by Tom Doyle
Grandpa gave Dad a last swat on the head. “Knock it off. Any other day, he could take you and me and the Left-Handed dead while filling out his taxes.”
“There are Left-Hand ghosts?” asked Scherie.
“I apologize for our rudeness, ma’am,” said Dad. “I’m Dale’s father, Captain Morton. My, but as dooms go, you’re a pretty one.”
“Yes, very nice to finally meet you,” said Grandpa, who then turned toward me. “A little exotic for my taste. Parents not born here. But she’ll do.”
Scherie scowled with outrage. “Look, ghost, I’m not interested in your opinion…”
“We’re on a mission, not a honeymoon,” I said.
“Honeymoon?” asked Scherie. She hadn’t gotten what Grandpa meant.
“Nothing,” I said. “I’m fading again. Go up to 84. Wake me up in Pennsylvania. We’ll get off the freeway there.”
CHAPTER
THIRTEEN
At Matamoras, Pennsylvania, Scherie woke me from a doze of patchwork dreams. Like General Washington in retreat, we had crossed the Delaware. We left the freeway and drove through the Poconos, heading south and east. Some unlicensed station played a song by Guided by Voices. Barring a serious allocation of government resources, Roman’s documents would break any conventional trail. But they wouldn’t trail us conventionally.
The camouflage spell must have been flickering by now. The diminished traffic moved around us more smoothly.
My ancestors weren’t fighting or even manifesting. “Can we talk to my grandmother now?” asked Scherie.
“Sorry,” I said. “Maybe you can, if she shows up. For me, it’s mostly Mortons. They’re the ones who want to talk to me. Though for most of them, that’s like saying your phone message wants to talk to you. The dead may not want anything. They’re dead.”
The night only felt forever; I needed to find our stop before dawn. Good craft sites dotted every state in the Union, but I didn’t know the ones outside of Rhode Island. The back road route was slow; I needed a recharge fast. Even spending my craft with brutal efficiency, the debts of magic demanded repayment.
The dark hills blurred; I was starting to nod again. I could force myself awake, but that would just burn my remaining energy all the quicker toward complete collapse. I might have to try to recharge on mundane ground. So be it. “We have to stop.”
“What about there?” said Scherie.
I saw our destination: an intersection with an old beat-up “Crossroads Motel” that Norman Bates might have graduated to, not part of a chain, with plenty of vacancies. Its ghostly history was strong enough to see without effort. Before, it had been an inn, and before that, a fort, and before that, a tribal ceremonial clearing. Most would pass it by; it was exactly what I needed. On this craft ground, I could recharge.
Ignoring the ghost structures, I scoped out the present-day motel, a run-down monument to that brief time between highways and interstates, a destination for the few sportsmen and adulterers this remote area could support. Hunting and sex were craft-sensitive activities, and the remaining glow of this place was enough to give an edge to both. Three buildings with ranch-style rows of rooms boxed the parking lot, with an office at the far end of the right-hand row. In front of the left-hand building was a sports car. We drove past the car, a candy-apple red late-model Porsche, parked in front of room 128. Its quality raised suspicion, but no tracker could have anticipated us here. I could use it as a distraction. It would look very Morton to any pursuers.
We rang the bell at the desk. A large man woke, Tony Perkins’s antithesis. “We’d like a room with twin beds, please.” The same room with two beds meant two different types of security: I could protect Scherie, and we could avoid dealing with yesterday’s relational fallout.
“Visa or—”
“I’ll pay in cash,” I said.
“I still need a deposit,” said anti-Tony.
“I’ll pay more cash,” I said.
“Suit yourself,” said the clerk. “Let’s see. Room 108 is a twin.”
Good, that was across from the Porsche. But wait—it had been a long time since I’d gone to ground in my own country. Something I was forgetting, something important. No, unimportant, yet very annoying. “The Gideons.”
“What’s that?” said anti-Tony.
“Do your rooms have Gideon Bibles in them?” I asked.
“Some of them. If it’s missing, I can get one for your—”
“Not necessary,” I said. “I’d prefer a room without a Bible. It offends me.”
“What’s your problem with God’s word? You some kind of … oh, sorry, ma’am.” Typical—the man tolerated hints of criminality more than an irreligious fellow American.
“It’s not the Bible,” I said. “A Gideon once hurt my grandmother.” The lie came easily; it was nearly true.
“Oh. Well, you can—”
I drew out some more bills. “Could you just check for me?”
“I can just check,” whispered Scherie.
“No, dear, this nice gentleman will check for us,” I said. I gave her a military glare that even a civvy could translate: not another word, soldier.
Anti-Tony walked outside. I held up my hand. “Nice weather we’re having,” I said. We stayed silent. The clerk returned. “No Bible, Koran, or Satanic ritual.” He gave us the room key, then bent forward to fill in the ledger.
My pursuers might question this clerk, so I hit him with as much suggestion as I had left. “I think you misread it. We’re staying in room 128. We’re the couple in 128.”
“The couple in 128,” repeated anti-Tony.
“We came in the bright red Porsche.”
“Cool car,” said anti-Tony.
The deception in place, I took the key for room 108. I continued to hide my limp until we were outside. “You need to lie down,” said Scherie.
I held out the key to her. “I’ll be there in a moment.”
Scherie took the key, but didn’t budge. “Suit yourself,” I said. First I went to the trunk of the Chevy and put two automatic pistols and a case of ammunition into a small bag with the Colt we already had. Then I limped over toward the Porsche and looked around. The lights were off in 128 and all the other rooms. No one was watching except Scherie. I unzipped my fly, and pissed on the Porsche’s rear tire. Scherie gasped, the urine splattered, and all else was quiet. There was the pinkish tinge of blood in my piss from the beating I’d taken, which was bad for me, but good for this deceptive marking.
Finished with my business, I limped back to Scherie. “What the hell?” she said.
“I don’t like Porsches that aren’t mine,” I said. “Help me to our room. I’m going to collapse quicker than a French craftsman in a blitzkrieg.”
* * *
Before collapsing, we loaded and prepared our weapons. For me, it was like old pencil sketches of Mortons on the raw frontier and the high plains, molding lead musket balls together by the fire. A comfortable domestic delusion, given what Scherie must have thought of me now.
“What’s our route to Mexico?” asked Scherie.
“Ask me tomorrow.” I thought I knew, but when I was exhausted I made decisions when needed, and not before.
“Why don’t we just show and tell?” asked Scherie. “This isn’t Colonial Williamsburg. You could go to the media. A couple tricks and they’d believe you. You’d be protected.”
“No,” I said. “That would break the fundamental deal between craft and country. We serve, the government protects, and we can live our own lives.”
“You’d rather be dead?” she asked.
“If I break that deal, I might as well kill myself, and shoot a lot of other craftspeople besides.”
“Oh.”
“It’s usually not bad like this. We live where we choose, go to school or get homeschooled, just like everyone else, marry who we want, have kids…” Damn, I must have been beyond exhausted to start this line of conversation. Maybe I was just mumbling at this point, because Scherie didn�
��t look up from her gun to see my embarrassment.
We tucked our guns away for the night and fell back on our separate twin beds in our Gideon-less room, fully clothed. A long silence, then Scherie yawned. “I’m exhausted, but I can’t sleep.”
“Try counting breaths,” I said. No time for pillow talk—I had to start healing.
“Why are you against the Bible?” she asked.
“I’m not against the Bible,” I said. “I’m against Gideon Bibles. The government can use them to track people, particularly craftsmen.”
“That’s insane,” she said. “Not serious.”
“Dead serious,” I said. “The Bibles are magical trip wires, a surveillance net covering hotels and motels. No freedom of the road for craftsmen. If you aren’t government craft, you’re in trouble. I could cover the Bible in a craft-soaked cloth, but they’re looking for me, so they might spot that.”
“And it’s the same if you ask someone to remove it for you?” she asked.
“Like a security camera going suddenly dark,” I said. “They’d see it.”
“Oh. I thought you just didn’t like the Bible because it’s against wi—” Scherie blushed. “It’s against magic.”
I chuckled, though it hurt to laugh. “You don’t have to worry about the W-word, though I prefer ‘craftsperson.’ I enjoy the Bible; it has plenty of interesting things to teach about the craft. The Koran too. It’s always there in the old sacred texts, hiding in the corners.”
Scherie said, “I don’t remember any…”
“How about the witch of Endor?” I asked.
“She doesn’t count,” she said. “She wasn’t a real witch.”
“That’s not clear in the original,” I said.
“You believe that story?” she asked.
“Maybe not the details,” I said, “but yes, I believe it. It’s one of the few stories in the Bible that every craftsperson believes.”
“Why’s that?” she asked.
“Because,” I said, “it’s a story where craft works.”
* * *
Dreamless sleep beckoned. Only the force of long discipline impelled me to rudimentary self-healing. I couldn’t wake up like this.
I initiated my repair through breathing exercises. This sputtering fount of craft wasn’t like the House, where the air itself was supercharged with Morton life force. I’d have to delve deeper for power here. As I breathed from my belly, it felt like roots growing down from my spine, into the mattress and shooting through the legs of the bed, down through the floor and the walls, into the native soil, seeking magical sustenance.
This passive work wouldn’t set off any Bibles in the nearby rooms. Our pursuers wouldn’t detect it until we were long gone.
But even discipline couldn’t keep me awake forever. Like falling into a well, I slept.
* * *
As Dale became quiet, Scherie still couldn’t relax. She had seen ghosts and magic, but that wasn’t what kept her awake. She was lying in the same room with a man with whom she’d been intimate, but about whom she knew less and less with certainty, including how she felt. A day ago, she had known her feelings with passionate exactness. Now, she only knew one thing for sure. Dale was hurt. A magus, yet he couldn’t instantly heal himself. His injuries and pain alone would have made her too anxious to sleep.
She was only a normal person, but she could hope and pray. As a child, she had told her ghosts to leave, and they had. As sleep finally claimed her, she wished with all her heart that Dale’s injuries would go away. Yeah, injuries, get the fuck out of here. Her heart glowed warm with the thought.
* * *
The general had summoned Michael Endicott to his office at the point of the C-CRT triangle. It was as bare of family monuments as of sunlight. Instead, wall-to-wall screens acted as windows: some video, some comp-interactive, and one twenty-four-hour live feed from Chimera.
Endicott stood at attention, despite exhaustion that would have crippled another man. He was sick at heart, haunted by the mask of the Red Death. At the critical moment, he, a man who had faced death for years without flinching, had fled. He didn’t know what he had feared; all he could remember was the mask, and the dread of what might be beneath it.
But if Endicott was hoping for a dressing down from his father, he was disappointed. The usually stony general paced, hands punctuating each sentence. “Morton sacrificed himself to let the Left Hand out! He gave them one of your men to possess, and someone else for an incarnation, maybe even of Roderick himself. But it doesn’t matter which of them is embodied. They’ll all be taking revenge, killing Family members wherever they can find them. Will the Families listen, will they cooperate on security? Feh.”
“Sir,” said Endicott. “I don’t think Morton is dead. Or at least he made it out of the house alive. We found no, um, recent bodies. He may still be working with that thing.”
“No corpus? Doesn’t necessarily signify,” said the general. “In these black transactions, mutually assured destruction happens. They devour their own. And the Peepshow can’t see him.”
Endicott shook his head. “We can’t trust their intel, sir. The Peepshow’s involved somehow. Sphinx was there.”
“The Sphinx is dead,” said the general. “Chimera is certain of that much.”
As if aware of being invoked, the feed from Chimera chimed a mellifluous alarm. “Go ahead and look,” said the general. “It’s about your business, unless there’s another high-priority screw-up in the craft world.”
A lengthy text report headed “SPACTAD” appeared on the Chimera screen. The connection to the Mortons wasn’t immediately obvious. A bunch of Bibles had gone off in an obscure corner of Pennsylvania.
“Unauthorized craft,” said the general. “Looks like heavy-duty healing.”
“He was beat up pretty bad,” said Endicott.
Chimera’s report leapt from the Bibles to Dale Morton without explanation of the connection. IF MORTON IS ALIVE AND LEFT ALONE, THERE IS A HIGH PROBABILITY THAT HE WILL LEAVE THE COUNTRY WITHOUT INCIDENT. SECOND HIGHEST PROBABILITY IS THAT HE WILL BE ARRESTED BY ROUTINE CRAFT SECURITY. THIRD HIGHEST PROBABILITY IS THAT HE WILL BE DEAD.
“Problem solved,” said the general.
“But if he killed—”
“Problem solved,” repeated the general.
“We’ve haven’t had a renegade of his power in a hundred years,” said Endicott. “And that thing that’s chasing him, that was like something out of the bad old days. We can’t let them play hide-and-seek across the mundane country.”
The general reflected only a moment. “Morton isn’t the worst problem. That Left-Hand thing is. If it chases him for a while, that gives us more time. If it catches him, no great loss. You are ordered not to search for Dale Morton. Under any circumstances. Is that clear?”
“But we’ve got—”
“Is that clear?” repeated the general.
“Yessir.”
“And see to your uniform, soldier. It’s in disgraceful condition.”
“Yessir.”
“Joking, of course,” said the general. “Seriously, let other people worry about Dale Morton. You’ve got real work to do.” Someone knocked and an almost somnambulant young woman entered the general’s office to fuss with the feed from Chimera. The older tech was probably still recovering from whatever Morton force had knocked him out in the van. “I want a briefing on how we’re going to respond to the Left-Hand Morton threat, ASAP.”
Endicott returned to his office and stared at his sword. His grandfather had told him that its greatest attribute was to cut through bullshit. Right now, he was knee deep in it, and rising. The advantage of coming from a self-righteous family was the long tradition of suspicion of others. The suspicion was often excessive (witness Salem), and too often justified.
What gnawed deepest at Endicott was Morton himself. Sphinx had given Morton the mission that, instead of killing him as Endicott’s would have, had nearly destroyed his mind and irrevo
cably broken his career. Endicott’s Prague mission, which would have been Morton’s, had come from Chimera. Endicott couldn’t see the score in this turf war between Sphinx and Chimera. Maybe Chimera had meant for Morton to go down fighting, but there would have been a reason. Not the mess they had now.
Was Dale driven by anger against the other Families? The Endicotts didn’t talk to ancestors because it went against the Bible. If an Endicott ancestor approached Michael, he told it to get up or out. If the spirit persisted, it was probably diabolic. Michael didn’t worry about whether the reasons for this doctrine were correct, because the results spoke for themselves. Endicotts lived in the present, not the past. Much of the darker past was just a sick joke to Michael. So Morton’s rage about the past stunned Endicott. Morton hated him for being an Endicott. The problem with talking to supposed ancestors was that old wrongs were never forgotten.
So, Morton brutally murdered Hutch, turned Endicott’s advance man into a zombie, directed that zombie to kill Sphinx, all in the name of centuries-old hatreds, and that was just prelude to a campaign of deceit and vengeance against all the Families. A tidy story—pity it didn’t work, particularly the last bit. Endicott hadn’t seen petty anger in Dale’s last fight. The Mortons were great deceivers, but Endicott couldn’t believe that he had mistaken the look in Dale’s eyes. The man had been ready, willing, and almost relieved to die; if he was still alive, it was through no fault of his own.
Bottom line: whatever Dale Morton had in mind, even if it was self-sacrifice for guilt over Hutch, it was sincere.
What if someone in the chain of command—Chimera, spiritual brass, even (God forbid) the general himself—was playing Michael for their own agenda? No, not his father, though that didn’t mean the general was any more free of manipulation. The uncompromising morality of the Endicotts sometimes made them easy marks, but they were Hell’s own wrath when they found themselves played.
Endicott needed fewer variables and more answers. The right person needed to pay for Hutch’s death. He needed Morton found and captured. If Morton was alive, that other thing, that Red Death, wouldn’t be far away. The Red Death dressed like someone who would have gleefully killed Hutch.
