by Tom Doyle
The general’s use of the present tense chilled Endicott.
But then the general repeated his skewed version of craft history. “Left-Hand elements were active during the Civil War. We have evidence from our Latter-day friends that survivors of the Morton Left Hand, including a common-law couple, moved west, where they could be as violently perverse as their natures desired. With the First World War, they had room to hide in our ranks again. And Captain Morton’s own father demonstrated a strong reversion to type.”
Endicott had always doubted much of this, particularly regarding Morton’s father, but before Endicott could raise old questions, the general asked, “Where is Colonel Hutchinson?”
“I have the Gideons looking,” said Endicott. “When Morton asked for her, he said we were hiding her.”
The general smiled. “I suspect he knows more than we do. Either he’s recruited her, and she’s gone underground, or she said no, and he disposed of her.”
Despite his anxiety for Hutch, Endicott kept his gaze steady. “Sir, couldn’t the colonel and the captain both be victims of the Left Hand? Maybe they need our help.”
“No,” said the general, again with his new certitude. “Chimera has seen this. This is the year, and the Mortons are the threat.”
“But Sphinx…”
“Is part of the problem,” said the general. “Morton is right about that much. Fortunately, Chimera doesn’t have her biases. Anything else, Major?”
“No, sir.” Endicott had ventured as much of his doubt as appropriate.
The general tapped Endicott’s desk twice in thought. As if in response, there was another knock at Endicott’s door. “Enter,” said the general, as if he were in his own office.
One of the white-coated, quasi mundanes from OTM came in and handed the general a message. OTM technicians always seemed to be buzzing about the general and his office. They were an unremarkable bunch amidst the colorful craft-types, and Endicott only noted this tech because of the intrusion into his space. The tech would have been considered old for his job in the private sector, but maturity was an advantage where absolute discretion was important.
While the general read the message, the technician looked past Endicott at Abram’s portrait. Endicott couldn’t read the tech’s emotion, but he didn’t seem appropriately respectful.
“Please have Chimera tighten control,” said the general to the tech, who thankfully stopped staring at the portrait and departed. The general folded the note and looked at Endicott. “The Left Hand are skilled at hiding whenever the other Families come after them. Morton may even try to flee overseas. We can’t let him out of our sight. My orders remain the same: he’s not to leave Rhode Island. Use any necessary force.”
* * *
I drove to see Roman, who was once again slouched outside the office entrance. “Dobrý den, pardner. I’ve been expecting you.”
“Why’s that?” I asked.
“You get a gun for a beautiful woman. I think, you’ll both have to leave town soon.”
“You’re a wise man,” I said. “I need two departure packages for Mexico.” My retirement vacation party was next weekend. In my original plan, I would have obtained a similar package to support my threat of postparty flight in order to draw out my enemies. Now, I needed to provide for a very real getaway for Scherie and, if our major opponents didn’t show, myself.
“No problemo, pardner,” said Roman. “For you, ten percent discount.”
“Spasiba,” I said. “But I’ll need a car too.”
The smile fled Roman’s face. “What is wrong with the Thunderbird?”
“Nothing,” I said, “other than everyone knows it’s my car. And I need something a little more recent and resilient.”
“Hmmm. This I do not like. Come inside. I show you horses.”
At his desk, Roman displayed computer thumbnails of a stable of laundered cars. “You want something American, yes?”
“Yes,” I said.
“This Corvette?”
“No, this Chevy Malibu.”
Roman sighed. “Very boring.”
I said, “I want the car fueled and parked along the side street near the family mausoleum by next weekend. Leave the keys in a case above the driver’s side front tire. I’ll be sending you some weapons, but any other special forces equipment you can obtain will be appreciated. And I’ll need plenty of ammo.”
“You’re planning a long trip?” asked Roman.
“Very long.” That could be too true.
“I’ll have the car moved in stages.” Roman stared out the dirty window. “You know, friend, someone maybe is watching. Watching now.”
“Everybody is watching. As long as they don’t know the exact details, I’ll be fine.”
“No one knows details. I handle myself, very quiet. But maybe I take a vacation too, yes?”
“You’re a very wise man,” I said. “Just a few days might be good for your health. Go someplace nice. I’ll pay. In advance.”
Roman nodded. “I see. Then we say good-bye.” We embraced like Slavs. “Vaya con Dios.”
“That’s not Russian.”
“No, it’s cowboy,” said Roman. “And it’s what I mean.”
* * *
When I returned to the House, I went to the kitchen. Despite some new appliances, it still had the antique dumbwaiters and cramped sense of space of my grandfather’s day. I poured myself a finger of bourbon. “To absent friends.” I raised my glass. “How about it, Hutch? You want vengeance, I’m going to need some help.”
Nothing. Not that I would expect Hutch around the House after she had warned me, as she wasn’t a Morton. I would have to be more forceful. “Colonel Hutchinson, I’m calling you.” I reached out my hand as if through a curtain …
“Shit!” I drew my hand back. Burning, but not heat. Cold. “Hutch?” But no reply. I’d touched the void, the spirit equivalent of hard vacuum. “Oh shit, Hutch, have they gotten you there too?”
Warming my throbbing hand under my armpit, I took my bourbon down into the basement. Could anyone help me? I knew the other family names from Morton lore, but not where they lived now. The code names I had worked with gave no clue to the family identity. They were as goofy as my “Casper” and equally impersonal, once you knew craft was involved. Oz and his witchy friends were popular, as were wizards from Tolkien, Rowling, Bakshi, and King. Stupid—did mafiosi take their nicknames from The Godfather? Second thought, maybe they did.
As for the Morton craft bloodline, I might be the last living representative of that legendary lineage. But even if Dad couldn’t come and Grandpa wouldn’t help, I had the other Morton dead. I had the House.
With the House’s help, my party could work as a distraction. All the craft noise of the House and my many guests would make it difficult for Gideons and others to track our exit, if I used the right route.
I stood on an iron plate attached to a long rod that passed through each floor, up to my grandfather’s room, down through the subbasement and below, to ground itself deep into this earth. Here, I could tap into the power of the Morton House and ancestors. I pressed my hand up against an oak beam, and felt the thrum that was nearly, but not quite, in sync with my own pulse. It was the layered telltale of my family’s magic, the time-spanning vibration that was a heart, a steamboat, a train, a car, a plane, a rocket.
“Help me, House,” I said.
We can help. The voices iced me. They were not the warm collective voice of the orthodox Morton dead that was the House. They were the dungeon voices of those who had attempted to freeze time, whose attempt to snatch immortality had led only to living death. The most powerful ancestors in this House were not my friends. To help me, the Left Hand would require payment. Payment in blood.
We can help, they cooed again. Come to the subbasement. And bring your friend.
* * *
The next day, when Scherie arrived for another training session, I was ready. I had tucked a sheathed knife in my belt an
d readied a bit of persuasion craft. Right-Hand Mortons weren’t good at compulsion, but we could give people a sense that life’s wind was blowing a certain direction.
“If you’re serious about training,” I said, “we need to go to Mexico. There’s a camp that will give you special ops training. The price is right, and I trust the operators.”
“I can’t afford that right now.”
“That won’t be a problem.”
I showed her the training camp’s papers. Yes, it really existed, and I had prepaid for Scherie’s boot session in case I didn’t make it. Still, crossing the border to a secret place full of armed men might intimidate even her a little. “You can check this out with your father. The thing is, we’ll need to split up and get away without this surveillance following us. What we’re doing is extralegal.”
“They’re not watching me.”
“Don’t count on that. Since I met you, they’ve increased their surveillance. So consider this an entrance examination.”
She nodded at this appeal to her competitive streak, so I continued. “We’ll leave during the party. It’ll be the best time; I can set up all sorts of distractions. Unless I decide it’s safe to go together, you’ll leave first, and I’ll follow. Work out your own route, but don’t tell it to me. We’ll meet in Guadalajara at the Café Madoka a week after the party. If I’m not there, go on to the camp without me—it means I’ve been, um, unavoidably detained.” More likely I was unavoidably dead. But I thought, Believe.
“Why are they so interested in you? Is it about one of your missions?” asked Scherie. “The one that made you scream in Farsi?”
“Some people I used to work with have gone bad. Best just to avoid them. Here are the other things you’ll need.” I handed her a fake passport, some pesos, and a Luxembourg bank account number (which, if I didn’t make it, would give her enough money for an ordinary life), all mundanely arranged for me by Roman.
“You were just a captain,” said Scherie, “but you’re able to arrange this kind of travel?”
“My family has a history of being prepared to move.” True since the time Thomas Morton had fled to Maine, but not an answer, so I accompanied my words with a silent, craft-laden mantra for her not to question, just to accept and get ready.
She nodded slowly, all acceptance again. Then, one hand clenching into a fist, she frowned. Her brow furrowed, and she turned her face as if looking at the wall for a memory, like she had forgotten something at the supermarket.
“Scherie?”
“I know this may sound crazy.” She turned to face me, to look me directly in the eye. “But all these plots and secrets, they’re just the tip of the iceberg, aren’t they?” She waved the passport and pesos at my face. “Here I am, about to do something absolutely crazy because you say it’ll be OK. So what I want to know is, are you and your family something special? Do you have some kind of mental power?”
“Like magic?” I smiled. I would do what every Morton did to protect himself and those he cared about. I kept my breathing regular, my face relaxed, my pulse normal—the biofeedback of the lie. “There’s nothing magic about me. Must be you.”
I delivered the line perfectly, without any tell that a mundane would recognize.
“Sorry,” she said. “I’m just new at all this.” Yet, even as Scherie apologized, I sensed that she was less scared for me, and a little scared of me. Lies, like magic, always cost something. “So how do I get out during the party?”
I said, “I have a story to tell you.”
* * *
“You wondered about my family. My first American ancestor was Thomas Morton. He came to Massachusetts right after the Pilgrims. He and the Puritans didn’t get along. He fled to Maine. He had children. One of them, Jonathan, came to Providence to build this place.”
I could have easily gone on with a full family history, craft and all. But what she knew might still matter. So I told her the craft-free version—a difficult lie, because the Mortons lived in craft. The secret and true history of the rise and fall of the Left Hand went like this:
The eldest of Jonathan’s sons left the House of Morton to commence the orthodox family line’s tradition of military service. The Morton estate in Providence came into the hands of the second eldest son and his descendants, and fell on strange times. This Left-Hand branch of the Mortons inbred for craft with their cousins, but craft didn’t work like Mendel’s peas, so their descendants were no more magical than their free-range relations. Instead, they became a sad bunch of neurasthenic recessives and outright psychotics.
Not inbreeding, but the incestuous combination of energies for a bloody purpose made the Left Hand powerful. They fought mortality, and lost horribly. They searched for transdimensional monsters, but only made monsters of themselves. They conducted experiments that fed on flesh and blood. Travelers disappeared; the neighbors grew suspicious, then hostile.
The Left-Hand Mortons reified their justified paranoia in the very bones of the House. They built sturdy new walls to deflect sudden attacks by angry citizens. In Reformation style, they built “priest” holes that a craftsman could hide in for days. They also built the underground rooms of the subbasement to hide and contain their more extreme experiments.
Finally, as the Civil War drew within farsight, the orthodox Mortons determined to put their House and cousins in order. The family patriarch, Ezekiel, paid a call on the twins Roderick and Madeline, last leaders of the Left Hand. Ezekiel would make no moral arguments; rather, he would urge them to return to the hidden productive life of craft service to Family and country, lest the government break its covenant and hunt all the Mortons down.
Neither Ezekiel the man nor his spirit was ever heard from again.
That began the war against the Left Hand. Ezekiel’s grandson, the young Joshua, took the family mantle and called upon the other Families to aid him in putting down his twisted cousins. The Left Hand executed a preemptive strike of terror against their likely enemies, killing and disabling many. The Families united in wrath. Some hunted the Left-Hand rogues across the country. Most laid a quiet siege to the House, camping in revival-style tents on the grounds.
Fortunately, it was a siege of the House and not against it. The House revolted from the Left Hand’s control and let in the orthodox Mortons and the other Families. They found Roderick lying in a deep craft-enhanced trance far beneath the House in the subbasement. His half-alive body oozed with strange decay, and he could not be roused from his sepulchral bed. With no gentler feeling than disgust, Joshua and his ally Abram Endicott hacked Roderick to pieces.
They searched for Madeline, Roderick’s partner in love and madness. In the family crypt, they found her. Her lost fingernails and battered hands indicated that she had struggled to escape her coffin. In some inexplicable “experiment,” Roderick had buried his sister alive.
Concerned that the Left Hand might have some further design, Joshua commanded the House to contain their spirits.
Secret exits had been a Left-Hand obsession, though now even their ghosts couldn’t leave the House. One avenue of escape went underground, and could be reached only through the evil subbasement where the House kept the Left-Hand ghosts. The other old Morton dead had faded, going wherever spirits go when they tire of playing their unchanging themes, leaving behind the thrumming remnants of their energy in the House. But in the subbasement, more than the energy of the Left-Hand Mortons survived. Their will survived. As in life, their revenants had incestuously combined into something powerful, and fearful, and hungry.
* * *
“It’s time to show you the way out,” I said. “It’s the subbasement.” I took her by the hand in a gentle but unbreakable grip. There was no other way. To secure their help, I would have to present Scherie to the Left Hand. Guess who’s coming to dinner.
CHAPTER
EIGHT
As we walked to the cellar, Scherie tried to make conversation about my edited version of the Morton story. “So, the cra
zy, inbred Mortons built the subbasement?”
“Right, so you might see things that are a bit strange down there.”
“If you’re trying to scare me off from this,” said Scherie, “it won’t work.”
“Just stay with me and you’ll be fine.” As I spoke, I didn’t dare look at her. I no longer trusted my ability to deceive her.
In the cellar, I picked up a flashlight. I brought Scherie to a door, hidden as much by the accumulation of dust in its cracks as by design.
“Don’t send me down here for a bottle of wine!” Scherie laughed nervously. I smiled, weakly. As I feared, she was picking up on the vibe too quickly.
With more effort than I expected, I opened the door. We passed through the archway behind it and descended carefully down wrought iron steps that shook under our weight. Down, down, down we went, past three landings. At the bottom, I scanned my light across a long, high-vaulted hallway, a dark subterranean demi-cathedral to a science gone awry. I led the way. On each side of the passage was a line of matching doors.
“Why is this one bricked up?” Scherie pointed to an obvious break in the symmetry of rooms, the undeniable appearance of a frame around the bricks where a door would have been.
“You’re the one who mentioned the wine,” I said.
She might find some of the other props familiar as well. A mummified black cat that still twitched with a desire for vengeance, the skeleton of a demented great ape that had hunted human prey, a heart in a box that had beaten far longer than its owner had lived. The modern Mortons had let such nasty things remain rather than attempt to remove them. “As booby-trapped as Eva Braun’s brassiere,” Grandpa had warned. Susurrant dry voices like spectral carnival touts urged me to come and see, come and see.
A hand on my arm. “Do you hear something?” asked Scherie.
“What? No, just the draft. This way.” This wasn’t a tour.
“When I was a little girl, I…” But Scherie left the thought hanging like an icicle. I took her down another flight of stairs, these of cracked stone, to the smooth marble floor at the center of the subbasement. The room was a mini-Pantheon, lit by a pale glow from an oculus in the domed ceiling, a Roman temple-cum-catacomb. Shrines to the chthonic deities of the Left Hand lined the walls at regular intervals, their strange radial asymmetries echoing the architecture. Unlike any other Mortons, the Left Hand were semitheists. They hoped for examples of immortality, and worshipped dark mirrors of their own souls.
