Apocalypse to Go

by Katharine Kerr

  The second notebook, written in sensible black ballpoint, dated from my years as a psychology major in college. As well as the usual lecture notes on the psychological system and therapy methods of Carl Jung, it held a wealth of material on the early Christian beliefs that scholars lumped together as Gnosticism. Along with alchemy and other magical beliefs, the Gnostics had fascinated Jung, who’d been far more open-minded than most medical doctors are.

  As I looked over my sketchy descriptions, they began to fascinate me as well. Although I didn’t know why, this material struck me hard as being important to the case at hand. The Collective Data Stream had prompted me to retrieve that notebook, but as usual it had omitted the reason why I needed it. That’s the trouble with having psychic talents: ambiguity is our way of life.

  “This all looks interesting,” I told Ari, “so it wasn’t a wasted trip.”

  “It’s never a wasted trip when your aunt offers us dinner.” He was hovering in the doorway into the hall. “I want to go to the gym. Come with me. Working out’s much better for you than starving yourself.”

  “Thanks to you I get plenty of exercise in bed.”

  “That’s not enough. Sex doesn’t elevate your heart rate for a long enough period of time.”

  I stared. “You mean someone measured?”

  “They must have.” Ari quirked both eyebrows. “Hadn’t thought of it that way before.”

  “Health nuts have no shame. I hate gyms! I don’t want to go today. Maybe next time.”

  “There never will be a next time at this rate.”

  “That’s the idea, yeah.”

  “Besides,” he went on, “I don’t want to leave you here alone, not after our prowler last night. We know now that someone wants a look at our flat. I don’t want you alone in it if he comes back.”

  There he had a point.

  “I wonder if he was searching for Belial,” I said. “It’s a good thing I keep him in the wall safe.”

  “That thought had occurred to me.” Ari considered for a moment. “I don’t know why our would-be intruder even wanted to get into the downstairs flat. It’s obvious that the front rooms are empty. The only thing of interest he could have seen would have been your father’s desk.”

  “Which is empty, too.” My mind twitched. “Not that our burglar would have known that.”

  I turned in my chair and glanced at a pair of innocuous-appearing cardboard cartons sitting on the floor near the TV. When my sister had given me Dad’s old desk, she’d packed up the things inside it and sent them along, too. I reminded myself that I really needed to go through the papers soon. With one last reproachful glance in my direction, Ari turned away to head for the bedroom and his workout clothes. As soon as he’d taken two steps, I felt the ASTA.

  “Uh, this is going to sound dumb,” I said, “but I have to reverse my opinion. You’d better not go. Someone’s out there waiting for you to leave.”

  Ari raised a hand to the place where he usually wore his shoulder holster. He muttered under his breath, then trotted on down the hall to fetch the gun. I ran an SM:D and felt it like a stab of ice to the heart. Dimly I could sense a car and a threat inside it—no details, however, came to me. Ari returned, armed. He sidled along the wall to reach one of the side panels of the bay window. He pushed the lace curtain back a few inches so he could peer out.

  “See anyone out there?” I said.

  “Just the usual cars. I’ve been keeping track, you see, of the neighborhood vehicles ever since we moved in. Most people try to park in the same spot. None of the cars seem out of place.” He glanced over his shoulder. “Can you locate the threat more precisely?”

  I slid open the wide drawer of my desk and brought out the pad of newsprint paper and box of crayons I keep for running Long Distance Remote Sensing attempts. I leaned back in my chair with the pad on my lap and the crayons right to hand and went into SM:D again. My hand grabbed a gray crayon, scribbled, set it down and repeated the process with blue, green, yellow ocher, more gray. I stared out into space and thought of next to nothing.

  At last my hand threw a spurt of black into the picture and told me that we were finished. I closed down the SM:D and looked at what I’d drawn.

  “He’s on Moraga,” I said, “in a black car parked in front of that blue house on the corner across the street from the Great Highway.”

  “Very good,” Ari said. “That means he can’t see our building.”

  “Not with his physical eyes.”

  Ari said a single word in Hebrew, not a nice one, judging by his tone of voice. “Very well,” he continued in English. “Let’s give him what he wants. We’re going to leave, but we’re only going to drive around the block and see if we can take his license number.”

  To throw our suspect off a little further, I drove several blocks south on 48th before doubling back. We were assuming that he’d wait to approach the building until he was sure we’d gotten far away, but apparently he valued speed over caution. As soon as we turned onto the frontage street by the Great Highway, I saw that the black car had left the scene.

  “Back we go,” Ari said.

  I spun around the corner onto Moraga and sped up to 48th in the oddly silent Saturn. It never roared at high speeds. Ari’s mystery mechanics really knew their business. I turned onto 48th but saw no sign of the black car.

  “He must have parked around back,” Ari said. “Pull up on the street.”

  I followed orders and parked in front of the neighbors to the north. Just as I killed the engine, I saw someone rushing down our front steps, a slender man wearing tan slacks, a black turtleneck sweater with the neck pulled high, and a wool watchman’s cap pulled down low on his forehead. He had black tattoos on his cheeks, but I couldn’t identify the design. Ari slithered out of the car and drew his gun as he stepped onto the sidewalk.

  “Police!” he called out. “Stop! You’re under arrest!”

  By then our would-be intruder had reached the sidewalk. For a moment he hesitated. I realized that he was holding something in his right hand. A gun? The man yelped and starting running south.

  Ari barked out the command again, “Police! Stop! Drop your weapon!” and braced the Beretta in both hands.

  I flinched in fear, but before I could slide down in my seat for shelter, the intruder threw what he was holding to the sidewalk. A metallic blue-violet sphere hit about five feet in front of him. Yellow light flared like bright fog, but I heard no explosion, saw no flames or smoke. The man raced into the fog of light and disappeared. So did the light. Ari lowered the gun and stared, merely stared openmouthed with the Beretta dangling from one hand. Ordinary gray sidewalk stretched out empty in front of him.

  I felt not the slightest trace of danger, not an ASTA, not a SAWM, not an SM:D, nada, zip, jack. I got out of the car and joined him.

  “He’s gone, all right,” I said. “Way gone.”

  “I got that impression,” Ari said. “I suppose that the object he threw has some sort of transport function.”

  “Good guess, yeah. The only other alternative I can think of is that there’s a world-walker’s gate right in the middle of the sidewalk, and somehow I doubt that.”

  “Seems unlikely, yes.”

  “The apparition had a sphere just like his.”

  “How very odd.” Ari started to holster the gun, then hesitated. “Is it safe to go round back to look for his car?”

  I ran a quick SM:L. Nothing. “Yeah,” I said. “It is.”

  He holstered the Beretta. Together we walked down the driveway and saw the black Toyota sedan parked sideways in front of our garage. It carried ordinary California license plates. Scrape marks in the paint just below the latch of the hood indicated that someone had pried it open recently. When I looked into the driver’s side window, I saw a single generic-looking key in the ignition.

  “It must be stolen,” I said.

  “Yes.” Ari took his cell phone out of an inner jacket pocket. “I’ll call the police.�
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  “What are you going to tell them?”

  “That someone’s blocking our garage. They won’t believe what just happened. I’m finding it hard to do so myself.”

  “Me, too. While you talk things over with the police, I’m going upstairs. I want to start going through those boxes of papers. I wonder if that’s what this guy is looking for.”

  “If he was, wouldn’t he have tried to take them from the Donovan house?”

  “With an eighteen-foot fence to get over and Kathleen’s pack of dogs waiting on the other side?”

  “Right.” Ari winced at his oversight. “I’ll come round with you to let you in the front. You’re sure no one’s upstairs?”

  I did a quick check. “Positive.”

  Before I went upstairs, I checked the back doors to both flats. The Chaos wards were still in place. Ari saw me safely inside, then returned to the garage to phone and file his complaint about the blocked access.

  I went into the living room and considered the cartons of papers from Dad’s old desk. I was oddly afraid to begin looking through them. I suspected that my father, my wonderful Dad, whom I’d loved so dearly, had shot two British soldiers to death when he was in the IRA. Dad might have written something that would give me a definite answer. I wondered if I wanted to know the truth.

  I sat down on the floor by the first carton and methodically took everything out of it. The box mostly contained papers, typed and handwritten both, all of them in Irish. I’d forgotten half of what I knew of that language, but from deciphering a few phrases here and there I realized that most concerned his job in the contracting business.

  On the rest he’d made notes about us kids, our progress in school, our music lessons—nothing that related to the IRA, and nothing that would interest a follower of Chaos. At the very bottom lay the certificate proclaiming my sister Maureen an honors student for her junior year of high school. I remembered how proud of her Dad had been. He’d been taken away from us a couple of weeks later.

  I saw why I’d been afraid to open those boxes. Memories flooded back, all painful, of his disappearance and its aftermath. At least I now knew why he’d gone and where he was, and that he’d never wanted to leave us.

  I heard the front door open. Even though I knew it was most likely Ari, I took no chances. I got to my feet and began to summon Qi between my hands with a slow stroking motion, round and round, wrapping the heat into a ball that I could, if necessary, turn into a weapon. Footsteps thumped on the stairs; then Ari’s voice reached me.

  “The police will be here in a bit,” he called out. “The neighbors tell me that they’ve never seen that car before.”

  “Okay,” I called back.

  I let the Qi scatter itself harmlessly into the air. Ari walked into the living room.

  “Are you all right?” he said. “Have you been weeping?”

  “Yeah.” I wiped my eyes on the sleeve of my blouse. “But I’m okay now. Just old memories.”

  He sat on the couch to watch when I pulled over the second carton and opened it. On top lay more ordinary papers. Under them, though, I found the surprise.

  Four rows of small cardboard boxes, each a different color, four boxes to a row, covered the bottom of the carton. The arrangement ranged from red in the upper left-hand corner to violet in the lower right. In between, the colors roughly followed the order of the spectrum.

  “It looks like Kathleen arranged these for some reason,” I said.

  “Frankly,” Ari said, “I’m surprised she knows how the spectrum goes.”

  I gave him a dirty look. “Kathleen’s not real bright, but she is my sister, and I don’t like to hear her dissed.”

  “Sorry.”

  Ari leaned forward on the couch. I picked out a dark green box and held it on the palm of my hand. It was about four inches square and amazingly heavy for its size. I took out the blue-violet version and found it just as heavy.

  “You know what?” I said. “These don’t have lids. Every seam’s glued down. To open it you’d have to slice along one of the edges.” I ran a fingernail down one side of the blue-violet box to demonstrate.

  “Don’t!” Ari snapped. “Just put it down slowly, back into the carton.”

  “Say what? Do you think it might explode?”

  “Why take the chance?”

  I swallowed heavily, took a deep breath, and returned the two boxes. The case of nerves made me put them in the wrong locations. Before I could correct the order, it corrected itself. The boxes never moved, but their colors changed places with a rainbow colored ripple. I yelped. Ari swore in both English and Hebrew.

  “Well, I guess Kathleen didn’t arrange them,” I said. “Come to think of it, Kathleen packed all this up, and then Jack tossed it into the SUV and drove over here with it. You guys carried the cartons upstairs and dumped them onto the floor. Nothing blew up then.”

  “True. I suppose I’m conditioned to think every unknown object might be an IED.”

  “You know what’s more likely? Remember that thing our visitor threw onto the sidewalk? That wasn’t any ordinary hunk of dynamite.”

  “Right.” Ari’s eyes drooped, and his British accent grew thicker. “Silly of me, to think they might be something I might understand. I—” He paused, listening. “Here are the police. I’ll just go down.”

  He left the room and stomped down the stairs. He banged the door behind him when he went out, too. I got up and trotted over to the window to look out: sure enough, a squad car had pulled up at the curb. I watched Ari greet the officer. They walked around the side of the building.

  I glanced at the boxes again and remembered something else. The female apparition had held up a blue-violet sphere. One of the boxes was the exact same color as that sphere. So was the sphere our would-be thief had used to escape. I took my cell phone out of my jeans pocket and punched my brother’s speed dial number.

  Instead of Michael, Sophie answered the phone. From the abundance of background noise I could tell that she was sitting in traffic, probably in my uncle’s old Chevy truck, since he let the boys borrow it on occasion.

  “Can you hear me?” I said. “It’s Nola.”

  “Oh, hi, Nola!” she said. “Mike and I are just sort of cruising around.” Her voice dimmed. “It’s your sister.”

  “Ask Mike,” I said, “if you guys can come over here to my place. I’ve got something to show him.”

  “Sure,” she said. “He’s been thinking he should call you anyway. He says it’s mental overlap.”

  “That’s the family name for it, yeah. See you in a few.”

  I clicked off and returned to contemplating the array of brightly colored boxes. In about five minutes, Ari came back upstairs.

  “That car was reported stolen,” he said. “The officer’s sent for the city tow truck to take it away. Someone will call the owner tomorrow.”

  “Why not have the poor guy just come get it now?”

  “It’s not proper procedure. He’ll have to pay the towing fees and the like.”

  “Yeah, but if he just came and got it, there’d be no towing fees.”

  Ari considered this, then shrugged. “There needs to be a procedure,” he said, “and it needs to be followed.”

  The principle of Order on the hoof, that’s my Ari. I didn’t bother arguing any further.

  I kept watch out the front window for Michael, though I heard the ancient red truck grumbling along before I saw it. I went downstairs and reached them just as he was parking across the street. Sophie hopped down from the passenger seat, a pretty blonde girl in tight jeans and an oversized blue sweater. She was wearing a pair of black orthopedic shoes, one especially made for her clubfoot, and on her normal foot, a thick-soled version to compensate for the height difference. Stylish, no, but she could walk without lurching like a drunken sailor.

  “It’s great to see you,” she said. “I hope we get a chance to, y’know, talk.”

  “Is something wrong?”

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nbsp; She glanced in Michael’s direction. “I don’t know.”

  Something between them, maybe, I thought. I arranged a sympathetic expression, and we let it go at that.

  Jingling the keys, Michael led the way across the street. I happened to glance at the apartment house that stood next to our building. The neighbors both upstairs and down were lurking at the corner windows that gave them a good view of our building’s front. I waved. None of them waved back. I was beginning to get the feeling we weren’t real popular in the neighborhood.

  “Before we go inside, bro,” I said, “I’d like you to take a look at something.” I pointed to the place on the sidewalk where the break-in artist had thrown his device. “See that little nick in the concrete?”

  “Yeah,” Michael said. “What about it—oh! Jeez.” He took a few steps toward it. “This is seriously weird. There was a gate here, but it’s gone.”

  “It was a temporary arrangement only.”

  He frowned and stretched out a hand toward the place where I’d seen the yellow light. “I can almost see something, a kind of fog, and then someone moving, but it’s blurry and faded. Y’know?”

  “Yep. That’s called a scar on the time stream. We’ll see how long it lasts. Come upstairs, and I’ll tell you more. I think it concerns something that Dad kept in his desk.”

  As soon as we walked into the living room, Michael spotted the carton that held the array of boxes. He had just started to say hello to Ari when he let his voice trail away and stared at the papers and other clutter on the floor.

  “What is that?” Mike’s voice was nearly a whisper.

  “Papers from Dad’s desk,” I said.

  “Don’t mean those.” He walked over and squatted down by the open cartoon. “What are these?”

  “I don’t know. We were hoping you’d have some ideas.”

  “Not ideas. Just a feeling.” Michael reached into the carton. “God, they’re hella beautiful.”