

Anna popped the top off one of the bottles and put it on the counter. “I hear Tommy and Nail got some good stuff, but Tommy’s gonna need some prep time with it. He’ll probably hit you up tomorrow to help him do that creepy thing he does. The rest of us are thinking about checking out the cult members—Mendelsohn’s place is pretty locked down.” She opened the other bottle and put the bottle opener on the counter. “Hey, are you o—”

“Don’t.” That endless, hated question, and Anna knew better than to ask it:
Are you OK?
The question was, in fact, the source of one of only a handful of bitter arguments they’d had over the years.
Are you OK?
Anna, like most everybody else, regarded it as a simple expression of concern, but Karyn had heard it so many times it had lost meaning and become something slippery and indistinct, and somehow insidious. What was “OK,” anyway? It wasn’t good, it wasn’t bad—it wasn’t anything. It just lived in that damned question, the only function of which was to make the asker feel like they’d discharged their responsibilities just by barfing it up.
Are you OK?
The hell with that. She’d had enough of
Are you OK?
to last her until she died.

Anna made an apologetic grimace. “Sorry.”

“I’m just . . . anxious. That’s all.”

She offered Karyn a bottle. “Yeah. I hear that.”

“Motherfucker,”
Nail said. He kept his eyes to the binoculars, but a frown creased his face. “These jokers even split up to go to the bathroom?”

Genevieve shook her head. “Nope. First rule of cult conditioning—never leave anyone alone. Cut ’em off from friends and family, and make sure they never have a moment alone to start thinking. Constant reinforcement.”

“Great.” He set the binoculars down in his lap and drummed on the steering wheel with his fingers. “So quietly disappearing one of them is probably out.”

“Yeah,” Anna said, piping up from the backseat.

Genevieve echoed that thought. “Not a great idea anyway. It’s not unheard-of for somebody to quit and vanish, but if anything looked funny about it, they’d get suspicious. They’re a suspicious bunch of assholes.”

“Probably goes with belonging to a cult that worships deceit.”

“You said it.”

Anna leaned against the window, watching half a dozen cultists walk down the sidewalk. They were loaded down with groceries—evidently, demon worshippers needed eggs and milk like everybody else. So far today, Anna, Nail, and Genevieve had trailed the group from a shitty two-bedroom apartment the six of them shared to a basketball court for a long-ass game of three-on-three to the grocery store. Anna hoped Karyn and Tommy
were having better luck, because this was going nowhere.

“You were in with these clowns?” Anna asked. “Back when you worked for Mendelsohn?”

Genevieve turned around, bringing her legs up and bracing her back against the dash. “Not really. I was never that stupid. Plus,” she added, winking, “my brain is just too dirty to wash.”

Anna turned back to the window, trying to avoid staring at Genevieve for too long. The woman knew how to push all her buttons without even trying, and every so often the memory of the lingering look Genevieve had given her when they met jumped to mind and caused faint heat to rise to her cheeks. She knew she ought to keep it professional, knowing what Karyn would say.
Don’t shit where you eat.
Well, Karyn wouldn’t put it like that, but that would be the gist of it. And she was probably right.

“You’ve gotta know something,” she said, trying to drag her focus back to the issue at hand. “The leadership, significant dates, anything.”

“It was pretty secretive. If you weren’t a part of their thing, they wouldn’t say shit to you. Supposedly, once you’d been in a while, there were ceremonies and shit, but I never saw any of that. They’re partial to new moons, I think.”

“And it’s . . . Hell, what’s the phase of the moon now?”

Genevieve shrugged. “No idea.”

“Truck’s loaded,” Nail said, inclining his head toward the beat-up Suburban the guys they were watching owned. One of the cultists, a skinny dude with blond dreadlocks who looked like he ought to be whacking on a djembe in a drum circle somewhere, slammed the tailgate and went around the side to get in. The taillights flared red and, moments later, the vehicle pulled away. Genevieve turned around and resituated herself in her seat as Nail followed.

Anna tried to stretch her legs, but the backseat of the Mustang Nail had shown up with that morning wasn’t particularly roomy. “As fascinating as these grocery runs
are, we’re going to have to speed things up here. Don’t you know anybody who might still be involved?”

“Everybody I knew got out, or I lost touch. Like I said, they don’t exactly encourage you to keep up with your friends.”

“Maybe somebody who’s out knows somebody who’s in, or can at least tell us
something
.”

“Yeah, maybe. Might be worth a try.”

“Let’s go.”

“What, now?”

Nail shook his head. “I saw that nimrod with the dreads leave Mendelsohn’s place. I say we stick on him. See who he knows, where else he goes.”

“It’s not gonna take all three of us,” Anna said as an idea formed. Part of her thought she didn’t have exactly the purest of motives, but she pushed that aside and kept talking. “Genevieve and I will go chase down some of her old friends, and you can stay on Nimrod. Just let us out at the next light.”

He glanced up at the rearview mirror, met her eyes there. “Yeah. Okay.”

* * *

The air was musty and thick with dust, the light from the hanging forty-watt bulb dim, and the dimensions of the room oppressive. The ceiling hung just high enough that Karyn was in no danger of hitting her head but low enough that she felt a constant need to duck. It wasn’t even really a ceiling, just bare joists supporting the floor overhead. At the far corner of the basement hulked a heap of trash taller than she was. Scrap metal, chair legs, what looked like a vacuum cleaner from a bygone era, and a mess of less identifiable crap all heaped up indiscriminately in a precarious pile. Every time she turned away from it, she swore something squirmed or wriggled in there.

Anna had remarked in the past on the creepiness of Tommy’s basement workroom, and Karyn agreed completely.

Tommy cleared a space on his workbench—an old pool
table with the felt torn away, revealing the gray slate underneath—and upended a paper grocery bag onto the surface. A handful of oddities fell out. There was an empty, grease-stained remnant of a McDonald’s bag, a toothpick, a couple of wadded-up napkins, a filthy sock, a burrito wrapper, and a hairbrush.

“That’s all fairly disgusting,” Karyn said.

“Tools of the trade, I’m sorry to say.” Tommy didn’t look all that sorry. He poked through the mess with an expression of avid curiosity, absently rubbing a hand over the stubble on the back of his head.

He looked up from the mess at Karyn, and she froze. His eye sockets were empty, a pair of vacant black holes that poured blood down his face. A meaty red-black chunk rolled down from the ruins of his left eye socket, left a trail across his cheek, and hit the workbench with a quiet splat.

“Hey, what’s wrong?” he asked. “You OK? You look . . . pale.”

What the hell?
Karyn thought back to the morning. Had she taken the day’s dose of blind
or not? Maybe she’d skipped it and then forgot it in the routine . . . No. She clearly remembered making coffee that morning, and she only ever drank coffee because, as bitter and nasty as it tasted, it covered up the acrid taste of blind
better than anything else she’d tried.

Then maybe Tommy was in danger?

She blinked, or maybe he did, and his eyes were back. The blood trail down his cheek remained, but Karyn thought she could ignore that.

Is he in trouble or not?
She remembered the last time she’d seen something go wrong with Tommy, that brief flash of blood just after the last score. Nothing had happened that night. Maybe it was something that would happen much later, or maybe . . .

Maybe the blind
wasn’t working as well as it used to.

I can’t worry about this right now. We’ve got work to do.

“I’m good,” she said, though in truth she was shaken and her nerves were amped up way too high. “You ready?”

“Born that way. You?”

“Yeah.” She picked up a pen and was gratified to see that her hand didn’t tremble.
See? It wasn’t that bad. Garden-variety hallucination.

“Cool.” He grinned at her unself-consciously, and she wondered if he knew these were the only times she ever saw him at ease. Probably not—he was so lost in the work that he never worried about his own frame of mind, which was surely the reason he was at ease in the first place.

He grabbed a dented metal bowl that looked suspiciously like it had been stolen from a local salad place, and he slid it to the edge of the table. From here, Karyn could see that the inside was painted with a collection of incomprehensible glyphs and sigils in a spiral procession from the edge of the bowl to the bottom. Tommy started up a low mumbling and reached over to a coffeepot that had been sitting on a hot plate with a dangerously spliced power cord. He made a few passes over the bowl with one hand, then poured the boiling water in.

Steam roiled off the bowl in a thick white cloud, way more than seemed justified by normal boiling water, and Karyn took a step back. Tommy’s eyes lit up as the steam curled around him.

“Here we go,” he said. He dropped the toothpick into the bowl.

Immediately, his eyelids started fluttering. Karyn hated this part. Never mind that she had her own built-in occult weirdness, this process always made her uneasy. Bribery was less unnerving, and old-fashioned pounding-the-pavement recon better still, but sometimes those options were too risky. In those cases, Tommy’s creepy divination was the right tool for the job.

Still, she wished his eyes would stop that, particularly after her latest vision.

“Inside of a car,” he said, and she started writing. “Dashboard lights . . . Ugh, looks like some trouble at home . . . I’d be pissed too if my daughter left the house dressed like that . . . hmm.”

This usually went on for a while. Karyn wasn’t quite
sure what Tommy was actually doing when he was doing this, and—just to add that little soupçon of eeriness—Tommy claimed not to be very sure about it either. Sometimes he seemed to be seeing through somebody else’s eyes, sometimes he seemed to be rifling through their memories, and sometimes he mimicked their movements or spoke with their voice. Usually that last was a simple matter of relaying their words, but on one memorable occasion,
somebody else’s
voice had issued from Tommy’s throat. Karyn had been so badly frightened she’d dropped her notepad, and she’d been halfway to the stairs before she’d gotten control of herself. She still had no idea if that had actually happened or if she’d hallucinated it, and Tommy couldn’t tell her. He rarely remembered anything from these explorations.

“Ugly stretch of Figueroa . . . downtown . . . Oh, good, more driving . . . Hey, fuck you, buddy! Gas pedal’s the one on the right! . . . Man, I hope he doesn’t bring that creepy fucker with him again. Or, hell, any of the others—they’re all gettin’ real weird lately . . . home again . . .” Tommy shook his head. “Not this one, it’s just his driver. Next.” He fumbled around until he found one of the napkins, then dropped that into the bowl.

More steam billowed up from the water. “What do we got here? Buncha dorks in hoods . . . Kimaris! Vacar! Zagam! . . . Oh-ho.
There
you are, you little tramp. One jawbone, slightly used, in the middle of a rally for KKK rejects. Christ, everybody wants to rub up on that thing. Where the hell are we? C’mon, look around a
little . . .
”

Tommy’s eyelids were fluttering at a rate that Karyn found just short of nauseating, and his breathing came rapid and shallow. Was it possible he would go into some kind of seizure? It had never happened before, but as his motions grew more exaggerated, she wondered.

“
Not
the frat house. I don’t give a damn where you live, let’s get back to it, huh?” Tommy frowned. “Okay, back to the show. Sure looks like Mendelsohn’s place. Oh, and we’re going inside! Greek urn, a sculpture the size of my car—and what’s this? Going down.
Basement? Couple of turns. Down some more. Walking pretty fast, walking pretty fast now . . . Don’t look over there! Remember,
never
look over there . . . God, I think I’m gonna puke.” He swallowed twice, convulsively, and Karyn glanced around the room for something he could throw up in. There was the bowl, and that was about it. For a place filled with stuff, there sure wasn’t much she could actually use.

Tommy continued talking, though, and the moment passed. “Jesus, Fort Knox has nothin’ on this place. This fuckin’ basement ever end? Guardroom, one, two, six, eight guys, and are there some guns? Why,
yes
. Sandwiches. Ashtrays. Looks like some of ’em camp here. No Mendelsohn, but I think that scruffy guy with the crazy eyes is his second-in-command, and I sure wish he’d stop lookin’ at me. End of the hall, a right turn, and a big ol’ walk-in safe with a place for the guest of honor in the middle. A pat on the shoulder from Number Two, and I’ma put this goddamned bone down right here.” A shudder coursed through his body, starting at the knees and rippling up through his hips and chest.

A moment later, it had passed. Tommy shook his head. “Aaand . . . that’s a wrap on this one. Lessee what else we got here.”

He tossed another napkin in the bowl and went through another round of rigmarole. This one was more like the nonevent with the driver, and thankfully his breathing slowed and blood came back to his cheeks. By the time he threw the McDonald’s bag in, he looked nearly normal, except for his constant blinking. He went through another round of useless scavenging.

Karyn figured that was about all there was to learn, and then he tossed in the hairbrush.

His reaction was immediate. His whole body tensed up, like an electric current had activated all his muscles at once. “Ggggg—”

“Tommy!”

“Don’t! I swear, I didn’t see anything. I didn’t!” His head suddenly jerked to the left, and his face twisted in
a grimace. Then, in a strangled falsetto: “I don’t
want
to see anything. Don’t take me back down there, please please please, man—AAAAAHH!”

“Tommy, stop this!”

“I just went down to see the relic, I didn’t mean to go
there
, don’t make me go back—Oh God, it’s dark, it’s so dark. Who’s there? WHO’S THERE? AAAUGH, MY EYES!!!!”

Karyn dropped her notebook and slapped the bowl from Tommy’s hands. Tommy fell to the cement floor, landing hard on his ass. The bowl hit the ground with a ringing clash, and warm water splashed everywhere, soaking Karyn’s jeans from midcalf on down.

She dropped to her knees next to Tommy, who had curled up on himself and wrapped his arms around his head. “Are you hurt? Tommy, say something.”

A moment passed, and then he slowly uncovered his head and pushed himself up on an elbow.

Twin streams of blood trickled from his eyes like gruesome tears. Karyn froze in the act of reaching for him. Was that real? Was that what the vision had been warning her about?

“Fuck me, that was no fun,” Tommy said, and he blinked. He pulled up his grimy tank top and wiped the sweat from his forehead and cheeks, smearing blood across his face. “Did we get anything?”