The Worm in Every Heart (31 page)

Making the connection, then, mildly startled by the ruthless depths of my own deviousness. And observing, to myself: Now,
that's
not nice.

But I knew I'd have to try it, anyway.

I gave Franz a detailed list of what I'd need, only to be utterly unsurprised when he immediately balked at both its length and its—fairly expensive—specificity.

“Why the hell don't you ever practice straight-up Chinese magic, anyway?” He demanded. “Needles, herbs, all that good,
cheap
stuff . . . ”

“Same reason you don't raise any Mennonite demons, I guess.”

He invited me to suck his dick. I gave an evil smile.

“Oh, Franz,” I said, gently. “How do you know I never did?”

Next step was getting all the appointment-book bullshit dealt with: Setting a time, date and place, with Jen's address making the top of my list in terms of crucial missing information. According to Franz, she'd been living in some Annex hole in the ground for most of the last five years, vampire sex shows and all—though not an actual hole, mind you, or the actual ground. But only because that kind of logistical whimsy would have been
way
too interesting a concept, for either of them.

“And what are
you
planning on bringing to the party?” He asked, grumpily. To which I replied, airily:

“ . . . I'll think of something.”

* * *

Which is how I came, a mere three hours later, to be sitting side by side with Carra in the Clarke's inaccurately-labelled Green Room—her slump-shouldered and staring at her scars against the grey-painted wall, me trying (and failing) to stop my feet from tapping impatiently on the scuffed grey linoleum floor. We were virtually alone, aside from one nurse stationed on the door, whose eyes kept straying back to the static-spitting TV in the corner as though it exercised some sort of magnetic attraction on her, and a dusty prayer-plant whose leaves seemed permanently fused together by the utter lack of natural light.

“I need a reading,” I told Carra, briskly.

Toneless: “You know I can't do that anymore, Jude.”

“I know you
don't.
”

“Same difference.”

It seemed clear she probably sensed ulterior motives beneath my visit, even though she knew herself to be always my court of last resort, when faced with any inexplicable run of synchronicity. But she didn't seem particularly interested in probing further, probably because this just happened to be one of those mornings when she wasn't much into seeing people; not live ones, anyway.

“Look,” I said, “somebody's been doing stuff, and taking my name in vain while they do it. Sleeping with Ed, even after I already kicked him to the curb. Volunteering my services to Franz, even after I already told
him
to take a hike.” I paused. “I even tried to do a spell, on that guy—the one from the movie?” As she nodded: “Well,
that
was all screwed up somehow, too. Like, just . . . weird.”

“Your magic was weird,” she repeated, evenly.

“Abnormally so.”

She looked up, brushing her bangs away. “Told you there was something about that guy,” she said, with just a sliver of her old, evilly detached, Ryerson-era grin.

I snapped my fingers. “Oh yeah,
I
remember now—you did, didn't you? Just never told me what.”

“How should I know?”

“You read minds, Carra,” I reminded her.

“Not well. Not on short notice.”

“Also bullshit.”

She turned to her hands again, examining each finger's gift-spotted quick in turn, each ragged edge of nail. Finally: “Well, anyways . . . it's not like I'm the only one who's told you that.”

“Grandmother Yau did say she saw me twice,” I agreed, slowly.

A snort. “I'm surprised she could even see you
once
.”

“Why?”

“For the same reason I can hardly see you, Jude. You're only half there. Got no shadow, remember?”

Hair back in her eyes, eyes back on her palms—scanning their creases like if she only studied them hard enough, she thought she could will herself a whole new history. Then wrinkling her forehead and sniffing, a kind of combined wince/flinch, before demanding—apropos of nothing much, far as I could tell—

“God. Can you smell that, or what?”

“What?”

“
That,
Jude.”

Ah, yes:
that.

Guess not.

Yet—oh, what WAS that stupid knocking inside my chest, that soft, intermittent scratch building steadily at the back of my throat? Like I was sickening for something; a cold, a fever . . . some brief reflection of the Carra I'd once known, poking out—here and there—from under her hovering Haldol high.

I knew I could still remember exactly what it was, though, if only I let myself. That was the worst of it. Not the innate hurt of Carra's ongoing tragedy—this doomed, hubristic sprawl from darkness to darkness, hospital to halfway house and back again. Carra's endless struggle for the right to her own independent consciousness, pitted as she was against an equally endless, desperate procession of needy phantoms, to whom possession was so much more than nine tenths of the law.

“The biggest mistake you can ever make,” she told me, once, “is to ever let them know you see them at all. Because it gets around, Jude. It really gets around.”

(Really.)

Remembering how she'd once taught me almost everything I know, calmly and carefully—everything that matters, anyway. Everything that's helped me learn everything I've learned since. How she broke all the rules of “traditional” mediumship and laid herself willingly open to anything her Talent brought her way, playing moth, then flame, then moth again. After which, one lost day—a day she's never spoken of, even to me—she somehow decided that the best idea would be for her to burn on, unchecked, ‘till she burned herself out completely.

How she'd spent almost all her time since the Ryerson Graduation Ball struggling—however inefficiently—to get her humanity “back,” even though that particular impossible dream has always formed the real root of her insanity. And how I pitied her for it—pitied her, revered her, resented her. How I held her in increasingly black, bitter contempt, anger and resentment over it, all because she'd wasted five long years trying to commit the unforgivable sin of leaving me behind.

No, I knew the whole situation a little too well to mourn over, at this point; almost as well as Carra did, in fact, and you didn't see her crying. She held her ground instead, with grace and strength, until the encroaching tide threatened to pull her under. And then she took a little Thorazine vacation, letting the Clarke's free drugs tune the constant internal whisper of her disembodied suitors' complaints down to a dull roar. Putting herself somewhere else, neatly and efficiently, so the dead could have their way with her awhile—and all on the off-chance that they might thus be satisfied enough, unlikely as it might seem, to finally leave her alone.

What I felt wasn't empathy. It was annoyance. I had had things to talk about with Carra, business to attend to. And she had made herself—quite deliberately—unreachable.

Besides which: Feeling sorry for Carra, genuinely sorry . . . well, that'd be far too normal for
me
, wouldn't it? To feel my chest squeeze hot and close over Carra's insoluble pain, just because she was my oldest Canadian acquaintance, my mentor and my muse. My best, my truest, friend.

My one. And my only.

(A memory loop of Ed's voice intervening here, thick and blurry: “Tell you what, Jude—why don't you surprise me: Name the last time you felt anything. For somebody other than yourself, I mean.”)

And when was it we had that conversation, exactly? Two hours ago? Two months?

Two years, maybe. Not that it mattered a single flying fuck.

Ai-yaaah. So inappropriate. So selfish. So, very—

“Still walking around out there, like any other ghost,” Carra continued, musingly. “Looking like you, acting . . .
sort
of like you . . . ”

—
me.

“So,” I said, slowly. “What you're telling me is—this guy I've been after, for the last couple of days—”

“
He's
your shadow.”

And: Ohhhh.

Well, that explained a
lot.

Rubbing a hand across my lips, then stroking it absently back over my hair. And thinking, all the while: Could be true; why not? I mean—who did that guy remind me of, anyway, if
not
myself? Certainly explained the attraction.

Running after myself, yearning after myself. Working
magic
on myself.

Man, I always
knew
I was a narcissist.

All the lesser parts of me: Weak where I was potent, slippery where I was direct, silent where I was vocal, acquiescent where I was anything but. Myself, reflected backwards and upside-down in a weirdly flattering Yin mirror, just like Grandmother Yau said.

Caught in a mesh of darkness.

“My ‘evil twin',” I suggested, facetiously.

She shrugged. “Kind of depends on your definition.” Then: “Christ! What
is
that smell?”

In other words: If
he's
the evil one—

—then what's that supposed to make
you
?

I shook my head yet again, flicking the idea away—such a smooth-ass move, and one that really does get easier and easier, the more diligently you practice it. Then propelled myself upwards and outwards, briskly brushing the room's dust from my clothes, like I was simultaneously scrubbing myself free of her aura's leaking, purple-brown, depression-and-defeat-inflected stain. Saying:

“Well, anyway—gotta go. Things to do, rituals to research, shopping lists to compile. Exorcisms don't come cheap, you know.”

“ . . . don't.”

“Why the hell not?”

Hesitant: “I mean, it's just. Not. Not, uh . . . ”

( . . . safe.)

Riiiiight.

‘Cause that was the big concern, these days: Staying safe, at all costs. Even when the best way to make sure
I
stayed safe, if it really concerned her so much, would be to sign herself out of this shithole—the way we all knew she could, at a moment's fucking notice—and come help out. Instead of just sitting there all smug with dead people's handwriting crawling up and down her arms like some legible rash and the air around her starting to thicken like a rind, to crackle like a badly-grounded electric fence . . .

Bitch,
I thought, before I could stop myself. And saw her flinch again, as the impact of my projected insult bruised her cortex from the inside-out; saw blood drip from one nostril, as she blinked away a film of tears.

I shut my eyes to block it all out, feeling that
ache
squirm inside me, twisting in on itself. Knotting tight. Feeling it ripple with fine, poison-packed spines, all of them spewing a froth of negativity that threatened to send my few lingering deposits of tenderness, sorrow and affection flowing away at a touch, leaving nothing behind but emptiness, and rot, and rage.

If I
let
it, that is. Which I wasn't about to.

Not when I still had even the faintest lingering chance of getting what I wanted.

“Listen,” I began, carefully. “We both know the main reason you put the Posse together in the first place was because it was the only way you could blow off steam, stop devoting all your energy to just protecting yourself . . . ”

Leave it open as sin and let the ghosts rush in at will: Babble and float, vomit ectoplasm and sprout word-bruises like hickey chains, laugh like a loon and know no one was actually going to treat you like one for doing it.

Good times, baby. Good, good times.

“But now the lid's back on all the time, because you're afraid to let it come off, under any circumstances. And the steam's still building. And pretty soon it's going to blow either way, and when it does it'll hurt somebody, which'd be okay if it was just you. Except that it probably won't be.”

Carra cast her eyes at me, warily. There was an image lurking somewhere in her downcast gaze, half-veiled by lash and post-meds pupil dilation: Past, present, maybe even future. It took all my remaining self-restraint not to tweeze it forward with a secret gesture, catch it between my own lids, and blink it large enough to scry. But that would be impolite. We were friends, after all, me and her.

And: Like that actually
means
anything, some ungrateful, traitor part of me whispered—right against the figurative drum of my mental inner ear.

“You know,” she said, finally, “if you hadn't caught me on an off-day . . . that probably would have worked.”

Adding, a moment later—

“And speaking of reading minds—you think I don't know what you're planning, by the way? An open medium, a vessel with no shields; couldn't ask for a better demon-trap, not if you ordered it from Acme Better Homes & Banishments. I walk in, Fleer jumps me, you cast him out and toss him right back through the Rift again—and what the hell, huh? Because I'm
used
to having squatters in
my
head.”

“So what—would you have agreed if I'd said it straight out?” I shot back, reasonably enough. “But c'mon, admit it: Be a fuck of a lot more interesting than just hiding in here, where you're no use to anybody.”

“I'm sick of being ‘of use'. I've been ‘of use' since I was born. And now—now
you
want to use me; Jesus, Jude. Is that what ‘friends' do to each other, these days?”

I shrugged. Well, when you put it
that
way . . .

Softly: “I'll always be your friend, Carra.”

She shook her head. “That other part of you, sure. But you . . . you've changed.”