by R. L. King
Stone glanced up from his eggs, which he’d finally noticed. “What?”
“Hang on…let me think a sec.” Jason’s mind spun again, trying to make connections that kept flitting away. “You said something about communications… Yesterday I was at a library—” He told Stone about the vagrants he’d encountered, and their strange behavior, including how one of them had known that Jason was searching for his sister.
“Interesting.” Stone’s eyebrow rose as he once again forgot about his eggs.
“That’s not all, though.” Jason’s voice grew more animated—he was sure he was on to something. “One of them didn’t talk the whole time I was there. This old guy—he just sat at the table and scribbled around on a piece of paper. I barely noticed him at the time. I thought he was crazier than the rest of them. But when I left it dawned on me that what he was scribbling was a bunch of symbols that looked like they could have gone with the ones I showed you.”
Stone’s gaze sharpened. “Did you see either of the two we have here?” he asked, pulling his own copy of the two symbols Jason had showed him out of one of the notebooks on the table.
“Definitely not the first one—I’d have noticed that right away, since I was still a little weirded out by seeing it in two different places within less than a day. Not sure about the other one. Remember, I didn’t see it for the first time until later that night, so I wasn’t looking for it.”
“Interesting…” Stone murmured, almost to himself. He dug around in the pile and came up with another notebook. “Take a look at this,” he said, opening it to a page near the middle and shoving it across the table toward Jason.
Jason looked at it, his polite interest quickly morphing into a stare of wide-eyed amazement. Across the two open notebook pages were a whole series of symbols very much like the two he was already familiar with, arrayed in neatly written rows. There looked to be between twenty and thirty of them, and the two Jason already knew about were included. Most had notes jotted below them, but Jason couldn’t make out more than a word here or there—they seemed to refer to locations, and included dates. Several, including Jason’s two, had tally marks beneath them and multiple notes.
“What—what is this?” he asked, unable to hide his astonishment. “Where did these come from?”
“I’ve been collecting them,” Stone said. “For the past few years, ever since I saw the same one twice and made the same inference you did—that they must mean something. I haven’t done anything with them other than jot them down along with where and when I saw them. I showed them to a couple of colleagues, but they had no idea what they might mean.” He took the notebook back and examined the symbols. “All I know for sure is that they’re not magical sigils—at least not in any magical system I’m familiar with, and I’m at least passingly familiar with most of them.” He pointed at Jason’s two. “These two are fairly common and widespread—I’ve seen them in several locations, over a long period of time. These, though—” He pointed at several, one after the other. “—are rarer. And a couple seem to be regional variations of each other: similar, but not quite identical.” Finally, he pointed at one near the bottom of the page. “And this one I actually noticed on the curb in front of my own house once or twice. The rain washes it away, but it occasionally turns up again.”
“So—you just drive around looking for these things? There are that many of them around?”
Stone shrugged. “I don’t look for them specifically, but I’ve gotten better at spotting them. If you know what to look for, they’re fairly common. I’ve seen them on business buildings, on residential mailboxes, grocery stores, abandoned buildings, schools—” He spread his hands. “The only thing they seem to have in common is that they have nothing in common. The one there, that you say means ‘bad place,’ I’ve seen on some pretty frightening abandoned buildings, but I also spotted it on a perfectly innocent-looking children’s daycare center in San Luis Obispo once when I spent a week down there on holiday last year.”
Jason took a slow deep breath. “So—what’s it all mean? Where do they come from? Who makes them? And what’s this got to do with Verity?”
“I don’t know. Perhaps nothing. But I like to keep my mind open. Possibilities can occur in the oddest places when you let yourself consider them.”
“Yeah, ain’t that the truth?” Jason agreed. “Hey, listen—after we go get my stuff from the motel, can we go by that library and see if they’re there? Maybe they’ve heard something. And maybe stop by the police station, on the off chance that somebody there might have gotten a line on her.”
Stone shrugged. “Sure, why not? Let’s get going.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Picking up Jason’s gear from the motel room was quick and easy. Since he was beginning to fear that nothing would ever be quick and easy again, it was nice to be pleasantly surprised.
On the way to the library, he spotted three of the strange symbols and pointed them out to Stone. “Yes, they’re quite ubiquitous around this area,” the mage said, nodding. “When I leave the Bay Area on business or for holidays, I’ve noticed they occur much less frequently outside larger cities. Though I’ve seen a couple in and near some fairly tiny towns, so who knows? It’s definitely a mystery, and I’d love to know what the hell it all means.”
By the time they reached their destination, it was close to noon. “I hope they’re here now,” Jason said. “It was later in the day when I saw them the last time. But the librarian did say they spent a lot of time here, so I guess there’s a decent chance.”
“Indeed, since apparently this is a good place,” Stone said, pointing.
The symbol was quite discreet this time, chalked at ground level off to the side of the library’s double glass front doors. Jason let his breath out slowly. He couldn’t afford to get caught up chasing mysteries if they didn’t help him find Verity, but he had to admit this one was damned compelling.
The homeless group wasn’t sitting around the same table where Jason had seen them before. He went to the front desk and smiled at the librarian in what he hoped was a friendly manner. “Morning. I was in here yesterday—remember?”
She nodded. “I do. You’re the one who wanted all those newspapers. Back for more? If you want to go back too much further, I’ll have to dig out the microfiches.”
“No, no thanks. I think I got what I was looking for with them. But you know that group of homeless people who come in here?”
“How can I forget them?” she asked, wrinkling her nose in distaste.
“Do you know when they usually come in? I need to ask them something.”
“Oh, they’re here now,” she said. “In the back. When they came in this morning I watched them mill around and point at the front window, and they seemed to get into a little disagreement. Then they all headed back toward the study room at the back of the library.” She sighed. “It’s not a very big room, and it doesn’t have any exterior windows. It’s going to take me weeks to get the smell out if they decide that’s where they want to stay. It’s odd too, because they’ve been coming in for weeks, and they always sit at that same table, or near it.”
“Thanks,” he said, and waved at Stone to follow. Stone put down the magazine he’d been leafing through, and together they headed for the rear of the library. “Wonder why they changed their spot,” Jason said.
Stone just shrugged.
The back room was a small brick enclosure with a single door. It had half-height display windows on either side of the door on the wall facing into the rest of the library. Jason could see a large table and several chairs inside; the vagrant group was seated around the table in the same configuration they had been in yesterday. All three of the lucid ones looked up almost simultaneously as the two newcomers approached; the spacey girl looked bored and troubled, and the Scribbler was still scribbling away. He’d gotten hold of a lined notepad, and several pencils of varying lengths were spread out in front of him.
Jason wasn’
t quite sure what to do, so he knocked on the door. He felt a little stupid doing it, but apparently it was the right thing to do because the leathery, middle-aged man nodded and waved them inside. “Thought you might be back,” he said, his voice as gruff and gravelly as before. The smell in here was overwhelming, but Jason did his best not to react as he stepped inside. Stone followed.
Meanwhile, the old woman with the watery eyes and the multitude of mismatched tote bags seemed to be fumbling with one of them on the floor. She made a sudden lunge as a small fast-moving something leaped from the bag, but she missed. It darted toward Jason and Stone, who were standing near the still-open door.
Jason was startled, but Stone leaned down and deftly scooped it up before it could escape. He held it up—a tiny black kitten with wide, frightened eyes. “Now, little one,” he murmured, stroking its head with two fingers. “Trust me, you don’t want to go out there.”
The kitten immediately ceased its struggling and started to purr loudly, snuggling into the crook of the mage’s arm. He smiled at the old woman. “I believe you lost this?”
“She likes you,” the woman said in a shy, shaky voice. “You can hold her for a while if you like. But—” she glanced at the window looking out over the library “—she’s not really supposed to be in here, so if—”
Stone nodded sympathetically. “Of course,” he said, opening his overcoat and allowing the kitten to burrow inside. “No one will be the wiser, I promise.”
The middle-aged man had apparently had enough of all this small talk. He fixed his squinty gaze on Jason and said, “What are you doing back here? What do you want?”
“I just wanted to ask you all a couple of questions,” Jason said.
“We ain’t seen your sister,” the man told him.
“Okay, that was the first question.” He was disappointed, but not surprised.
“Who’s that guy?” the man asked, pointing at Stone and glaring at him rather rudely.
“He’s a friend. I met him yesterday—he helped me out of some trouble.”
“He’s a magic man…” the spacey girl said in a singsong voice. “Got magic hands…”
Stone looked startled, then quirked a questioning eyebrow at Jason, who shook his head and shrugged as if to say, I didn’t tell them anything!
The middle-aged vagrant ignored them all. “So what’s the second question?” His tone was confrontational.
“I wanted to know if any of you knew a homeless woman named Susanna.”
“Nope,” the man said too quickly.
“Are you sure?” Jason asked. “I really need to find her—I think she’s with my sister. I don’t know if you heard, but she and a friend of hers were visiting a house last night and—well—some bad stuff happened.”
“They died,” the old woman quavered. “They were killed. It was in the paper today. We always read the paper, first thing.”
Jason nodded. “Yeah. They did. I think something dangerous is going on, and I want to help. I want to get my sister out of it, and if Susanna is with her then we can try to help her, too. But I need to know where they are.” On a hunch, he pulled the little paper bearing the symbol out of his pocket and put it down on the table where they could see it. “Susanna’s friend Willow gave me this last night, at the hospital. She said I should show it to Susanna if I saw her. Do you recognize it?”
That got their attention—they didn’t even try to hide it. Even the spacey girl and the Scribbler paused in their pursuits to look at it. Then, as one, all five of them looked up at Jason like they’d never seen him before. “You say Susanna’s friend gave you that?” the middle-aged man demanded.
“Yeah. Last night. We snuck into the emergency room so we could talk to her, and she told us to show it to Susanna. Why? Do you know what it means?”
Benny, the young, dark-skinned man, nodded. He glanced at the middle-aged man; when he didn’t react, he continued: “We know Susanna. We knew Willow.” Tears shone in the corners of his dark eyes.
Jason leaned over the table. “Do you know where Susanna is? Willow told us that her group was squatting at a fruit packing plant in Redwood City, but when we got there—”
“—they’d already left,” the middle-aged man said. “Yeah.”
“Do you know why they left? Did they somehow know that the DMW—the gang—were coming?”
The middle-aged man shrugged. “Maybe. Don’t know.” He glanced up at Jason, his eyes going a little glassy. “Hey, you got any weed?”
“Uh—sorry, no,” he replied, taken aback by this shift in topic.
The old woman put a hand on the middle-aged man’s arm. “It’s all right, Hector,” she said softly. “Lissy says he’s all right—you’re all right, too. Everything’s going to be fine.” Her voice took on a hypnotic cadence, like a chant. She looked up apologetically at Jason and Stone. “He has—episodes sometimes. They don’t last too long.” She smiled. “If Willow trusted you enough to give you that, she must have thought you meant Susanna no harm.”
“We don’t mean anyone any harm,” Stone said, stepping forward, his tone soothing. “We simply want to find Susanna and ask her a few questions, and with any luck find Jason’s sister before she gets herself into something she can’t handle.”
Jason nodded. “I don’t know how to ask this without sounding rude, so I hope you’ll understand I don’t mean to. But you seem to be based down here, and Susanna was up in East Palo Alto. How do you even know about each other? You don’t travel far, do you?”
“We don’t travel too much,” the old woman said. “But we can get around when we need to. All of us can.” She paused, watching the spacey girl, Lissy, as she stared out the window at the library patrons wandering around out in the main area. “Susanna—if your sister’s with her, she’s safe. I can promise you that.”
“How can you promise that?” Jason asked. “No offense, but you guys don’t look like you’d be much good in a fight, and if they run into somebody like the DMW—”
“—if they do, there might be trouble,” the old woman agreed. “That’s why it’s best not to run into them at all, isn’t that so?”
Jason turned to look at Stone, his expression exasperated. Talking to these vagrants was like having a conversation with a group of mentally unstable seven-year-olds. They couldn’t be counted on to stay on topic for more than a few minutes at a time, and when they did, half the time they didn’t make sense. “So,” he said, turning back, “Do you know where I can find her? Do you even know where I should start looking? Can you contact her and tell her I want to talk to her?”
“We might be able to do that,” Benny said. “World’s getting more dangerous. Things are going on. Not safe to be out runnin’ around, you know?”
“Yeah, I’m getting that impression,” Jason agreed.
“Magic man can find her,” Lissy singsonged. “Magic man can make the magic happen, if he knows how to do it. Show him, Frank. Help him make the magic…”
All of them, even Hector and Lissy, stared at the Scribbler. For a moment, nothing happened: he continued drawing random figures and patterns on his piece of paper. Then he tore it off the pad with a flourish, tossed it aside, glanced up at Stone, and began attacking the next sheet with feverish intensity.
Jason turned to Stone again and rolled his eyes, thinking that it might be best to just get out of here and carry on their search without assistance from the local chapter of the Lunatic Fringe. But Stone was not rolling his eyes or looking exasperated. His gaze was locked on the piece of paper in front of Frank. “Fascinating…” he murmured under his breath.
“What?” Jason whispered.
Stone didn’t answer, though. He was still watching Frank intently as he worked. Jason tried to do the same, but as far as he was concerned, the man was producing nothing more than a page full of random scribbles, even less intelligible than the symbols he’d been drawing before. Everyone watched in silence until at last he slapped the pencil down on the table with a th
unk, ripped the page off, and tossed it toward Stone without looking at him.
“What is that?” Jason asked, looking back and forth between the vagrants and Stone. “How is that supposed to—”
“Shh!” The harsh, sibilant hiss cut through Jason’s words. For a moment he didn’t realize where it had come from, and then he saw Lissy staring at the window, looking frightened.
“What’s going on?” Jason demanded, getting frustrated.
“Coming,” Lissy said. She sounded scared. “In here. Somewhere. Coming.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
“Who?” Stone was looking out the window as well—nothing looked out of the ordinary. “Who’s coming?”
“Did you see somebody? The DMW?” Jason couldn’t decide whether he should pay attention to this delusional girl or just leave now.
“Sit down,” Benny ordered, scooting to the side and motioning for Jason and Stone to take two of the empty chairs at the table. “Do it quick. And whatever you see or hear, stay quiet.”
Jason looked skeptical. “But—”
“Do as he says!” the old woman said, sounding a lot less quavery than usual, though still nervous. She was twisted around in her seat and was also looking out the window into the library. All five of them looked tense, even Frank the Scribbler. “Please. Hurry!”
Stone was oddly tense too. “Come on,” he said to Jason, nudging him toward the chairs and stashing the scribbled paper Frank had given him in one of his overcoat pockets. “Do what they say. Something’s going on here, and I want to see how it plays out.”
Jason sighed and did what he was told. He dropped down into the chair next to Hector, and Stone sat down between him and Benny. “Just be quiet and don’t look at anybody,” Benny told them, his voice tight. “If anybody asks you questions, pretend you don’t understand.”
Lissy let out a long, agonized moan and began rocking back and forth in her chair, her eyes clamped shut. “They’re coming,” the old woman said, turning back around. She pulled an old tattered magazine out of one of her tote bags and opened it to a random page.
