A Key, An Egg, An Unfortunate Remark

by Harry Connolly

  “Ah, well,” Marley said. She was a little breathless as she reached the bottom of the ladder. “Just a moment before we move on.” She gestured toward a deadbolted door behind them, then collapsed into a chair. The dog popped its head out of the canvas bag again and Marley scritched it behind the ears. “I’m sorry to say that these coats, boots, and things are fitted for Jenny. I don’t have anything in your size.”

  Albert realized that his hands were shaking, and not from the effort of climbing down the ladder. He’d faced armed gunman before, obviously, but never alone and never unarmed. How had his aunt gotten into this mess?

  He set the computer on the table and sat across from her, making a deliberate effort to match his aunt’s composure. “No cross-dressing for me, then. Aunt Marley, what do you think is happening up there?”

  Marley removed a tablet computer from a little case, swiped the screen and read the display. “Apparently they’re burning down my house.”

  “But—“

  “It’s all right, dear. As I’m sure you’ve realized by now, Weathers isn’t a human being, poor dear. He’ll be just fine.”

  “Well, okay. Good. But... your invisibility thing... spell, I mean. Your invisibility spell would have given me plenty of time to take care of these guys. I could have taken one of their guns, or even a knife from your kitchen, and—“ Marley held up her hand. She didn’t want to hear it. “They shot at you! The spell cost what? Forty grand? Your house is worth at least a million dollars!”

  “Well above that, actually.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me? I could have saved your house and all your things. I would have been happy to do it.”

  “Happy to kill them?” Marley’s voice had become high and tight. “For a million-dollar house? Is that the price for a human life? Ten human lives?”

  Albert’s whole body grew hot with anger. He laid his good hand on the place where his right index and middle finger used to be, which was still tender even after all these months. In a tightly-controlled voice, he said: “Don’t talk to me as though I don’t know...”

  Marley sighed. Her own anger had passed—holding onto it had become difficult as she got older—and now she was merely tired. “I’m sorry, Albert. That was condescending of me; you deserve better. If there’s anyone in my life right now who understands the cost of taking a life, it’s you. Please accept my apologies, dear.”

  He took a deep breath and looked around their little concrete room. He also reminded himself why they had fled to this underground bunker. “Forget it. It’s a tough moment.”

  “True, but that’s no excuse. I will say this, though: Every life is sacred to me. I could have stopped those men myself, but one of them might have died. That’s not a risk I’m willing to take. The house can be remade, but a person can’t. My things... well, it’s only money.”

  Albert wisely held his tongue at that.

  “I need you to understand this,” Marley said. “I need you to see who you are, and who I am, too.”

  “Some things are worth fighting and dying for.”

  Marley tried another tactic. “Albert, I know I can be an insufferable know-it-all sometimes and I know I can be difficult to put up with. But you’ll just have to accept that I really do know what I’m doing, most of the time. Well, some of the time. Well, all right, often I’m just trying to do what seems best at the moment.”

  “Like everybody.”

  “Hah! That would be a nice thought if it were true, but it’s not. I’m sorry, but I simply don’t believe that everyone is trying to do what’s best in any given moment. I’ve seen too much of the world for that. Too much habit. Too much blind tradition. Too much fear of change and loss. Too little willingness to make something new. You see, it’s not just that I’ve built something in this city that works without murder or grief—that works without any violence at all. It’s that I’m building on it and expanding it, when I can.”

  “And I respect that,” Albert said tonelessly.

  “But I can’t do it alone. I can barely get by in my regular life alone. I need help, and I’d like that help to come from you, even if I make things difficult sometimes.”

  “Okay,” Albert said. “I’ll help. I want to help. But for the future, let’s skip the part where you tell me that I don’t understand the price of violence. Because I do, and I have my own ideas about when that price is worth paying.”

  “I understand,” Marley said, in a knowing way that made him feel uneasy.

  “Will Weathers be able to stop the gunmen upstairs?”

  “Oh, he won’t even try,” Marley said. “Weather’s interests are not the same as ours. He’ll observe the things that interest him and ignore the rest. The idea that he should save the house or stop the gunmen would be utterly foreign to him.”

  By this point, Albert was genuinely anxious to know just what Weathers was, if he wasn’t a human being. However, Marley didn’t seem willing to explain it, so he changed the subject. He pointed at the laptop half-closed on the table beside him. “Of all the things to save from the house, why this laptop? Nowadays, you can back up everything on it to a remote location called ‘the future.’ ”

  Marley slapped her hands onto her thighs and stood. “Let’s get somewhere safe and we can go into it in detail.”

  Albert threw the locks on the door and heaved it open, revealing a long, dimly lit passageway. “You need an underground monorail to take you from station to station.”

  “Haven’t you seen the movies? It’s the criminal masterminds who get rail transit in their hideouts. The good guys have to hoof it.”

  They went down the long passage together. The very long passage. Albert estimated that it was at least the length of a football field, but in fact he’d underestimated. Finally, after what seemed a respectful delay, he said: “When you said Weathers wasn’t...” Albert searched for the right words. “Is he a werewolf?”

  “Oh my, no. I told you he wasn’t human. Werewolves are most definitely human.”

  “Like vampires? Now I guess I understand why you were so upset about my silver bullet remark. But what is Weathers, then? I’m dying to know.”

  Marley made him regret asking the question immediately. “First I’m going to ask some questions of you: Who were those men? Why did they attack the house?”

  Albert stopped suddenly. “Well, it’s not one of your crazy parties. You said they were home invaders. Thieves.”

  “Home invaders don’t station gunman at the back of the house to shoot people who try to flee; they burst in through all the doors at once. They don’t enter the house in a team of four, all clumped together and aiming their weapons in different directions. They don’t use white phosphorus.”

  “White phosphorus!” They started walking again. “You’re describing military tactics.”

  “That’s what I thought, too. If I were forced to guess, I’d say they were professional killers hired to murder everyone in the house. What does that tell you?”

  “You’re not as popular as I thought?”

  Marley laughed. “I’m positively despised in some circles.”

  “They probably don’t want to steal something from you, since they already set the house on fire. Most likely, they just wanted to kill us all. Unless it was something they could grab quickly.”

  “I don’t think so. There’s nothing available for a quick grab in my home.”

  “And I don’t think it’s Nora and her crew,” he added, pleasing Marley greatly. Jenny—and more than a few of her other assistants—would have assumed Nelson was the lead hunter simply because he was male. It was a pleasant change of pace to have an assistant who could see things clearly. “They didn’t have the gear, the training, or the manpower. Actually, you know what they could have planned to grab? Weathers. What if someone wanted to kidnap him, since he’s not, you know, normal?”

  “Don’t say normal, dear. It makes you sound like a... well, just don’t. And there’s no need to worry about Weathers,
I promise you. He’s a demon.”

  Albert stopped short a second time. He stared at Marley with his least attractive expression: open-mouthed shock. “What?”

  “If you keep stopping, we’re never going to get to the end of this tunnel.” They started again. Peering ahead, Albert could see a door ahead. “Yes, he’s a demon, but that doesn’t mean he’s damned, or he comes from hell, or even that he’s evil. He certainly doesn’t go around tempting people to sin.”

  “Right.” Albert said, wryly. “That would be devils, not demons.”

  “Very good, Albert!” Marley’s dog barked once as though in congratulations.

  “Aunt Marley, I was joking.”

  “Sometimes a single joke can contain more truth than a whole newspaper. Anyway, he’s a being from an alternate place. Not evil or good, but utterly alien. He’s come here to learn about narrative and interrelation.”

  “Narrative? You mean, stories?”

  “He’s fascinated by the way people relate to each other and how they pare back sensory details to understand the universe. It’s tremendously interesting to him and he’s more than happy to be my servant if he can be exposed to human narrative.”

  “Like soap operas in the middle of the day.”

  “Yes. Too bad they’re being canceled. They’ve been very useful over the years. But those gunmen can’t kidnap Weathers. They might offer him a bargain, which he would only take if it didn’t conflict with his bargain with me. More likely, when they point their guns at him, he won’t be there any more.”

  Albert nodded, taking that in. “And when you told him ‘No eating’?”

  “Oh, look, here we are at the door.” Marley laid her thumb on a sensor pad. The door clicked, then slowly swung open. Albert was startled to see that it was nearly an inch thick, made of steel and swung open smoothly and quietly. The other side was faced with plasterboard.

  Marley entered the room beyond. It was a basement, small and functional but not fancy, with a thin coat of dust everywhere. She led Albert upstairs; the basement door had been nailed open.

  In the dining room, Marley yanked a white cloth off the table and directed him to set the laptop there.

  But Albert didn’t notice. He was looking around the place. There were white cloths over everything, but this was clearly a nice, middle-class house: not very large, with ordinary furniture that could be acquired from a mall furniture store.

  “To the table, please,” Marley said, with unnecessary sharpness. “I don’t want the battery to run down too much. What’s the power level?”

  Albert glanced at the upper corner. “Ninety-one percent.”

  Marley wasn’t reassured. “Plug it in, plug it in.”

  Albert uncoiled the power cord and plugged the laptop into a wall socket. Then he squinted at the screen.

  “Aunt Marley...” he paused a moment. “Is this a speech to text program?”

  “I should hope it does more than that. This computer has a spirit attached to it—I call it Scribe—and it’s writing my biography.”

  “What?”

  “Take a look.”

  Albert studied the screen, once again making that unattractive expression of open-mouthed shock. Properly chastened by the text on the screen, he closed his mouth. “It’s not just taking down what we say,” He made the hand signals for Attention, Look out, and Rally, then stopped just as things became tedious. “but what we do. And it’s kind of snotty. How?”

  “I told you,” Marley said quickly, hoping that criticism would pass unremarked. “It’s writing my biography. I summoned a spirit—and because I know you’ll ask, they’re not the same thing as demons or devils. I call it Scribe. It writes down pretty much everything I do, within certain guidelines.”

  “What about me?” Albert asked, becoming alarmed for no sensible reason at all. “I’m in here, too.”

  “You’re part of my life, dear. Don’t worry, I’ve asked Scribe not to get too deep into people’s thoughts, because that’s rude. It also has a knack for leaving out unimportant detail. That’s why I’m going to put it to rest and do a little reading while you get a couple of cans of soup from the pantry and make us a midnight snack. Beef barley, I think. It’s been too long since I ate.”

  “Well, all right.” Staring warily at an utterly inert and harmless computer, Albert retreated into the kitchen.

  Marley sat in front of the laptop. “Scribe, give me three asterisks.”

  * * *

  “Scribe, please start again.”

  Albert wisely waited until Marley had set her computer aside before putting a steaming bowl of soup in front of her. “Did you find anything?”

  “Yes,” Marley said. “And it’s very annoying.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Old Lives and High Scores

  Albert sat opposite her with his own bowl. “How so?”

  “Well, I don’t exert much control over Scribe,” Marley said, wisely. “It knows to leave out bathroom time and boring things, but otherwise it records events as it sees fit. And that’s fine. But sometimes I wish I could set a buzzer beside it so it could alert me when it has a flash of the future.”

  “It can see into the future?”

  “Yes, but only in limited ways, and only sporadically. Still, sometimes I think it’s deliberately trying to infuriate me,” she said unfairly. Marley turned the computer toward her nephew. “Look at the last three paragraphs of this chapter.”

  Albert read aloud from the screen. “As the crowd cheered the final point, Marley wandered without purpose—as she often liked to do—to the window. She saw Aloysius standing beside the sundial in her rose garden, his hand absent-mindedly stroking the surface. He must have been standing out in the chill for quite a while, thinking.

  As she watched, he seemed to come to some sort of decision and stalked off along the path toward the front of the house.

  She never saw her nephew alive again. Seriously?”

  “I wish it were a joke.”

  “Aunt Marley, wait a second: Did this computer really record the last time you saw Aloysius alive? This is from your party the other night?”

  Marley directed her aggravation away from the blameless text toward her nephew. “Albert, do try to keep up. Things are frustrating enough as it is. Think how much trouble I could have saved if I’d known about that last sentence.”

  “But if you’d saved him, the sentence wouldn’t be there, right?” Albert asked, displaying a surprising capacity for cleverness.

  “Don’t be tiresome,” Marley snapped again. “Eat your soup.”

  They ate in silence, Marley’s spoon clattering irritably against the edge of her bowl. Her cell phone rang several times, but she ignored it; she didn’t even glance at the number to see who it was. Albert scrunched himself down as small as he could manage and ate as quietly as he could, a habit he’d learned in his mother’s kitchen and thought he’d shed when he enlisted. Luckily for him, he didn’t even notice the return of those old behaviors because he was entirely focused on keeping his mind a blank so his aunt would not be able to read his thoughts on her laptop.

  He was still hungry when they’d finished, but Marley collected the bowls and dropped them into the sink with a clatter. “It’s time to get some sleep. The next police interview is going to waste several hours, so we should get an early start.”

  They went upstairs. There were no doors on the bedrooms or the bathroom, only curtains. Marley pointed toward a back bedroom where Albert found some men’s clothes, but of course they were all too small. He stripped down and lay in bed, trying to catalog all the ways his life had changed since breakfast. It had been a long Monday.

  In the master bedroom, Marley changed into a sleeping robe and opened the window to blow out the stale air, at the same time wishing she could do that with her thoughts and habits. She, too, lay in bed for a long time before she slept, but she spent the night in bitter self-recrimination, trying to figure out how she could have gotten so lazy and
distracted that she’d let Aloysius lose his life. The blame, she was sure, lay solely with her, and she did not try to find fault with anyone else. Not the victim of the crime. Not the one who’d committed it.

  They slept until ten the next morning, much later than either had planned. Albert opened cans of roast beef hash and fried them in a skillet while Marley went through her texts and, of all things, her voice mail. “Weathers is fine,” she announced.

  Then she started making outgoing calls. First, she called Frederika, her lawyer, giving explicit instructions to contact the police and arrange a time to meet with them about the home invasion and arson. Then she called to arrange a new car. Then she called two friends who’d left worried messages—leaving voice mails, of all things—letting them know she hadn’t been home when the fire started and would they please let others know? That she had to meet with the police later made an excellent excuse. After that she made a call to her financial advisor, letting him know about the fire. He immediately got to work on the insurance and her alternate living arrangements. She hung up when Albert placed a gigantic plate of hash in front of her.

  “One of the messages was from Jenny’s parents,” Marley said. “They’re in town, from China.”

  Albert set forks on the table, hoping his aunt wouldn’t make him learn to fold linen napkins into crowns. “That was fast. She was just arrested yesterday.”

  “I don’t think they’re here for that. They called because she didn’t pick them up at the airport and no one is at her apartment. They’re looking for her and worried.”

  Albert remembered Jenny’s laugh. He barely knew the girl and he liked her. “Are you going to meet with them?”

  “Oh, God,” Marley said. “We have so much to do today and we’re already getting a late start. And what can I do? Tell them to call the police? If they’re resourceful at all, they’ll have already done that in the...” She glanced at her phone. “Thirteen hours since they left that message. I’m just going to assume they’ve already helped themselves as much as I could have. And truly, how would they prefer I spend my time, holding their hands or exonerating their daughter?”