“If you get scared, you can come back and wait in the car,” he said.
“I’m not so fragile. I just have nightmares. I read something about soldiers having bad dreams. It doesn’t mean they are weak.”
“I didn’t mean that.”
“I know. You are trying to protect. It’s what you do.”
That wasn’t true either, but he wasn’t in any mood to have a deep conversation in the parking lot. There was work to do. They headed toward the entrance where Astrid was already waiting. She glanced at Sister but must have seen something in her face that brooked no argument, because she simply led them into the lobby.
“Hold my hands and don’t let go,” said Astrid. “They have security, but I can get past.”
Each of them took one of her outstretched hands and they passed the various checkpoints unnoticed by the staff. Astrid knew where she was going, and when they came to a locked door, Astrid simply made a Door through it. Elliot knew that the living weren’t strictly allowed to use her Doors, but the ones she made only transported them a few inches, so perhaps they didn’t count. At this point, maybe Astrid didn’t care. They took an elevator to the Intensive Care Unit on the fifth floor, and she led them down a corridor.
“I come here now and then,” she said. “Lots of people die in hospitals. But this past week, I’ve found seven old geists trapped here. Seven. In the four years I’ve been doing this job, I’ve found maybe a handful, so this is unusual.”
“Have you talked to the other psychopomps?”
“Jeff didn’t know who I was. None of them did. I never came back from the void, so I never became a psychopomp.”
“Then why are you doing this?”
“Because it’s my job. The souls need us to free them or they suffer. I talked to Jeff, explained things as best I could. They’re happy to have another on the team, even if I am a little old to be starting. But that’s not the issue. I want to you check this area and tell me if there are any time slips.”
He looked around, but it was an ordinary hospital corridor.
“What am I looking for?”
“Anything. The paint might change color, or the pattern of the tile, our clothes, anything weird.”
“Nothing,” he said.
She looked at the walls, as if daring them to change, then she took them a few doors down.
“Now, keep quiet for this part,” she said, still holding their hands. “I can do what I like and not be seen by the living, but they might actually hear you if you talk. I haven’t done this before with humans, only with another Door. But if things get bad, I can get us out.”
Elliot glanced at Sister, but her jaw was set and her posture straight. She was ready.
Astrid took them into a room where a woman in her fifties was sleeping, oxygen tubes in her nostrils and an IV tube running into the vein on the back of her hand.
“Up there,” said Astrid, jerking her head toward the upper corner of the room.
Elliot saw nothing. Then, he felt a cool puff of air and something like silver cobwebs wavered in the light. It formed into a torso, a neck, a head and a face.
Sister signed something, but with one hand clutching Astrid’s, Elliot couldn’t make it out. He knew what she meant. The back of the person’s head was embedded in the wall, as was its entire body from the waist down. Only the front part of the poor thing’s torso was exposed to the room. He couldn’t tell if it was male or female, old or young. The thing was more a representation of a human being than an actual one. The facial features were distorted, blank holes for eyes, a mouth that opened and closed as if speaking, then rounded into a circle of pain and closed. It writhed, arching its back, and the area around its waist and head crackled with electricity, white and sharp. Its mouth contorted in a scream and its eyes squeezed shut.
Astrid’s voice shook. “Can you hear it?”
“No.”
“You don’t want to. Can you sense anything in here?”
Elliot studied the room, from the patterned privacy curtain surrounding the woman’s bed to the generic artwork on the walls to the view of the city outside.
“It’s all fine. No changes.”
Astrid looked disappointed. “I was hoping there was something else. Some answer that made sense. I can’t free it. I tried everything. I can’t physically tear it out of the wall.”
“Have you called Jeff?”
“I’ll call him once you leave. Are you sure there’s nothing here?”
“Certain.”
They left, and Astrid called Jeff from the parking lot.
“I only have a minute before Jeff gets here,” she said to Elliot after hanging up. “But I thought of something. In my past, the one I remember, you were drugged by the Seelie and started seeing things. Furnishings, landmarks, paintings, things like that were changing right before your eyes. That’s how everyone knew you could sense time slips. It became useful when you were trapped in the Library too. But when you lived in that trailer on the beach, before you joined the Time Corps and before the Wild Hunt came through, you slipped sideways into a slightly different version of our world and the Time Corps came to fetch you. That idea bothered me. First, I thought the worlds were distinct. How could one world have another slightly different one attached? And second, how did you get out of that attached world without the Time Corps?”
He thought about it, and as he did, his memories solidified. It felt strange, as if they were being created just as he needed them, like a line of writing that was only a few words ahead of those he was reading.
“I remember being drugged, I remember the mural in a falafel shop changing while I was on a date with Yukiko. But I remember just being in my trailer afterward.”
She looked deep in thought, puzzling together the pieces of the world she knew, one that conflicted with his own. He knew she wasn’t crazy and neither was he.
“I just wish the Time Corps was here,” she said. “The only ones of us in this world are the ones originally from here.”
A small earthquake shook the ground, and a nearby car alarm went off.
“Just an aftershock from the one this morning,” Elliot said to Sister, who put her hand to the ground.
“No, I don’t think it is,” said Astrid. “This whole place is unstable. Void wyrms or geists or sidhe, it’s coming together here. This place, right at the border of ocean and land, where the tectonic plates touch, the whole San Andreas fault line, it’s all one great big instability. It attracts things. Always has.”
The way she said it made her seem so much older, as if she understood things now that he could not. His younger cousin was now someone strange to him.
Sister looked up at the hospital, toward the place with the trapped geist. “What was that light around the soul? It looked like lightning.”
“Yeah, it did,” said Astrid. “But it’s not. That’s the light from the place the dead souls go. That wasn’t just a soul stuck in our world. It was one half in our world and half in the next. Like it was trapped trying to push through. But instead of going from our world to the afterlife, it was coming the other way.”
Chapter 14
Felicia sat on the edge of her bathtub back at her apartment in New Orleans. The kitchen timer on the bathroom counter went off and she checked the home pregnancy test. She double-checked it, tossed it into the bathroom trash, walked into her bedroom and burst into tears.
A baby. My God, how was that even possible? She knew how, of course, but she hadn’t slept with anyone in—in how long? A long time. Certainly not in the last six months.
“Are you okay? What happened?” asked Doug, her housemate. She had forgotten to close her bedroom door.
“I don’t know. I’m just—I’m pregnant.”
It took a few moments for it to sink in, and she w
atched him move from surprise to confusion to something resembling a practiced look of neutrality.
“Are you going to keep it?” he asked tentatively.
She paused, remembering her dreams. Over the last few weeks, she had filled the notebook on her bedside table with recollections of them. People, events, even maps of places she had never been before.
“Yeah, I’m going to keep it,” she said.
He sat beside her on the bed. She knew he was trying to be helpful, but how could he? There was nothing anyone could do. She was alone in this.
“Did you, uh, tell the father yet?” he asked.
“I don’t know who he is.”
Her eyes welled with tears again, and Doug put his arm around her shoulders.
“It’s okay,” he said. “You’ll be okay.”
It was a stupid thing to say. She wasn’t going to die from a baby. She wouldn’t lose her honor or anything. This wasn’t 1950. She’d have her job and life would go on, even if her parents were disappointed in her. She’d have food, shelter, a job, daycare.
The only thing she wouldn’t have was a father for her child.
Doug handed her a tissue from her nightstand and she blew her nose.
“Do you have any ideas about him?” he said gently.
“No. I don’t remember anything. I haven’t slept with anyone in a long time.”
“Were you out? Maybe someone slipped you something and you were unconscious.” He stood and walked over and pulled down her wall calendar. “When was it?”
“Right around the first week in February if I count from my last period.”
He flipped back to that month and read her schedule. “Did you go out that week?”
“I never go out. Or, rarely. You know that.”
“Yeah, I know.”
Her few free evenings were spent sleeping or studying. Going out with friends was rare, and going to a place where a man could slip her a drug was rarer still.
“When are you due?” he asked.
She got up and flipped through the calendar. “If I count forty weeks, then … the end of October,” she said.
“You have time then. You can call some numbers. There are places that help you buy diapers and baby clothes and stuff. And won’t you be done with your residency by then?”
“Yeah, I finish in June,” she said. But the logistics of raising a child were not the worst thing on her mind.
Maybe she was going crazy. She was missing a chunk of memory and was plagued by strange dreams. A coyote who was a man and a fox who was a woman, a talking raven, the dark-haired Irish man and the young girl who was his daughter but wasn’t.
And his feet. She remembered the man’s feet, apelike and dexterous. When they lay in bed together, he would wrap that warm, strong foot around hers, like holding hands. It was the finest feeling in the world.
The windows rattled and their apartment shook. Doug got a terrified look and grabbed the desk.
“It’s okay. Just an earthquake,” Felicia said. “See, it’s already over.”
“That’s really weird. We don’t get earthquakes in New Orleans,” he said. “Maybe you brought them back from LA with you.”
Chapter 15
“I was just thinking about you,” Hazel said to Seamus.
“Nothing too terrible, I hope.”
“Oh, nothing like that. Would you like to sit inside?”
She gestured to an adjoining room where men often sat and talked with the ladies before heading upstairs. Due to the early hour, it was currently empty. He accepted her invitation and sat on a burgundy settee with carved woodwork legs. Hazel brought him a small snifter of brandy and sat beside him, arranging her skirts in a utilitarian fashion, not to display her ankle or show herself to her best advantage, but to be comfortable.
“The owner of the Delta Belle isn’t too fond of you these days,” she said.
“I won a good deal of money on his riverboat.”
“A little too much, Professor. You should be more careful.”
“I didn’t cheat.”
“You count cards.”
“Which isn’t cheating. It’s not my business that the other men can’t be troubled to learn to do the same.”
She sighed. “I’m only trying to look out for you. It would be a shame to make an enemy out of someone like that.”
“Have you been out on the Delta Belle again? Or did you learn this here?”
“I go out on the boats when I get the chance. You know I love to be moving.”
“Fast horses and fast carriages, that’s you. But a riverboat is hardly fast.”
“It’s faster than sitting here,” she glanced around the room, at the heavy curtains, the chairs and tables that were showing their age, the fading silk flowers in a vase on the mantelpiece. Her gaze lingered on a painting of a generic landscape with a horse and rider galloping over green hills.
He wanted to ask her why she didn’t leave the city, but he knew. A street child had grown into a woman of the streets and there was nothing he or anyone else could do about it. Since he had known her when she was a child, he never could bring himself to pay for her services. As the years had passed, he was glad of it. This way they could be friends.
“I had a dream about a ship,” said Hazel. “You were in the dream, but you were in your laboratory, cursing and banging around, burning some odd thing or other. And there was a monkey who talked, and cats who did as well.”
“A talking cat?”
“Isn’t that a mad notion? A striped tabby cat, sitting with you talking about your inventions. And a monkey in a vest on this old ship, the sort with a dragon head, like in books.”
“What else did you dream?”
“Ah, it was silly, the whole of it. But I thought you might be diverted.”
He knew she wasn’t telling the truth. The tightness at the corners of her mouth, the way she unconsciously stroked the outer edge of her thumb with her ring finger. There was more.
“Was there a machine?” he asked, watching her. “One that could take us places?”
She looked at him now, her rouged lips parting in surprise.
“Yes. Yes, there was. How did you know?”
“And there were glass-fronted slates, but with pictures that moved. Like daguerreotypes, come to life.”
“And metal ships in the sky,” she said, staring at that ugly painting again. “Ah, but we can’t waste time on dreams, can we, Professor? You and I must live in the real world, not in the one of fancy. Would you like to see Bernice?” she asked, slipping out of her thoughts and looking at him with weary eyes. She was doing business now, their chat was over.
Bernice was his favorite lady. Well, one of them anyway. She was an auburn-haired beauty, rounded and soft with a low, hearty laugh. And she laughed often.
“Do you have anyone darker? From Mexico or Spain, perhaps?” He watched her response, the wary, frightened look that came and passed.
“You know who she is!” he said. “The woman in all my dreams. The woman with the dark skin and topaz eyes. You dreamed of her too.”
“We don’t have any Mexicans or Spaniards here,” she said, rising. “I’m sure Bernice—”
“Forget Bernice! Don’t you find it strange that the two of us would dream of the strangest things at the same time?”
“They’re only dreams,” she said. “And dreams are nothing more than the mind amusing itself. It feeds us little bits of beauty and goodness so we don’t go mad or lose hope.”
He touched her bare shoulder, and she visibly stiffened.
“You played violin in the dream,” he said. “You used to play violin when you were a girl.”
“That was a long time ago. The instrument was broken.”
&nb
sp; “Did you dream about that too?”
She turned away, and he did not try to see her face. He knew she needed a few moments, and he gave them to her. It wasn’t that she didn’t play violin any more, it was the entirety of her existence that pained her. From the front room came the sound of voices, and someone else took up playing the piano. The person was not as fine a player as Hazel was, but few people were.
“There was a house too,” she said at last. “One here in New Orleans, in our ordinary world. A white house with blue trim, and a black woman lived there.”
“I remember,” he said, though the memory was vague.
“She lived among the white people, but not as a servant. I always thought it strange.”
“If it isn’t Seamus Connor!” cried Bernice, spying him through the doorway. She glided in, a swirl of pale green fabric and perfume, her pinked cheeks bright against her powdered white skin. “Oh, but I’ve missed you.”
He bowed over her hand, winking, and she laughed her low, pleasant laugh. From the corner of his eye, he saw Hazel step back, then slip out another door, toward the back of the brothel.
The next morning, he found his housekeeper, Mrs. Washington, in the kitchen.
“I’ll have your breakfast ready in a minute or two, Professor,” she said.
“I’m not hungry,” he said, then realized that she was already cooking and that it was rude to refuse to eat. “But I will be soon, I’m certain. I came down to ask you a question.”
“And what’s that, then?” She put the kettle on the stove and checked the fire underneath.
“Have you had strange dreams lately?”
“No stranger than usual,” she said, then grew alarmed. “Did I talk in my sleep? But how could you hear that from way off in your room?”
“No, no. I was only curious. I’ve heard of people having odd dreams.”
“Your friend Oren?”
The Time Corps Chronicles (Complete Series) Page 124
