The Library at Mount Char (17 page)

“Good. You do know. The prey doesn't move because it feels no pain. The lion touches it in a certain way, and unbinds it from the plane of anguish. This is part of the craft of hunters. When the kill is this way, the lions say…” She nodded at the naked man.

He rumbled again, eerily lionlike.

“Your woman died in this way, if it matters to you. She didn't suffer at all.”

Marcus thought of the gazelle, staring into the camera, thought of the light receding from Aliane's green eyes.

“But there is another way of killing. This is done when the lion hunts out of hate, rather than hunger. For such times the big cats have a touch that
enhances
suffering rather than relieves it. Under this touch the prey's spirit is bound to the plane of anguish. The pain is like drowning. Often the damage to their spirit is such that there is not enough left of them to return to the forgotten lands. Those killed in this way are ruined forever. It is as if they were never born.” Her eyes crinkled. “I saw this done once. It was a terrible thing.” She touched his arm with real sympathy. “The lion wishes me to inform you that this is how you will die.”

Marcus's eyes flicked back and forth among the three of them, looking for some sign that this was a joke. The woman's face was grave. The guy in the tutu watched him avidly, his eyes cruel and alive. Marcus wasn't sure what was worse.

“So…you're just going to
feed
me to that thing?”

“We are, yes.”

“Why?” Marcus whispered. “Why would you do something like that?”

“Because that is what the hunter wants,” she said. “We came to an arrangement, you see. This is his price.”

The big man in the tutu smiled at him. Moonlight glinted off the blade of his spear.

“If we free his daughter and give him the time to kill you as he wishes, he will help us. He will protect our agent as if he were his own cub.” She shrugged, stood. “What he asks isn't so much. It is fair, even.”

“
Fair?
…I…”

“You what?” She looked down, her face mostly in shadow. The compassion he had seen before was gone. “You invaded the lion's home. You murdered his mate, the mother of his cub. You kidnapped him and his daughter here and cast them down in a pit. Is that about right?”

“Yeah, but…I mean…”

“And why did you do this? To what purpose? You were going to steal their lives so they could growl and roar for the amusement of your whores?”

“Sort of…I guess. But I mean, you saw
Scarface
, right? It was—”

“Stop talking.” She spoke to the naked man in a language he did not understand. He said something back to her, then made a sound amazingly like a lion's roar. “Please excuse me,” she said. “I'd rather not watch.”

“Hang on!” Marcus said. “I got a
lot
of money! We could—”

She and the naked man faded back into the stairwell and started down to the Husbandry Room. They shut the door behind them. The big man in the tutu smiled down at him. “Hey, man,” Marcus said. “Help me out, here. You want to get into show business? I could—”

The big man smiled wider. He pointed over Marcus's shoulder, back into the woods.

Not wanting to, Marcus turned to look. Dresden and his daughter stood just behind him, closer than he would have thought possible. Somewhere out in the impossible distances of the night he heard the Bronx chick saying “Oh. My. Gawd.”

Down in the pit, safe and comfortable, the chicken squawked.

S
teve woke up in 1987, more or less.

It was a teenager's bedroom. He was pretty sure about that part. The walls were covered with posters of singers—Wham!, the B-52's, Boy George, others—that he vaguely remembered from high school. A rack of cassette tapes hung across from the bed and, next to it, a collage of Polaroids. Teenage boys in acid-wash jeans and parachute pants mugged for the camera—fake-singing, flexing their muscles, that sort of thing. In one of the Polaroids two boys were kissing.

Steve blinked.
Where the hell am I?
He remembered being in the jail chapel, remembered the stinky dude in the tutu killing Dorn and the guard. Thinking of the tutu and the two guys kissing in the Polaroid, a horrible thought bubbled up:
Maybe Tutu Guy kidnapped me as some sort of sex slave? Like that guy in
Pulp Fiction
?

But that was too terrible to contemplate.
Think, think
. He remembered getting slugged in the chapel. A few seconds later he was moving down the tile corridor, slung over the guy's shoulder, watching guts and severed limbs roll by like he was on the Horrible Shit ride at a high-end amusement park.

Someone's arm had been lying on the floor—just the arm, nothing else. It looked surprisingly un-gross—not much blood, and muscles like a medical drawing. A few paces farther down most of another guard came into view. He was an older dude, fiftyish, cut neatly in half just
above the belly button.
What did that?
Steve remembered wondering.
Giant scissors?
The half of his face that Steve could see was bloodless and unmarked, eyes open. Steve remembered recognizing him, remembered squirming, and…

And then I woke up here
.

The alarm clock on the nightstand pretty much had to be from 1987 as well.
No one makes stuff out of wood-grain plastic anymore, right?
The clock didn't work, though. Someone had stomped a crater in it, then drawn a circle around it in what looked like corn flour.

Steve blinked at this for a few seconds, trying to imagine a remotely plausible reason why someone might do such a thing.

Steve sat up and peeped out through the venetian blinds at the foot of the bed, wincing at the metal rattle they made. His head hurt. The sun was either just coming up or about to go down. At first he wasn't sure which, but then a couple of houses down some guy came home from work and got the mail. Kids were playing ball in the dude's backyard.
Not dawn, then. I slept through the day
.

Questions answered, Steve let the blinds fall closed. If he had known that this sunset would be the last he would ever see, he probably would have taken a couple of seconds to savor it.

He still had on the jail coveralls. That was sort of a relief, in light of his fears about becoming a butt slave, but still not ideal. The closet turned out to be full of things like parachute pants and acid-wash jeans. After a brief rummage he put on some black sweatpants—tightish, but serviceable—and a gray concert T-shirt. The logo of the band Heart was stenciled across the chest in bright-orange letters, glowing like a coal.

He followed the sound of voices out into the hall. Out there it was warmer than in the bedroom. It smelled good, like freshly baked something-or-other—bread, maybe, or sweet rolls? His stomach rumbled.

But under that was a bad smell, something he didn't quite recognize. There was a metallic sound as well.
Clink. Scratch. Click
. It was vaguely familiar.
Clink. Scratch. Click
.

Steve peeped around the corner into the living room. The big guy in the tutu was asleep on the floor in front of the TV. The sound was off, but Nazi artillery rumbled across North Africa on the History Channel.
Steve wondered at this for a minute.
TV? He doesn't speak English, does he?
On-screen Rommel held binoculars to his face.
I bet he
does
like tanks, though
. Next to the tutu guy a halfway demolished pile of brownies rested on a white plate. Brown crumbs stuck to the dried blood in his mustache and on his chest. His bronze sword thingy with the chain lay at his fingertips.

Half a dozen other people, some almost as weird, sat here and there in the living room as well. They glanced at Steve without much interest as he walked in.

Next to the couch stood a man in brown business slacks, cut off ragged at the knees, one pant leg a couple of inches higher than the other. His bare chest was tattooed with dozens of triangles, the smaller ones inscribed in the larger, down to a black dot at the midpoint of his breastbone.

Seeing Steve, he put his hand on the shoulder of a woman sitting on the couch. She had dirty-blond hair, hacked short and carelessly. She wore what looked like the top half of a black one-piece bathing suit, cut into a sort of sports bra. She put her hand over the man's, laced her fingers in his.

Clink. Scratch. Click
. In the darkest corner of the room a woman sat on the floor, knees huddled up to her chin. Skeletal arms poked out from the remains of an apocalyptically filthy gray dress. Half a dozen flies buzzed around her head. As Steve watched, she flipped open a Zippo.
Clink
. Lit it.
Scratch
. Closed it up again.
Click
.

Her eyes never wavered from the place of the flame. Unsettled now, Steve jerked when a new person entered the room. He recognized the Christmas sweater and bicycle shorts immediately.

“You.”
Small knuckle pops as his hands clenched into fists.

Carolyn held her finger to her lips. “Shh.” She pointed at the bloody man in the tutu sleeping on the floor between the knife and the brownies. She jerked her thumb back over her shoulder toward the kitchen.

Steve opened his mouth to yell at her, then, with a glance at the napping murderer, nodded instead. He tiptoed around the couch as quietly as he was able. The couple stood up and followed in his wake. The woman with the lighter went
clink, scratch, click
.

There was another person in the kitchen, an older woman, kneading
dough. To Steve's mild surprise she was dressed normally; floor-length fleece housecoat, a bit faded but clean, and slippers.

“Hello, there!” She spoke in a half-whisper. “I'm Eunice McGillicutty. Would you like a cinnamon roll? They're just out of the oven.”

“Steve Hodgson. Uh, pleased to meet you.” Somewhat to his surprise, he realized this was true. Unlike the others, she didn't seem like the sort of person who might keep a guy chained up in her basement. He briefly considered thanking her for this, but gave up when he couldn't think of a delicate way to phrase it. “Sure. A cinnamon roll would be great.”

The old lady smiled, pleased. She pointed at a baking dish. “Coffee over there,” she said. Steve grabbed a mug off a wooden peg and helped himself to a cup.

“Hello, Steve,” Carolyn said, her voice not quite a whisper.

“Hi!” he said, a little too brightly.

“That's Mrs. McGillicutty. She speaks English.”

“Yes. Yes, she certainly does.”

Carolyn jerked her thumb at the couple behind her. “These are Peter and Alicia. They don't speak English. Not much, anyway.”

“What about the big guy out in the living room?”

“That's David. His English is pretty bad as well.”

“And the other one? The one who keeps playing with the lighter?”

“That's Margaret.”

“No English?”

“Hardly any anything. She almost never talks.”

“Can I ask you something?”

“Sure.”

“Can you think of any reason I shouldn't grab one of those kitchen knives and stab you in the fucking neck?”

Carolyn pursed her lips, considering. “You might get blood on the cinnamon rolls.”

“I'm only partly kidding.”

“OK,” she said. “Fair enough. I can see why you might be a little upset.”

His rage flared. Steve glanced at the knives, almost not kidding anymore. “
A little upset?
” he hissed. “You framed me for murder! Of a
fucking cop! They're talking about the
death penalty
, Carolyn! Lethal. Fucking. Injection.
Life
in
prison
! If I'm
lucky
!

“Try to keep it down,” Carolyn said. “You don't want to wake up David.”

No
, Steve thought, thinking of the swinging intestine that dangled from the ceiling outside the jail chapel,
I probably don't
. “OK,” he said in a fierce whisper. “Fair enough. Why don't you quietly explain why you'd do such a thing to me? What did I ever do to piss you off?”

Carolyn winced a little. “Nothing,” she said. “I'm not angry at you. That's absolutely the last thing that I am.” She hesitated. “For what it's worth, there are some sound reasons for all this. I can't go into details, but I really am sorry. I can see where it might be a bit…upsetting.”

“Upsetting,” Steve marveled, unable to believe that he had heard right. “Well, that is one way of putting it. Another way of putting it would be that you permanently and completely ruined my life. That's the version that I sort of prefer.”

Carolyn rolled her eyes. “Don't be so melodramatic. You're not in jail anymore, are you?” She pointed at the tray. “Have another cinnamon roll. They're good.”

Mrs. McGillicutty looked over her shoulder. “Help yourself, dear.”

Steve felt like his heart was boiling. “Melodramatic?” His hand drifted, unbidden, toward the block of kitchen knives.
“Melodramatic?”

“Calm down,” Carolyn said. “It's not as bad as all that.”

“What do you mean it's not—”

“Quiet, Steve. Shut up for a second and I'll explain. I have a plan. If you'll do a small service for me, I can make every single one of these problems you've mentioned go away.”

“Oh?”

“Yup.” Carolyn rummaged around in the refrigerator and came out with a plastic bottle of orange juice. She twirled off the top and lifted it to her mouth.

“Glasses are over there, dear,” Mrs. McGillicutty said pointedly.

“Sorry.” Carolyn got a glass.

Steve considered. “You can make a murder charge go away? A
death penalty
case?”

Carolyn poured some orange juice and took a swig. “Yup.”

“And how, pray tell, might you be planning to do that?”

“Grab me one of those cinnamon rolls and pull up a chair. I'll show you.”

C
arolyn stood up and disappeared into the nether reaches of the house. While she was away, Steve went to the refrigerator looking for a Coke. All they had in the main compartment was diet, but he spotted something approximately the same shade of red as a Coke can in the vegetable crisper.

Carolyn padded up behind him a moment later. “Steve, this is—”

“Hold up a second,” he said, staring into the crisper. “Is this a heart?”
It's definitely not a Coke
.

Carolyn didn't answer immediately. “Beg pardon?”

“In this bag here. In the fridge. Is this a heart? Like, a person's heart? It looks like a person's heart in your refrigerator, Carolyn.”

“Um…no. I mean, yes, it's a heart. But not a person's. It's from a cow. A bull. David was going to make an hors d'oeuvre for a guest, but he had to cancel.”

“Yeah, um, no.” Steve turned. “That's nowhere near big enough to be a bull's—whoa.”

Next to Carolyn stood a blond woman who Steve hadn't seen before. Three children, silent and pale, clung to the woman's waist. One of the kids, a little boy, had huge purple bruises all around his neck. The girl next to him had a deep dent in her forehead.

Steve knelt down in front of the children. “You guys OK? Are you, like…hurt?” He reached out to touch the crater in the girl's skull. She cringed back.

“They only speak to their mother,” Carolyn said. “Steve, this is Rachel.”

“Well, that's fucking weird. What the hell happened to the girl's head?”

“It was, um, an accident. She fell. Off her bike.” Then, hissing, “Don't
say
anything, Steve. You'll embarrass her.”

“And the boy?”

“Football,” Carolyn said, deadpan. The boy peeped out from behind his mother's waist and gave a small nod.

“Hmm.” Then, pointing at Rachel, “What about her? No English?”

“No English,” Carolyn confirmed. She and Rachel spoke for a moment in a vaguely singsongy language that sounded like the illegitimate child of Vietnamese and a catfight.

“What's she doing here, then?”

“Rachel is good with secrets,” Carolyn said. She lifted Mrs. McGillicutty's telephone receiver and set it down on the kitchen table. “You still want me to fix your legal troubles, right?”

Steve looked at the heart in the vegetable crisper, opened his mouth, then shut it with a click of his teeth. He shut the refrigerator door. “Yes, please.”

“Then make it be loud,” Carolyn said, pointing at the phone.

“What?”

“So everyone can hear.”

“Oh. Yeah, sure.” He studied the receiver for a minute, then punched the Speaker Phone button.

“Now make it be the directory.”

“What?”

“Where you tell them the name, and they give you the number.”

Steve dialed three digits.

“What city?” said a mechanical voice.

“Washington, DC,” Carolyn said.

“What listing?”

“White House switchboard.”

Steve raised an eyebrow.

The machine reeled off the numbers. When it asked if she wanted to be connected for an additional charge of fifty cents, Carolyn said yes. The operator picked up on the third ring.

“My name is Carolyn,” she said. “I'd like to be connected with the president.”