Read The Cipher Online

Authors: Kathe Koja

Tags: #Fantasy, #Horror, #Fiction, #Urban Fantasy

The Cipher (22 page)

"Well. That takes some telling," but he smiled as he said it and some of the stick went out of my spine. "I wasn't here for part one, but I guess Shrike blew some kind of gasket when you wouldn't let her make her video—"

"It's Doris who should be pissed," I said. Got another beer. "It was her camcorder."

"Yeah. Anyway Shrike was busy throwing her fit when I got here and Doris says, Doris's the one who kind of looks like Malcolm, right? Right. So Doris says, Cool off, Nicholas is really onto something important here and it won't do any good to piss him off, he's the only one who knows, he has the answers blah blah blah, all this shit like you're some kind of guru, you know?"

That roadkill look; "I know."

"So Shrike says, everybody fuck off, I'll do it myself. And Doris and those other two assholes—"

"Dingbats."

"Dingbats, right," emphatic nod, "They all start arguing and Malcolm just blows up and says, You're all crazy and I'm out of here. And he takes his mask and goes home. Or somewhere. And nobody goes with him, everybody just sits around waiting for you to come back—"

"Nakota too?"

Headshake. "She took the video, though."

Ah,
God.
The fucking video, I had forgotten. My carelessness, how vengefully would it come home to roost? Stop it, I thought. Stop making things worse than they are. "What about everybody else?"

"Out to eat. Out to
lunch,
" shaking his head, "they're out to lunch all right. Is there any more of those beers?"

We drank them all up, but, drunk, my worry undimmed, I spun my silent fantasies of what Nakota might be doing with that video,
The Funhole Part One,
what remorseless mischief she might be making and me unable to fathom, much less put a stop to it. And Randy putting on some extremely loud thrash music. And the beer going down. And the dingbats, coming back. Whooping in the hall, some weird Chilean wine, two.bottles apiece, apparently we were all going to have a party.

They approved the music, as boisterously approved Randy, who did not return the favor or even comments directed at him, saying once to me, under cover of their chatter back and forth, their theories too silly to remember past the second spoken, "Guess you're their Malcolm now/'

Dull negating headshake, but we both knew he was right. It showed in their eager deference: my choice of music, my choice of chair, my choice opinions, at this point unexpressed beyond a few dispirited grunts; respectful their offers, even, to get me another beer. It was not so much ridiculous as scary, it got to me after only a very little while, and Randy too: he left and left me there, stranded in my growing island of pained drunken silence and beer-can armor, and still the gnaw, Nakota, where are you? Destructive force with a chip on her shoulder. You left her with the video before, I argued, nothing happened, nothing will happen now. Nothing bad will—

And the door, when had it opened, who could hear in that caldron of noise, and she, in night-damp Club 22-wear, my relief at her presence completely evaporated by the look in her eyes. The others, Medusa-like she scared them silent. Ignoring them, her gaze on me, one hand closing the door, the other holding the black plastic of the video.

"You win again, fuckface," and she skimmed the video at me, hard square Frisbee with amazing force and it struck me so near the eye, my warding hand useless and the sudden bright plop of fluid onto my skin, circular jelly mixed with the dimmer color of my blood. Someone turned the music down; Ashlee offered, small voice, to get me something to wipe off with.

"Get out," Nakota snarled, at her, at all of them, not bothering to look as she lit a cigarette and threw the lighter at me too. It missed. They stood, I felt their stares, and wearily I said, "Go on, go home," like a cop at the scene of some exceptionally lurid crime, nothing to see anymore, folks, move along. "Go on," louder, and as if shaken from their shock they moved, herding out the door, careful to keep their distance from Nakota as they might skirt a living fire.

"Quite the fans you have there," advancing on me, newly furious that my suggestion had worked where her order had not, "quite the little groupies. Did you
know
it wouldn't take?"

Already exhausted by her anger, the beer roiling flat and gassy in my timid gut, "Take what?"

"The
video,
you asshole. Did you know it wouldn't take?" and without so much as a breath, "You don't even know what I'm talking about, do you? I tried to copy it," and a hissy little laugh, enjoying despite herself the expression on my face, I'm sure it was unique.

"I don't know," blowing smoke at the blood on my skin, "why I never thought of it before. What if you played it ten times, at the
same
time, ten tapes going at once. Would it be clearer? The paths, I mean, the arrangement of the—" and suddenly swerving that train of thought, remembering whom she was talking to: "But it didn't
work."

I tried, stupid backbrain reflex, to help. "Maybe the tape was no good, the one you used. Maybe the—"

"Maybe it won't work even if I tried it on a
million
tapes, maybe it can't work," cigarette up and down in her mouth, little black arrow now indicating eyes so venomous with knowledge denied that I helplessly turned my gaze away. "I think there's something in it that resists being copied. And if I really thought you knew what that was, I'd put this out"—pointing the cigarette at me— "in that," nodding at my right hand which still bled its own brand of plasma, slimy on the tabletop, "until you told me."

"I don't know shit about what works and what doesn't, or why, and I don't give a shit either," and it was true. I was just so tired. I was going back in there tomorrow, going into storage if you will (and even if you won't I will, I almost have to at this stage of the game) and as for her paths, I was less uninterested than blessedly unaware and determined to stay that way, I wanted nothing of her theories to cumber me as I lay like a snake on my shivering belly, staring into the dark of a negativity that stood for nothing, nothing we could know. Her most trenchant speculations were less than the guesses of a fool, as cogent as Malcolm's for that matter and as meaningless. I knew that this was so as I knew the Funhole was a process, as I was convinced that my heart beat and my body used air, having no personal explanation for any of those processes beyond the cool fact of their existence, beyond saying This is the way things are. Which is almost certainly why she hated me, then more than usual: for the utter depth of my acceptance, ray, to her, lackadaisical acquiescence to conditions she was convinced could and must be altered: as if a prehistoric Nakota crouched rubbing wet sticks together, furious with

Neanderthal me for not helping her discover why she couldn't make fire.

"I think," I said, very slowly, my mouth rubbery, now, as the rest of me, from the beer, the two-day lack of food, the churning of worry like liquid salt in my stomach, "I think I'm just gonna go to bed."

She said nothing at first, a circumstance so remarkable that I almost remarked on it, feeling her watch my shuffle to the bathroom and even back without a word. Sitting on the edge of the bed to peel down my socks, my cruddy jeans, and she a cold tableau, finally saying as she turned away, "I never expected any help from you, anyway; you're incapable. Just keep your little groupies out of my way."

"They're not my groupies," I muttered, slumping back to a sleep as restless and impure as any I had ever suffered, waking time and again to her poker-backed priestess stance, there in the glow of the TV. In the light of the uncopied video. And I turned my head away, into the minor crevice of the pillow, and tried to think nothing at all.

8

Though I played no razzle-dazzle, gave them nothing whatsoever to feed on, still they dogged me, my little groupies, my animate source of irritation: to Nakota, to whom their bumbling attempts to stick up for, and worse yet listen to, me were evidence of almost blasphemous defiance, earning them a high spot on her shit list when she bothered to notice them at all; to Malcolm, who also considered them traitors, this attitude of course strengthening his axis with Nakota; to Randy, who uncharacteristically refused to find any humor whatsoever in their duh-huh style, insisting instead that I should get rid of them ("How?" I said, and he, unable to recommend to weakling me his usual no-nonsense method of choice—the bum's rush—ending frustrated and irritated, then, with me as well); only Vanese could stand them, and she only marginally— they were also a kind of collective symbol to our little band, their presence become to each the vindication of a particular theory, one to a customer please, no pushing. Nakota thought they were the walking indictment of my lame-ass methods in dealing with the Funhole, conclusively proving that anyone who swallowed my theories, which were of course practically nil, ought to be given a Drano chaser. Malcolm scorned them as cheap-thrill seekers when he had cherished for them a more exalted destiny, that of professional art fuck, although naturally he used a different term. Randy thought they were pretentious assholes, which they were, who should never have been trusted with such a mystery as the Funhole. Vanese thought they were assholes, too, in themselves basically harmless but also a harbinger of worse to come, the front row of a crowd whose control would not be possible.

She told me this the afternoon after Nakota's video-slinging event, while the flat was pleasantly empty but for us, me with a plastic sandwich bag full of ice cubes pressed, at her insistence, to the swollen cut above my twitchy eye.

"That girl is some kind of hard-nosed bitch," Vanese said, without admiration. "What she needs is somebody to take her down a peg or two. Or twenty-two."

"Sorry, wrong number."

"What're you going to do, Nicholas?"

"About what?"

She sighed, a sad little sound that made more melancholy the backdrop of the sullen afternoon, dusty shadows lying in flat oblong planes, making of the whole room a complicated rebus of exhaustion and want. It even depressed me, and I was used to it. "Oh, Nicholas," that older-sister face again. "You're supposed to be in charge."

That surprised a laugh from me; I shook my head. "No way. No
way.
If anyone's in charge around here it's the Funhole."

"That's just what I mean. The Funhole, shit, that's no person, that's not even hardly a thing." Strong stirring motions in the sluggish goo of her convenience-store coffee. "Somebody has to be in charge, and it picked you, didn't it?"

Again, "No way," uneasy with the very idea, more uneasy still as she nodded to my newly rebandaged hand, courtesy herself, saying with that nod, Well isn't that the proof? Isn't it? "No," I said. "I'm just the first asshole to stick his hand down there, that's all."

"You really think so?" A pause, what was she thinking that needed careful phrasing to speak aloud? "Shrike, Nakota, she says you're the one who makes things happen. You think she could've melted that camera? Think any one of us could have—"

"I don't want to talk about it," I said, reaching balanceless from where I sat for the refrigerator door, hobbling in my seat, and I almost fell; could any clown such as me be in any kind of charge, strange groundskeeper for the gateways and the paths as Nakota kept insisting on calling her revelations, in charge of things I could barely comprehend, let alone understand? The sun slipped another notch, the shadows uglier in their depthless length. Bleakly, "There's no more beer."

"That's all you need—put that ice back on your head."

"Be my mother, Vanese?"

She smiled, a little. "You just better be a little careful, you hear me, Nicholas? Especially now, with your three new friends. I keep telling Randy, and I tell you, they're the shape of things to come."

"Then the shape must be a question mark."

I wanted to make her laugh, wanted to hear it, but her smile was too small; pouring out the sludgy coffee, picking up her key chain: heavy fake-gold heart shape chunky with keys, beside it some kind of tiny dangling locket, Randy's picture probably inside. "Is Randy coming tonight?" but she shook her head, he was tired, he had been snappish lately, neglecting his own work to come dally at this darker shrine.

"He needs some time off," over her shoulder as I followed her down the hall. "You ask me, you could stand some, too. Little rest makes a lot of difference."

"I bet it does."

Pausing there a moment, long intake of breath to ask a careful question: "Do you know—what does 'transcursion' mean?"

I shrugged. "Never heard of it."

"Me neither," gentle unconscious gnaw of lip, "but they were talking about it, before. I heard Shrike, Nakota say it once or twice. I just wondered if you knew."

"Never heard of it."

Famous last words.

Still Malcolm's tools lay unused, still he kept minimal contact with me; hadn't even been oyer to watch the video—actually a moot occupation, I hadn't seen it myself in weeks and in fact it wasn't even there to be seen: Nakota presumably carrying it around with her, sleeping with it at night (but not with me); while still nominally in residence she too was unusually scarce, though she always managed to be around on the occasions when I found myself beside the Funhole, greedy for the revelations she was sure she could interpret, hungry to walk at least mentally the paths she kept insisting lay spread before us, before her, like some dark garden. Garden of evil. She read a lot of Ben Hecht. Malcolm did too, or said he did, privately I thought he never got further than the tabletalk equivalent of Cliffs notes but what did I know, maybe he was a closet scholar. Yeah, like Nakota was a closet nun.

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