Thalo Blue (38 page)

The guard walked him to the elevator, accompanied him all the way down to the front doors of the main floor of North York General while a caretaker pushed a noisy floor waxing machine nearby. The guard even stood at the door with it open, letting in a blast of cold from the world beyond, while the Thief walked alone out into the frigid night. He stuffed his hands in his pockets, hunched his shoulders against the cold, and ambled past scraggly branches spilling from floral and shrub displays which would be manicured and tended in the light of a far-off springtime.
Procedure,
Thief thought, shivering. He was facing sleet that fell in an expanse of multitudinous dots against a line of pale glowing orange streetlamps ahead. Beyond them was the dulled blue-black of night.
We’re all just following our orders. All the king’s horses and all the king’s men: powerless foot soldiers, every one.

V. A Parable of Immortality

The most fragile of sensations in Zeb’s synaesthetic life were always those allied with scent. The smells of things were by no means
weak
, but his correspondences among them and other sensory arousals were limited, and he found the world to be an underwhelming experience from the stance of its fragrance. The dullness of it, in terms of what his nose could decipher, usually centered around empty smells like excessive car exhaust, industrial fumes, or the occasional acrid smoke of a forest fire from up north which drifted on a gust and hung over the city as a veil. Commonly, air had a taste, and even a look, before it had an aroma.

But there were a handful of scents that did not elude him in their mediocrity. He would longingly watch a swirling shape just out of reach, beyond the periphery edges of sight when he had the good glory to catch a trail of his mother’s perfume. This he discovered at the age of seven. She wore a combination of oranges and vanilla. In recent years, he searched out the perfect, subtle combination that she always wore, but was always unable to find an exactness to suit him.

Following that, his next vital scent, for which there was a synaesthetic blend, was the smell of distant pine, mown grass and faint suntan lotion residue. Those scents, alone or in a recipe of togetherness, would make the world seem dark, gloomy even—as though someone had gradually turned down the wattage of the bulb behind the sun. These scents were memories of Vivian. Memories of intense sexual pleasure. Memories of childhood flamboyance and excess.

Caeli’s skin, her smell of peaches and sweet cream, brought a warm finger down his spine from the nape of his neck to the small of his back. Hers was a pleasure and there was happiness in the idea that he could bring his nose to, and breathe deeply from, her arm or the flat smoothness of her stomach just below the navel. He thought himself capable of doing that for an eternity.

<> <> <>

Hospital smell was bad; there was no way around that. But just following the time when Sebastion found definite tingles in his fingertips and toes again for the first, he also found that he had grown accustomed to that smell which, for the rest of his life he thought would be detestable. But the smell that hit him next wasn’t the outright hospital odor he thought he knew. This was a stronger smell, more prevalent, perhaps of bleach or other chemical cleaners which were undoubtedly being used on the floor or the walls. It made him think he was going to vomit. It hit in the hallway as Malin squeakily wheeled him to the elevator at the opposite end from where Jewels Fairweather and the security guard had been standing. It was a sudden revolt, but he, as he was realizing was possible, assumed that something would help him move past it again.

On the way down to the cafeteria in the elevator car, with that smell still in his nostrils, Sebastion wanted to know, as he put it,
what the hell that was all about
.

After unfolding the wheelchair from behind the door and, with a tight smile, offering to push him in it, Malin had insisted they leave his room and go downstairs. And now, in the elevator, she leaned forward at his question, with her fingers still holding the handles at the back of the chair. Her hair came forward, bringing with it the fragrance of lavender and rain. There was a gentle shade of pink behind the walls of the elevator car at that moment, and even as the brand-new smell and its color dripped away from Sebastion, he wished for it to be back. Even just for a moment.

She asked him if he ever got feelings about things.

He said sure, of course.
All the time.

She had responded that she was learning in the last week or so to trust her gut. The gut, she said, was more right than wrong. More correct than the head, a lot of the time.

There was the tedious drone of a floor waxer beyond the cafeteria’s glass partition on the main floor of the hospital. Down hallways and inside the cafeteria—where the stink that he had somehow gotten used to still lived—most of the lights had been turned off at nine. The dreary glow of only those few that were still present settled on the faces of Malin and Sebastion, making them each look both serious and worn. They now sat facing one another, as if playing a game of chess, at a small, two-person table in the center of the ample, high-ceilinged room. He wanted to press her specifically as to why she had felt the need to call a security guard. That seemed extreme to him in his state at the moment, delirious with pain he had been, even if the ambulance technician
had
nearly become a blubbering idiot—but there was some uneasiness in him about the whole thing too. He thought maybe that the hurt flaring up and down his arm and torso could have clouded his view of things. Maybe Malin had seen something he had not. But he let it go for now, like water falling from the slant of a shingled roof. That Julius, whether he had saved Sebastion’s life or not, struck him as...
not quite right
anyhow. He was gone now, and that suited Sebastion just fine.

The pain was easing. He was grateful to her for suggesting the wheelchair, which, she said, was hospital procedure anyway. He had been taken off the morphine drip a day and a half earlier and those little white pills had become a godsend. He needed them less and less in that last day and a half, but when the near-spill in the bathroom made it feel like he had been hit with a bullet all over again, he found that he needed those little white pills more than ever.

They were taking effect and he found himself able to concentrate on Malin’s words. Despite the light—or was it the drugs working through his veins now—she looked good to him. Sickly swab of hospital lights, most of them turned out, or not.

“I haven’t been entirely honest with you,” she said.

That was her opener, that was how she started in: with a confessional. Surprising him, she went straight around the topic of his father, of his mother, of his time spent, as he had put it, at the bottom of a well with nothing but a small round dot of light, a centerpoint in his anaesthetized darkness.

She navigated a path towards a different topic entirely. And, as his arm’s ache lightened its load on him, he became increasingly pleased that he was not the topic this time. It had been cathartic these last few days, yes, true, but it had also been draining. And it had pulled him back, in a way, towards that dark corridor he had stared down for so many months after dad’s death. When Malin wanted to talk about herself, his eyes were wide with hope and expectancy. And his ears were tuned to her voice. Even if it had started with a confession of dishonesty.

“Do you believe in human feelings
so strong
that laws of the universe—perhaps even those of life and death—can be ignored? Broken even?”

“
Yes
,” Zeb said without hesitation.

“I do too. Have you ever heard of
the Druid Cases
?”

“No. Should I have?”

“Not likely,” she said, “On the books with crime organizations nearly exclusively. Not big enough or consistent enough to have a following in the press. They were way down south mostly, one in Texas, that’s where I came in on them...but the interesting thing about these Druid Cases is that they were not localized—not like most serials.”

Serials.
Serials?
That was not a word he felt particularly comfortable with. It held a bad sentiment, something stiff and vile, with a taint of the ages on it. He was not prepared for this conversational derailment. Was not even curious about where she was headed—and was lost already.
What did this have to do with anything?

“In fact,” she persisted, “they follow few of the defining guidelines of a set of serials. They appear more like random acts of violence. That is, until you really get down on your hands and knees and take a good look.”

“And you did that?” He would have confessed that he
was
patronizing her a little, partly because he was curious about her life, and partly because he was curious about what any of this might have to do with anything else. “You got in there and got your hands dirty?”

“I did. My master’s at Texas A & M—I stumbled across an article that mentioned the first four deaths in the string that eventually became tagged with the term,
Druid
. Most of the deaths weren’t local so not many people in my graduating class would have known about it either, or if they had come across it, likely wouldn’t have followed it up. It was
that
low-profile back then. Actually hardly anyone at all, outside of certain circles in the bigger law enforcement agencies, even used that term yet,
the Druid Cases
. My paper was published the following year and the name caught on from there. Those early deaths are catalogued as serial killings. For all intents and purposes that’s exactly what they were. Are. But, here’s the thing, Sebastion—”

Malin stiffened. Instinctively, he did the same.

“—These cases that I’ve been studying, they don’t actually qualify
as
serial. Not really at all. And there are two reasons the deaths in those case files can’t be defined that way—” She leaned forward, as though the cafeteria had been crowded and she was trying for discretion. “—The victims,” she said. “They didn’t die.

“And the killer was never the same person.”

<> <> <>

From her next forty-five minutes or so of talking, Sebastion learned a pile of details from Malin. There was a great deal hidden in all of it about who she was—at least that’s the area where his attention fell the most. Druid, though.
Druid.
She talked at length about the Druid, like he was a man, a real man. Up and walking around, like he or Malin, or the security guard or...

Malin had been born of a Swedish mother and an American father who had been transferred to an international political post in Stockholm—that’s where he met Malin’s mother and they were married. Her English was so good, she said, because her father started reading to Malin and her sisters from English books and magazines and newspapers when they were still young. She always thought a little piece of him missed home and reading to his girls like that brought it a little closer. “Newspapers,” Malin had said, “New York Post. Los Angeles Times. Toronto Star.” Her eyes had trailed off and away from Sebastion’s face. “‘
Time for the news, baby daughter,
’ he used to say. He called me his baby daughter...I was the youngest...Always the baby, right?”

Sebastion had smiled. She caught herself, and fell back in line, losing the moment that she could apparently see so clearly in front of her eyes. “—Anyway,” she continued. “That’s where my interest in criminology came. My psychology interests came later.”

“I knew you didn’t have the southern drawl,” Sebastion had said, a bit of a tease in his voice.

“No,” she had said, “Dad was from North Dakota. Mom was pretty happy that he read to us so much from the American papers and books...She was hopeful that we would each take after him and do some international work, maybe politics, maybe what I ended up doing. She was the best.”

“
Was?
”

“Yeah,
was
. I moved to the U.S. to study some time after they both died. I’ve only been on this side of the pond for, I guess, going on ten and a half years. I suppose that’s not long enough to pick up the accent. I always think my English is rather flat...”

In Malin’s final year at A&M she stumbled across the almost transient mention of the Druid cases in a recently amended journal of criminal psychology while trying to decide on a topic for her master’s study. This was it. She just knew this case would snag her some pretty big kudos, and she would be right. But the road ahead was an arduous one. She quickly found she was in over her head. There was just too much there. And it was the most perplexing case, or
set
of cases, she had ever heard about—let alone delved into. And, at the time, she had almost no experience.

She outlined some of the major details for Sebastion—the fine points that she spent a year or more researching, she told him, she would leave out because he most likely knew nothing about profiling, and she wasn’t going to get into that as they neared midnight. And definitely not following the incident with Julius Fairweather which they both agreed had been downright weird.

<> <> <>

Stoughton, Massachusetts, eleven years ago, dinner time, a man bursts into an upper-class bistro in the downtown area. He has blood running down his shirt, as though he has perhaps thrown it up on himself. He is screaming profanities and nonsense and pushing over tables. Later, witnesses will tell police that he seemed to be screaming one phrase over and over again and then starts whispering it nearer to the end of the incident.

Reportedly, the man eventually grabs hold of someone, nearly as though he has been looking specifically for him. He is a middle-aged man, balding, out with his wife and two daughters for a twenty-fifth wedding anniversary dinner. Following the dinner the family has tickets for an Opera. But they wouldn’t be attending it that night.