Scarlet Dream (14 page)

Brigid turned then, trusting her eyes to adjust to the darkness. What she had at first taken to be a cupboard was actually a small, boxlike landing that opened out into a staircase leading into the basement of the old house. Balancing her metal pole against her side, Brigid ran a hand along the wall until she located the light switch and flicked it on. Nothing happened—either the bulb was dead or there was no power coming into the house. However, as her eyes continued to adjust to the darkness, Brigid realized she wasn't absolutely blind in this environment. There seemed to be something glowing at the foot of the stairs, glowing with a slow pulse, first soft, then bright, then soft once more.

Cautiously, Brigid took a single step down the wooden staircase, ducking her head at the low ceiling, hearing the stair creak as she applied her weight. The glow below her was faint, but it was surely there.

“Kane,” Brigid whispered over the Commtact, “I've
found something. Down in the basement. Something glowing like it's—I'm not sure—alive, maybe. I'm checking it out.”

“Baptiste…” Kane began, a note of irritation in his tone.

“You haven't cornered the market on impetuous decisions just yet, Kane,” Brigid reminded him in a brisk whisper. “I think this may be important.”

With that, Brigid stole her way down the stairs, taking care to keep her movements light and still wincing every time the old wooden boards creaked. As she watched, the glowing continued to throb, like some slow pulse, dull then bright, dull then bright, making the dark basement pop into brightness and long black shadows every ten seconds or so. As she reached the foot of the stairs, Brigid saw the glowing more clearly, and she began to define the shapes as they became brighter before fading away. It was not just one item that glowed, but over a dozen, all pulsing in unison as if they were somehow linked despite being strewed across the copious area of the basement.

The glowing pieces were arranged in a roughly semi-circular, radial pattern with a large glowing hunk dominating its center, so that when they glowed it seemed reminiscent of a sunburst. Close up, Brigid saw that the small pieces were jagged, and it seemed as though they had been broken off from the main body of the item that rested in the center of the otherwise ordinary basement room.

That central item was familiar to Brigid Baptiste, and she had to stifle a gasp of surprise as she recognized it. It was a chair, its back to her. But not just any chair. This was the so-called voodoo chair that she had seen and become ensnared by when she and Kane had met with Papa Hurbon, local practitioner of the dark voodoo arts.
In actuality, it was an astronavigator's chair from the starship
Tiamat,
a part of the literal mothership of the Annunaki, and it possessed the ability to project images of star maps into a user's mind.

When Brigid had last seen the chair, it had been missing its lower section and had been propped up on bricks. The lower section was still missing, but now panels from the side and back had gone missing, also, and there was just a strut where the headrest should be. Peering around the room, Brigid saw the missing parts all around her, they were the other items that seemed to pulse in time with the chair's glowing palpitations. It had been taken apart with some degree of finesse she saw, despite the rough edges of the breaks, and its parts arranged in a manner that seemed almost as if they had been planted, sown into the floor of the grand old house's basement, like the points and convergences of a pentagram. With its known ability to project images into a sitter's brain, Brigid realized that the scope of the chair's abilities may very well include overlaying illusions into a person's mind, making them see whatever it was programmed to make them see.

Suddenly the nature of the book she had been reading and, presumably, whatever weird experiences Kane and Grant had been through in the House Lilandera, began to make a strange, alarming kind of sense. The book she had held had been a prop—all the things in the house were props—and the chair projected its illusions into the minds of anyone who interacted with those props.

“I think I've found the source of our trouble,” Brigid whispered, trusting the Commtact to enhance her voice for Kane's ears wherever he now was in the house.

After a moment Kane's voice came to Brigid. “Care to elaborate, Baptiste?”

“It's that chair,” she subvocalized. “Papa Hurbon's chair. It's here.”

Brigid took another pace forward, aware of the creeping tension in her muscles. The chair may be casting the illusion but there was one part of the puzzle that remained unanswered—when Brigid had encountered the chair before, it had needed to physically bond with her before it began to project its information for her brain to interpret. Like much Annunaki machinery, it was organic technology, and it required a person's touch to make it operate.

Cautiously, Brigid paced around the edge of the chair, the TP-9 semiautomatic held out steadily in front of her in a one-handed grip, the metal pole she had snagged from the artillery truck prepped in the other.

Just as Brigid had guessed, there was a figure sitting in the chair. It was an elderly woman, with white hair and skin so pale that, in the glowing pulsation of the chair and its parts, it looked as if it may never have been touched by the sun's rays. As far as Brigid could tell, the woman was sleeping.

No matter the size of a prisoner's cell, the prisoner will eventually examine every inch of it. And so it was with Grant. At first, he had dismissed the place he found himself in, aware that it was a painting somehow brought to life through means he could not begin to comprehend. But, having alerted Kane to his predicament via their linked Commtacts, he decided to search the place, to find out a little more about this odd trap he had been placed within.

The first thing that struck Grant was how real it all felt. Yes, there was a sense of unreality about it, the way the people had appeared to be loosely of the same appearance, the way that the Shizuka analog had broken down when he had shot her. But on a surface level it seemed to be real. Grant could feel the wind on his face, and he watched as it rustled the leaves in the trees and the branches above him swayed with the breeze. The place smelled like a forest, too, a cold, damp smell as if there was moisture in the air. Yet when he examined the trees up close, he saw the brush marks there, like a backdrop from a stage play.

Grant walked deeper into the forest, leaving the fumbling couples behind him, dismissing their pleas and groans of ecstasy. Behind him, the city continued to burn, lightening the sky. The flames acted as a fixed point, like north on the compass, and Grant kept them at his back
at all times to ensure he walked in the same direction. In theory, he was walking toward the external frame of the painting and hence an exit, since the burning city had formed the distant background of the picture as he looked at it on the wall of the House Lilandera. As theories went, it was the best he could come up with given the unreality of his situation.

The forest was like a dark streak, only defining itself into individual trees when he got close to them, as if the details didn't really exist until they were within arm's reach.

On the ground, twigs and a few fallen leaves lay on the loam. Grant halted, crouching to examine one of the fallen leaves. It was as big as his spread hand and a yellowish green in color. He picked up the leaf, its three prongs stretched out like the fingers of a cartoon character's hand. Close up, the leaf didn't have veins as leaves should; instead, it seemed untextured, like a flat sheet of colored paper in the shape of a leaf. The green of its surface was not complete, and Grant saw now that white peeked through where the paint had not been applied evenly. It was curious—in his mind, he comprehended this as a leaf from a tree, but his eyes could see the defects, the limitations in the artist's work.

Grant cast aside the leaf, pushing himself up from the ground on powerful legs. The sounds of coupling had become distant now, and the forest was instead a place of forest sounds, owls hooting, foxes barking and other nocturnal things prowling for food and shelter. Grant walked on, striding through a copse of trees and onward, in the opposite direction to the burning pyre of the city.

 

I
N THE CONFINES
of the House Lilandera, Kane was concentrating on keeping a level head as the only way that he
could think of to hold the house's strange illusions at bay. He shrugged into his jacket, sighing and shaking his head when he saw the frayed rip across the front where the undead thing with the eye patch had torn it during their earlier scuffle. That seemed like days past, and yet it had been perhaps ninety minutes. Which reminded Kane—the Red Weed was even now being mixed in the laboratory of Redoubt Mike, the glowing clock counting down atop the centrifuge spinner in the glass-walled room. Kane and his companions had less than eight hours to halt it.

From the well-worn mattress, the two fetuslike figures reached for Kane, a haunting sense of desperation in their childlike expressions.

“Don't leave us,” said Kirsten, still recognizable because of her vibrant blue eyes.

“We would love you here forever,” the one with green eyes added.

“Yeah,” Kane grumbled, “that's what I'm afraid of.”

The woman creatures, unable to comprehend that Kane had truly broken their illusion, cooed to him once more, making a performance of touching each other's naked bodies, pudgy fingers playing through dark flesh with the texture of dough. Repulsed, Kane turned away and made his way to the door.

“I'd like to say it's been nice knowing you, ladies,” Kane said without turning back, “but let's just say it's been an experience.”

With that, he pulled open the remnants of the rotten door and stepped out into the corridor. Like the bedroom, this previously impressive hallway now looked like hell, the last proud hurrah of a struggling dumpsite.

The window at the end of the corridor was missing, shards of glass clinging to the wooden frame like spiders hanging to the remains of a broken web. The walls were
speckled with mold, and here and there toadstools were growing in pools of moisture, the floor and walls beside them sprayed with their black spores. The floorboards were bare, with wide streaks of dirt worn into them.

Kane made his way toward the staircase, passing the doorways that led to the other bedrooms of the bordello. Several featured doors, though two of them were half rotted away, while the third had paint scarred across its surface and a small hole in its lower panel where someone—or something—had put a foot through it. Peering into one of the rooms, Kane saw a man lying on the bed with another of the dark-skinned fetuslike things riding astride him, teasing his body as wind blew through the shattered remains of the window. The man was naked and delirious, wailing in either pleasure or abject horror, Kane didn't care to think about which.

For a moment Kane's concentration slipped, and he saw the bedroom as he was supposed to, in the vivid colors of the shared illusion. The man seemed to lie amid a circle of flickering candles as moonlight spilled through the window, a gorgeous woman with dark hair and dark looks teasing his body to extremes of pleasure. It was easy to get sucked into the illusion.

Kane halted, closing his eyes and recentering himself. Without consciously thinking it, his wrist muscles flinched and he called the Sin Eater back to his hand. He opened his eyes then, and the illusion of the beautiful room had evaporated like steam. Without hesitating, Kane drilled a single shot through the back of the head of the woman-thing, and she toppled from the man's body, a bloody circle appearing on her forehead. What the man on the bed saw, Kane couldn't imagine.

“Get up, get dressed and get out,” Kane instructed. “This place isn't safe.”

The man looked startled. “What are you? Some kind of magistrate?”

“Yeah.” Kane nodded. “Now get your stuff and get out. I'm closing this rat hole down.”

Perhaps the man recognized the Magistrate tone in Kane's order. Perhaps he just saw something that wasn't really there. Whatever it was, he pushed himself from the bed and started gathering his clothes, looking timidly at the slumped body of the woman who had been bringing him pleasure just a moment before.

Kane moved on, ignoring the fact that the half-formed woman was twitching. Hard to kill, maybe? Didn't matter now, he had bigger fish to fry.

Then he saw a woman standing at the top of the staircase, blocking his exit as she glared at him, her skirts still glamorous despite the squalor of her true surroundings. It was Ellie.

“And just what do you think you're doing?” she asked, her voice still rich.

“Getting out of here,” Kane told her.

Ellie shook her head indulgently. “Oh, no, that ain't how things happen 'round here, sugar,” she said. “This here is a celebration of life. You don't want to be leaving that, now, do you?”

Kane raised his right hand, showing Ellie the Sin Eater blaster he held. “I broke your spell,” he explained. “Without that, this joint looks a little too members-only for my liking. So me and my friends are going to have to be on our way, I'm afraid.”

Ellie tsked, shaking her head heavily. “No one ever gets out alive,” she told Kane. “That's the charm.”

Before the ex-Mag could respond, Ellie became a blur
of motion, rushing forward the four steps between her and the muzzle of his blaster. She yanked it to one side as Kane clung on to its grip. Kane's finger squeezed at the trigger, and a 9 mm burst whizzed past Ellie's head and drilled into the wall, kicking up dried-out plaster where they struck.

“No one ever gets out alive,” Ellie repeated, pulling Kane close to her by the end of his own pistol. Her other pudgy fist struck out, ramming into Kane's gut with such force that he felt the breath burst from his lips.

If he had had any lingering doubts, it was at that moment that Kane felt sure that there was a little more to the motherly Ellie than he had initially presumed.

Something of the old magistrate code came back to Kane as Ellie drove her pudgy fist into his gut for a second vicious punch. Never forget—everyone's a suspect.

 

G
RANT WALKED FOR A WHILE
, passing more and more of the painted trees, his soles sinking into the moist earth with each step. But finally he came to a little wooden shack in the woods, beside which waited a cart on a simple dirt track. Lights burned in the windows of the shack, and Grant could hear faint noises coming from within. Although he didn't recall seeing it in the painting, the shack seemed as if it had been in the forest forever, not incongruous with what else he had seen around him. As he neared, Grant became conscious of cheering and laughter coupled with strains of up-tempo music. It sounded like a party.

Grant pushed aside a low-hanging branch that barred his way, and he walked up the dirt track to the shack itself. It was a single-story building, and he estimated that the interior would be no bigger than two family-size rooms, a modest accommodation for a woodsman and his wife.

Grant peered through the nearest window, from which bright light glowed and dimmed as if with the flickering flames of candlelight. Through the window, much to Grant's surprise, he saw nothing other than the changing hues creating the illusion of the flickering of candle flame.

Like strokes of paint on a canvas, Grant realized, the illusion of something not really there.

On a whim, Grant tried the door. Finding it unlocked, he pushed it open and, without a moment's hesitation, walked into the shack.

Inside it wasn't a shack at all. As the door swung closed behind him, Grant found himself standing in what appeared to be an ancient Greek temple, with a troupe of dancers taking center stage as its lone patron reclined in a cushioned seat, nude serving girls tending to his every need. The patron had the dark skin of an octoroon, and a frame so corpulent that it made him look like one of the cushions he reclined upon. Most notably, however, he had no legs, both limbs finishing at stumps above the knee. Grant knew who the man was, for they had met just two months ago.

Glancing behind him, Grant saw that the exterior door of the shack had disappeared. Instead there seemed to be a beautiful wood door, lacquered and decorated with a painting of swirling flames bursting from an idealized sun. Flaming sconces lit each corner of the room, casting their light and heat through the stone-walled building.

Warily, Grant stepped away from the door and walked through the main hall of the temple, through the cavorting dancers as their lithe bodies swayed and dipped to the strains of the simple music that a quintet played in one corner of the temple's open hall.

The man at the seat clapped his hands together, delighted
to see a newcomer in their midst. “Fresh entertainment,” he bellowed. “And what do you do?”

The man stopped as he saw Grant's face for the first time, and his broad, gap-toothed grin turned to a look of fear as he saw the scowl on the ex-Magistrate's face.

“Papa Hurbon,” Grant said to the man reclining on the couch. “You remember me?”

The dark-skinned man with no legs swayed a little in place as if drunk, and his mouth dropped open as he tried to form a coherent sentence. “Yuh…?” he began.

Impatiently, Grant waited.

“You can't be here,” Hurbon finally managed to say, his hand sweeping through the air as if to brush Grant from his sight. “How can you be here? This is mine.”

Grant grunted. “Perhaps it's time you learned to share, huh?”

But Hurbon had turned his attention away, clapping his hands to get attention as he called over his shoulder. “He shouldn't be here,” he shouted. “Kill him!”

Automatically, Grant took a step back, planting his feet in preparation for battle as six guards, tall men whose skin was so dark it seemed almost to absorb all light, stepped from the shadows and pulled short swords from the leather scabbards they wore at their belts. Off to the side of the room, the quintet continued to play their music, but the dance troupe stepped back, sheltering close to the walls.

“Whoa, let's not be hasty,” Grant began. “See, I want to help you get out of this place.”

Papa Hurbon laughed, a deep sound like distant thunder. “And why would I ever want to leave?” he challenged.

Before Grant could respond, the six muscular guards began to close in on him, their short swords glinting in the flickering firelight of the room.

 

A
S THE LIGHT CAST
by the astronavigator's chair grew brighter in the basement of the House Lilandera, Brigid Baptiste stared at the sleeping woman resting within its embrace. The woman was locked in the chair by tendrils that had spread across her body like a creeping vine. The woman was definitely still breathing, and she was old, Brigid realized, really old. Blue veins showed in the pale skin of her face and hands, and her clothing looked like something from another era, layers of taffeta and lace finished in creamy whites like something a bride might have worn two hundred years ago.

The woman's face was drawn with age, but she still retained a certain aristocratic air in her aquiline nose and the sharp angles of her cheekbones. Up close, Brigid saw that she wore a little blush on her cheeks, a whisper of silver eye shadow. At a guess, Brigid estimated that she was at least eighty years old.