“Helen,” I said, beginning to turn back to where I had seen the clothes. Strawberry hissed again, scrabbling frantically at the basket.
There was the sound of rushing water. I may have screamed. I certainly ran, up the dunes, inland, as fast as I could.
Bentley and Natterly followed, but they were not fast enough.
At Bentley’s yell I skidded to a halt and turned to see a huge head swing down, huge jaws thudding into the sand next to the old man. He scrambled away, heading up the beach toward me. But Bentley --
The creature’s head was flat with a jaw that unhinged. Around its head were a number of tentacles. One of these wiggling appendages had caught Bentley and had him trapped within its coils.
Even as I ran back down the beach I was thinking through my options. I have been in many rough situations while adventuring with Zinnia and as such always carry a knife on my person. Unfortunately the one I bore at the moment was small -- what Zinnia laughingly called my “evening knife” -- and would not do much damage to the creature. But I drew it anyway, reasoning that some damage was better than nothing.
I avoided the flailing tentacles and reached Bentley.
“Harris!” he yelled. “A soft spot! At the base of the arm!”
I ducked as a tentacle passed over my head, jumped to the side as one thumped the sand beside me, and headed in, trusting in Mr. Bentley’s observational skills.
My trust was not in vain. As the tentacle writhed I was able to see, at the point where the arm joined the body, a spot much lighter in color than the surrounding hide. It seemed to have more give to it, as well, perhaps to allow the tentacle its full range of motion. The spot was not large but it was large enough. I drove in my knife as far as possible and dropped to the ground. The tentacle holding Bentley released its grip and joined the others in flailing wildly in pain. Bentley ran and I followed, pausing only long enough to grab Strawberry’s basket. The lid fell off when I jostled it and Strawberry’s cries spilled out.
Instantly the dragon stopped.
Strawberry hissed and spat and, miraculously, the monster began to retreat.
“Kets,” I said grimly. “Come, gentlemen. Lord Brockton has some explaining to do.”
Zinnia was already in our rooms when we arrived. I introduced Mr. Natterly and Zinnia welcomed him graciously. She rescued Strawberry from the basket and stroked her while Bentley and I spilled out our tale.
“So, a sea dragon,” she said. “Harris, you lucky duck, how did you manage it? And Mr. Bentley, what did you think of the serpent? Was it terrible?”
“Absolutely,” said Bentley, but the gleam in his eye matched that of Zinnia in the midst of the hunt. “Terrible and beautiful. And fast! It was up out of the sea like a shot, a geyser of water falling like rain around it. It was—and I know it tried to eat me, but still—it was magnificent.”
Zinnia nodded her approval. “And what do you have to tell us, Mr. Natterly?”
He looked up from the glass of spirits Zinnia had poured for him and shrugged.
“Beast dun like kets,” he said.
“I do feel bad for the girl,” Bentley said.
I nodded. “Helen must have wandered past the ropes the other night and been caught by the beast. She wouldn’t have had the benefit of a feline companion to save her.”
Zinnia was unconvinced.
“Yes, but what about her clothes? Unless the serpent can use its tentacles to peel a woman out of her dress and leave it neatly on the shore—”
“You’re right.” Bentley frowned. “Murder, then?”
“Perhaps,” Zinnia said. “At least by neglect.”
I understood what she was getting at. James had knocked down the original stone statues.
“Mr. Natterly,” Zinnia said, “you say Lord Brockton somehow stirred up the creature when he was building the resort?”
“Oh aye, must’n done,” Natterly said. He had Strawberry on his lap—the cat was submitting to his petting, puddled over his thighs. “Knocked down the scrarecrawn, did they no? No scrarecrawn, the beast’s a-cummun.”
Zinnia was silent in thought for a moment. Then she smiled brightly, so bright I was immediately on my guard.
“Mr. Natterly, you stay here. The rest of us will go visit Lord Brockton,” she said. “We shall tell him all we know and see what he has to say.”
When we left, I made sure I had my revolver, and that it was loaded.
James was back in his office despite the late hour. He looked almost relieved when we told him about the serpent attack.
“It has been a problem,” he confessed. “I thought I had it under control, but lately it has been coming more often.”
Bentley had not yet caught on. He said “Under control? How do you control a sea dragon?”
“We kept people away—roping off the beach, encouraging them to stay away from the shore at night,” James replied.
Zinnia’s face was thunder. “And you thought that was enough?”
“It just kept coming,” he said.
“And Helen was your solution?” she demanded. “A sacrifice. You lured her down to the beach -- you seduced her, didn’t you? The poor girl thought she was heading for an assignation. Tell me, James, did you help undress her? Did you have the sea dragon eat her before or after you --”
“Enough!” James cried and threw open a desk drawer. But I was ready. I stepped up beside him smartly and had my revolver in his side before he could withdraw his own pistol.
“Hands up, please,” I said. “I would hate to have to shoot you. It would make Zinnia cross.”
A confession was not long in coming. Seeing that he was cornered, James revealed it all.
The island had been unoccupied for a long time before James (and his lawyers) pulled it from obscurity and purchased it at a good price from an obliging inheritor. The inheritor told him of the legend of the sea beast that had been passed down in his family along with the land and showed James the original stone cat statues. James hadn’t believed a word of it and hadn’t thought twice about knocking them down during construction. There had been a few accidents among the workmen, a few wild rumors that James quickly stamped on -- until the night he saw the beast himself. Then it became a struggle to keep people away, and when that didn’t work he thought to appease the beast.
“Appease it with a human,” Zinnia chided. “How dreadful. Really, James, I never would have thought it of you.”
“It was just one girl,” James said. “I have spent a fortune building this place. It would have ruined me if anyone found out.”
Zinnia advanced on James, her mouth a thin knife blade. She was a huntress by nature, her quarry whatever beast needed dealt with. Tonight, she was a fierce tabby, and James was the rat between her claws. She held him in her stare and then, when the tense moment had stretched nearly to the breaking point, Zinnia sat back and smirked.
“I will tell you what you’re going to do,” she said.
The fete went off without a hitch. It was a beautiful sunny day that ended with everyone in high spirits and two dozen cat statues lining the shore. When night fell huge bonfires illuminated the cats which stood guard on the beach. The masquerade lasted long into the night, and a few of the more senior and dependable Adoni made sure everyone returned straight to their rooms.
Zinnia and I sat on the beach and watched Mr. Natterly feed the fires.
“A Feline Fete,” I said, and shook my head. “What silly people your class are.”
“We do love a festival,” Zinnia admitted. “‘Obviously I wasn’t the only person to smuggle a cat here, and everyone was pleased to have a chance to show off their own fluffy little fellows. All day on the beach making cat statues finished up by a costume ball. It is ridiculous.”
“And it worked,” I pointed out.
“James has ordered the fete to be held every two weeks,” Zinnia said, “all summer long. That should be enough to keep the beast away.�
�
“Speaking of James…”
Zinnia patted my hand.
“Harris, darling, I can tell from your tone that you’re cross with me. What have I done now?”
“That man is a murderer,” I said, “and you’ve got him planning fancy dress! Surely you’re not going to let him get away with it?”
“Of course not! I just needed his authority as owner of the resort to get the fete in order. Once things were in motion, I sent him off to the mainland guarded by Mr. Bentley. Justice deferred is still justice served, in this case, Harris, darling.”
We stayed at Unukalhai for five more days with no further incidents. There were a few mysterious splashes during the day, and the cats that now openly promenaded the beach with their owners would occasionally stop to hiss toward the water, but on the whole it was a quiet week. Bentley sent word that James was safely behind bars, and that the running of the resort would be taken up by some nephew.
“I believe I shall write the young man a letter,” Zinnia said as we walked to dinner on our final night. “There are some things he needs to know about a few of the finer points of resort ownership.” She paused just outside the dining room. “Harris, I am sorry our retreat has been less than restful.”
She did look apologetic and a little sad, standing alone in her dazzling gown, dripping head to toe with glittering jewels. I put my hand on hers. She turned to me and smiled -- her eyes caught the sparkle of the stones and blazed.
“I think we shall come here again, Harris,” she said. “We can check up on the nephew and make sure he’s doing what needs to be done.”
“Perhaps,” I said. “And perhaps we can venture beneath the resort and find the source of the hot springs, as well. I have a theory…”
“As do I, Harris, darling.”
I followed Zinnia into the dining room and to our table where Lord Tremare beckoned us. She was perfect, charming and witty, but I knew that beneath it all Zinnia was thinking fondly of a long dragon with a flat head and a Medusa’s mane of tentacles, curled up asleep in the warm water caves below. That was Zinnia: always with one foot in two different worlds.
Conversation turned to people I did not know but whom Zinnia apparently did, Lords and Ladies and people with nicknames like Bunty and Hap. I let my mind wander.
I wondered if it ever tired Zinnia, being everything in every situation.
I wondered what it was like for these people, who knew nothing of the wonders that filled the natural world in its every nook and cranny. I wondered if they ever got bored with it.
I wondered if I would ever get bored of it.
I wondered, with suddenly sinking heart, if Zinnia would ever get bored of me.
And I wondered, as a set of sharp claws sank itself into my shin, whether we could leave that damned cat on the island. They undoubtedly needed it more than we did.
I kicked—there was a muffled squawk of a mew—Zinnia looked at me and smiled.
“She’s staying here,” she whispered, and poured me some fine champagne. My spirits rose with the bubbles in my glass.
Megan Engelhardt is a stay at home mom to four wild things. She lives just north of the Sasquatch Triangle of Ohio and writes in the margins of the day. Her work has previously been published in Asimov’s, Daily Science Fiction, and Crossed Genres, among others. She can be found at Aldi on grocery shopping day and on Twitter every day @MadMerryMeg.
KEVIN COCKLE
TIA TIME
The water glass did what glass does when it’s dropped from a sufficient height onto concrete: scatter shattered pieces, making an unpleasant noise in the process. I held Mike’s gaze as he smiled, still ankle-cuffed to his chair, still suspending his glass-gripping hand in mid air for effect. I heard my security detail come to def-con 4 across the dimly lit room behind me, but I didn’t give them the “go” signal. This was showmanship on Mike’s part, not aggression. I had decided to let this play out.
“You remember your second law of thermodynamics,” he said. I pursed my lips in silent response. “That’ll be important later.”
I don’t know if Mike Donnelly was a genius, but he’d always been different. I’d known him peripherally from our Southern-Alberta-Institute-of-Technology days; got to know and like him better at Quantico-North. He was funny then, geeky by Bureau standards, irreverent, as comfortable with literature as he was calculus. He’d gone the forensic accounting/FINTRAC route; I’d gone straight counter terrorism, but when global markets had imploded in a way that made 2008 look like an honest mistake, we’d sort of come back into one another’s orbits. Working out of Toronto, he followed the money; working out of Washington, I brought the guns. He provided the theory; I nailed down the solutions. We worked well together for two people who didn’t have a whole lot in common. I never dreamed when all this started, that one day it’d be Mike in one of our CanAm east coast dark sites, and me conducting his interview.
He looked like shit; smelled about the same. Hair a tangled, ruddy-brown mess to his shoulders; beard a random growth almost to his chest. Eyes I remembered as playful, now haunted, twitchy. Looking over his Agency psych eval, I had seen that he’d been on the bubble for acceptability, but had been selected largely on his ability to see connections, make intuitive leaps others couldn’t. He didn’t profile cleanly; the more the tests tried to pin him down, the more the edges of him seemed to blur. A risky applicant in retrospect.
I could hear sirens in the distance; the muffled hum of a large city past night-darkened windows. I knew this was Mike’s last chance to come clean in more or less civilized surroundings.
“Why don’t you start with the server farm,” I said. “Demolition seems to be a bit outside your skillset.”
“You seen the skies lately, right? Kir-royale clouds. Sun like a gob of blood.”
“Lot of forest fires out west, Mike. What’re you gonna do?”
“Forest fires,” he snorted.
“Mike…”
“You want to know why I blew up the Riemann hub, right?”
“For starters.”
“Well strap in, Jay. ‘Cause this is going to fuck you up.”
Fair enough, I thought, and hit ‘record’.
All right, so you know my team was attached to the IDA to establish chain-of-causation vis-à-vis the various derivative cascade effects that fueled the Meltdown. Standard forensics with a heavy-duty quant focus that led us to the Riemann AI network in upstate New York. You know I obtained a legal on-site warrant. You know I went in person to conduct interviews. You’ve seen my reports: so far so good.
Riemann Draco is interesting. They made money in 2008, scored again when Long Term Capital blew up in ‘98--hell--they even got attention from Reagan’s justice department by profiting too obscenely from the Savings and Loan debacle. Often fined, never convicted. They’re masters at creating order out of chaos--always at the cutting edge of financial science and legality. This was not their first rodeo: they were good and ready for us before we got there.
Reimann’s techs told a good, tight story. Their trading algorithm eco-system had evolved past their control protocols, but it was winning--exploiting the very volatility it helped to create--so they let it grow. Same as every other bank: a lack of electronic oversight, but no criminal intent, yadda yadda yadda. It was 2008 all over again, at least from their perspective. They’d give us what we needed to recommend an expensive wrist-slapping, and they’d get back to business ASAP.
So, fine. But you know how I like old-school ledger analysis, right? Bricks and mortar accounting; real assets on the ground. I found paper statements that listed a lot of miscellaneous investment in an orphan mine up in the Catskills. Converted to a wartime bunker installation in the 1940s, subsequently bought up by a series of beneficial owners who ended up becoming Riemann Draco LLC in the 80s. A lot of sunk costs for an abandoned coalmine turned war surplus. What was an investment bank doing with such a thing on the books, and why was it no
t more transparently listed in subsequent financials? I love a road trip almost as much as I love dusty old ledgers and murky half-truths. Rented a jeep, went on up there to get eyes-on.
Beautiful country, Jay, the Catskills. Pine forest, low rolling mountains, clear blue lakes. I lost myself on that drive--figured I might go back on my own time one day, do some camping. You know the hours we were pulling in those first days after Goldman went under; this was like a vacation in the middle of my investigation. Not gonna lie: I knew I was being seduced by the open road, fresh air, scenic vistas. I didn’t fight it.
So I get to the spot, and there’s a little ghost-town/tourist bureau deal that hooks you up with maps or guides, gives you historical info--so on and so forth. Pretty girl at the desk--glossy black bob like a Bay Street broker; flannel shirt and jeans like a rustic co-ed; Persian features, Californian voice. Says her name’s “Tia” and would I like a guided tour up to the mine site. No I would not, but thanks anyway, right? I got this: it’s an easy climb, and I got plenty of daylight. She did rent me a serious lantern and extra battery packs though, which I hadn’t even thought about beforehand.
When you get up there, the mouth of the mine gives you new appreciation for the word “cavernous”. It’s not normal, man. You emerge from a pretty dense tree line and look up the rocky footpath, and this great dark maw looming over you looks like something out of a horror movie. Naturally I was thrilled, but seriously, you could fit a ten storey building in that opening. Wild.
Anyway—I head up, go in, and it’s like subway construction from the 40s inside. That kind of design. Long oval hallways, whitewashed walls, descending staircases, empty rooms with open archways sans doors. It’s pretty well maintained; rationally laid out – at this point, I’m not worried about getting lost. You ever see archival photos of the old Maginot fortifications? That’s what I was reminded of.
Hear Me Roar Page 20
