Technomancer

by B. V. Larson

  Bernie ran a card through the door slider, then touched his thumb to a pad, which glowed green after a few seconds. I was impressed by the heavy security.

  The door swung open silently. The interior was black. I blinked and squinted inside.

  The two men gave me a push, propelling me into the room. The pit boss laughed, which broke into a coughing fit. He put his fist to his mouth and hacked. He sounded like a smoker in his last decade of life.

  “Any last words of advice for me, Bernie?” I asked as the door swung shut between us.

  He grinned unpleasantly. “Too late for that, funny guy.”

  The door closed, and all sound shut out with it. The walls seemed to suck up any hint of vibration, like a soft, fresh coat of snow in a forest.

  Not liking this situation at all, I pulled out my sunglasses and put them on. I felt for an opening mechanism and found it. The door was locked. I twisted the handle and felt the gears fight for a moment before going rubbery and beginning to give way.

  “Very impressive,” said a sonorous voice in the dark. It was male and authoritative.

  Startled, I turned toward the voice, taking off my sunglasses and putting them in my breast pocket. I could make out a figure in the dark room. There was about as much light as a movie theater with a black screen, but my eyes were slowly adjusting. Runners of LED lights ran under the furniture along the floor and around the ceiling, providing just enough soft illumination to see outlines once my eyes were used to it.

  “I’m Quentin Draith,” I said, trying to sound nonchalant. I peered at the seated man. It didn’t look like a monster. I decided to ask a dumb question. “Can we turn the lights on in here?”

  The man with the musical voice chuckled. “No. That would not be wise for either of us.”

  I detected a slight accent, European most likely. Maybe Russian. I blinked in the blackness, wondering where to take the conversation and why we were in the dark. Was the guy an albino or a vampire or embarrassingly deformed? Did he have the senses of a bat and a gun on me, enjoying a private joke? I decided to play along. I could see the furniture in the room now as dim outlines. I took a step forward, felt the back of a leather chair, and took a seat without asking.

  “You have what my relatives would have called pig balls, Draith,” my host said.

  “Pig balls?”

  “Have you ever been to a hog farm? Boars have very large equipment, you know. The size of cantaloupes. Did you know that, Mr. Draith?”

  “I can’t say that I did.”

  “They do, take my word for it,” he said. “They are quite impressive creatures. As are you.”

  “Thanks,” I said, never being one to turn away a compliment. “You are doing a nice job with the intimidation routine as well. But what do you find so impressive?”

  “Tony’s trick. I knew he had one, but I did not know it was the sunglasses. He stole from me several times in the past, did you know?”

  I paused. “No, I didn’t know that.” Inwardly, I cursed myself. I’d used the sunglasses right in front of him. Now he knew what object I had, and how it worked.

  “Did you come here to steal from me?”

  “No, I came to ask you what happened to Tony.”

  “Ah,” said the man. He stirred and moved in the darkness, rustling. I heard the clinking of ice in a glass.

  “May I ask your name, sir?”

  “I am Rostok, but people here call me the Ukrainian.”

  Better and better, I thought with a hint of despair. I felt myself yearning for the good old days of Italian mobsters. At least they kept the lights on.

  “Mr. Rostok, sir,” I began, “now that I’ve met you, I would ask you for information. For the good of the entire Community, can you shed light upon the recent killings?”

  A rumbling sound began. For a moment, I was alarmed, then I realized he was laughing. “Shed light, he says! Funny! Pig balls, I tell you! Is it not so, Ezzie?”

  “He’s got big ones, all right,” said a strange voice to my right.

  My head snapped toward the voice of a third party I’d been unaware of until that moment. There was something there, but I couldn’t see it. Something that didn’t sit in a chair, but was gathered into a pyramid formation. It was almost in the pose of a sitting person, but I had the feeling it was a coil of flesh on the floor. Perhaps it was a giant cobra. Whatever it was, it was not human in shape. I felt rather than saw the shadow rearrange itself. It was an abyss that sucked in light even in that dim room.

  “Allow me to introduce you, Draith,” Rostok said. “This is a very new member of the Community. This is Esmeralda. She is here for purposes I will explain shortly.”

  My mouth had gone dry. Up until that moment, I’d been maintaining my cool. But now I’d been faced with something that could not be human. Meeting it in the pitch-dark made it worse.

  I steeled myself against panic. I felt a great urge to run to the door and fling it open. Was that what they wanted? Was that the trigger that would allow the feasting to commence? I forced myself to sit back and put up a brave front. I was sure they could see in this darkness better than I could. They could probably read my shocked expression. I reshaped my features even as the thing reshuffled its odd body. When it moved, I heard a grinding sound, as if stones rubbed stones. I also felt a slight warmth as it passed nearby in the dark.

  “Nice to meet you, Esmeralda,” I said. I was surprised my voice didn’t squeak, but it didn’t.

  “I want to taste him,” said the shadow called Ezzie. “He makes me curious.”

  I compressed my lips into a tense line. Again, I thought of bolting, but I suspected it wouldn’t do any good.

  “Did I mention who sent me?” I asked, deciding it was time to do what little name-dropping I could. “Dr. Meng asked me to find out what happened to Tony Montoro.”

  I realized, of course, that Rostok could be the very person I was searching for. He certainly seemed stranger than anyone else I’d yet run into. If he was in the habit of feeding people to this thing called Ezzie, which I was sitting next to, that would explain a lot right there.

  “You see?” Rostok said to Ezzie, leaning forward in his chair. The leather creaked, and I got the impression he was a big man. “He stays right on target. He does not quake and shit himself. So many others have failed inside their minds when they first meet Ezzie.”

  I supposed I was being complimented, but I didn’t trust myself to speak right then, so I kept quiet, waiting for an answer.

  “I’m cold,” complained Ezzie.

  “I will do an unusual thing,” Rostok said, ignoring her. His outline shifted. I thought I saw him lift a thick finger into the air and point at the ceiling as he talked. “I will talk of the things you ask about. I will give you a message to take back to the others who suspect me.”

  “I’m listening,” I said.

  “I’m hungry,” said Ezzie.

  “You are annoying,” Rostok snapped. “Shut up.”

  Ezzie twisted parts of herself in the darkness and squirmed irritably. But she did shut up.

  “You have asked about Tony Montoro. I have told you that he stole from me. I can see how others who know this might believe I took revenge upon him. But I did not kill this man.”

  “Who then? And how?”

  “Do you know how to kill a thing like Ezzie?” he asked.

  “No. I don’t even know what she is.”

  “She is a person from another place that mixes with this place. She has stepped through from another of the spheres.”

  “Spheres? You mean planets?”

  “Not exactly. Imagine a dozen shapes all slowly spinning like soap bubbles. Imagine them touching one another, adhering to one another.”

  “Different worlds then?”

  “Ah—more like different existences. Occasionally, the rules in these places are different.”

  “The rules?” I asked. “You mean the rules that govern our physical world?”

  “Yes. I
n one, the sky may be metal. In another, time may run backward. That sort of thing is rare, however. I’ve never seen a place like that myself.”

  I stared at him in the dark room. “All right,” I said. “Then Ezzie is from one of these places, am I right?”

  “Yes.”

  “And where did the groom go, the man Jenna Townsend told me vanished from her hotel room. She said this hotel ate him.”

  The big Ukrainian slouched back into his chair. “She is probably right. I do not command my own hotel these days. Things come and go as they please.”

  I glanced toward Ezzie. “This is your power, isn’t it, Rostok? You can open up doors to other—existences.”

  “Yes,” he said. “But only to one place. I can do other things as well—but only here at the Lucky Seven.”

  I thought about that. He could summon monsters in this hotel. I had to wonder what he had summoned here to make himself rich and powerful. What horrible secrets these walls must hold.

  Rostok went on explaining the situation while I pondered the implications.

  “In a way, that is the power of all the objects, all the domains,” he said. “They each connect to other places where the rules are different. Your sunglasses, I believe, connect to a place where metals are soft like rubber. From them the rules of that place leak and change their surroundings.”

  “You said you’ve changed your mind about me. What else can you tell me?”

  “I’ve said too much to a person of your low status. You have no domain. You know almost nothing about us. You have no history with us, Draith.”

  “Then make me a player,” I said.

  “It is not so easy. I can’t simply declare such a thing. We are like a family of spiteful people. We fight amongst ourselves, but still we have a certain level of respect for one another. You are an outsider. A wandering rogue with a minor item—barely worthy of notice by the Community. But the killer must think you are a threat, because you have been close to many deaths.”

  “Can you give me another name, then, another suggestion?”

  Rostok muttered and shook himself. “No. But I will give you your freedom. Go.”

  “I’m cold and hungry,” said Ezzie.

  Rostok chuckled as I stood up to leave. “Stay away from my gambling machines, Draith. Or I will feed you to Ezzie. Your fat will warm her.”

  This last statement startled me. Could Ezzie be a larger version of the thing that had burned down my house? The thought was disturbing. I headed to the door and it slid open at my approach.

  I was sorely tempted, but I didn’t look back at the strange pair in the room. I was fairly certain I didn’t want to see what either one of them looked like. Not even in the half-light.

  I couldn’t leave a lead dangling, not when Rostov had left me in the dark—literally—and Jenna Townsend was a big lead. Besides, she had my gun. I left the casino and walked into the hotel that bordered it. I walked to the front desk and requested a courtesy phone. Jenna answered quickly. “Robert?”

  “No, it’s Quentin,” I said. “What are you doing?”

  “Packing,” she said. Disappointment was evident in her voice.

  “Do you want me to come up there?”

  She hesitated. “You left a gun in that bucket, you know.”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  “When I found it I freaked out.”

  “Sorry,” I said. “I’ve got some information.”

  “About my husband?”

  “Maybe.”

  She hesitated again. I was very strange—as strangers went—and it was late at night.

  “Come up,” she said finally. “Room eighteen eleven.”

  I hung up and headed for the elevators. I felt a bit shitty, as I didn’t really have a lead on her lost groom. I had only a foggy idea of what might have happened to him—something like Ezzie. I consoled myself with the idea it was all for a good cause. People were dying and vanishing. Maybe I couldn’t get Jenna’s husband back, but her tragedy and my experiences were almost certainly related. If I could figure out what was going on, maybe I could help both of us. I was sure of one thing: she was the only lead I had.

  Jenna wasn’t in her wedding dress when she opened the door, but her beauty remained. She had changed out of her white satin into blue jeans and black boots. Her jeans hugged her body in all the right places and dragged my eyes downward. I knew it was rude to ogle her—she was a bride or possibly a recent widow—but I couldn’t help myself.

  “What do you know?” she asked at the door.

  “Can I come in?”

  She hesitated, then turned around and walked back into her room. I caught the heavy door before it could shut and followed her. We both sat in hotel chairs around a hotel table and faced each other. I looked around the place, noticing it was a full suite. There was a half-sized fridge and a king-sized bed. The bed wasn’t in the shape of a heart—but the Jacuzzi was. I could just see it through the archway leading into the bathroom. It would have been worth a joke if it hadn’t been further evidence of her tragic circumstances. I looked back at her and hoped the poor bastard she had married had at least gotten to enjoy his wedding night.

  Jenna reached down and pulled up a rattling bucket of coins. She pushed them toward me, sliding them over the table.

  “I suppose you are waiting to get this back. It’s all there, you can count it.”

  “I trust you,” I said. I took the pistol out of the bucket and put it into my pocket.

  She shook her head. “Well, that makes one of us. Why did you give me that gun, anyway?”

  “I didn’t want them to have me arrested. You can’t carry a pistol into a casino, and I don’t have a permit for it, in any case.”

  Jenna eyed me warily. “Why the hell are you doing this? How did you get caught up in my life? I’m not going to give you anything—if that’s what you’re hoping for.”

  “Did you get a chance to look me up on the Internet?”

  “Yeah. The crackpot website. Stories about monsters and stuff.”

  “That’s all real,” I said. “You told me yourself that your husband vanished. Where did it happen?”

  She pointed toward the bathroom. “In there, just last night. He was wearing his tux still. We’d just gotten back from the wedding. No family. I wish now we’d flown out my mom, but we didn’t. She’s a pain—it just comes naturally to her. So we got married in private, and dressed up all the way for the pictures. I wanted to send them home and make it look real to everyone back there.”

  I thought about asking her where “back there” was, but it didn’t really matter. Besides, she was gushing now, telling me her story all at once. I didn’t want to interrupt and slow her down. I wanted to hear it all.

  Jenna stood up and headed with halting steps toward the bathroom. I followed her discreetly. It was as if she didn’t even see me. “Right here, see this scorch mark on the floor?” she asked. “That’s the spot where it touched down.”

  “Touched down?”

  “Yeah. A weird thing—a small, quiet tornado. But it wasn’t windy, really. It was as if part of the room itself was twisting—as if the colors and shapes were all bending and blending. I don’t know. It was like this spot touched some other spot in another place. Two places blurred together. The air moved and rippled like water going down a drain.”

  “OK,” I said, trying to envision it. “Did something come through, or go out?”

  “Just Robert. He was here one second, and then the room shifted around him and warped as that tornado shape began to form around him. I was sitting on the bed, adjusting my shoes. I was still in my wedding dress. We were going to make love in these rentals—you know, for a memory.”

  “Sure,” I said, thinking that Robert had been thoroughly ripped off. I wasn’t sure if he was dead or not, but he certainly hadn’t gotten the chance to bed his bride, just as I had suspected. The thought made me angry for some reason, even though I’d never met the guy.

  “He h
ad the strangest look on his face. It hurts me, just to think about it. He tried to shout something at me, I think, but the sound was muffled, as if he was already behind a door or a wall. Then he was sucked away as if that quiet tornado had inhaled him.”

  “Was anything left behind? Besides the scorch mark?”

  “Yeah. This one shoe.”

  She showed it to me. It was black, shiny. Polished with that permanent glossy surface that never seems to fade. The shoe was size eleven and would have fit my left foot, should I have been inclined to try it. I turned it this way and that, but didn’t see anything on it that indicated exposure to heat or stress. The laces weren’t twisted. The heel wasn’t melted. Nothing.

  Jenna kept talking, telling me about her panic, her tears, and the police. They’d thought she was crazy. A jilted bride with a wild, made-up story aimed at getting them to chase down her man who had obviously changed his mind and taken off on her. She claimed the hotel staff had been less dismissive. They’d looked worried, rather than embarrassed.

  “I could tell they knew something,” she said. “I could tell they had seen this before, or something like it. That’s when I changed.”

  “Changed?”

  “From crying and scared to angry.”

  I nodded. “So you went down to the casino and set out to screw them.”

  “Right.”

  I stared at her for a moment. The emotion in her face was obvious and I’d seen enough over the last day or two. I bought her story.

  “Well,” I said. “For what it’s worth, I believe you.”

  I then proceeded to tell her about my house, and the freaky thing that had burned it down. I mentioned McKesson along the way.