“That’s fine,” Kim said, smoothly positioning a freshly scrubbed and gleaming April in front of her in the doorway. “I wasn’t planning on inviting you in.”
“Right. Sure. You ready, April?”
She spun to show off her hair.
“It looks nice,” I allowed. “Now can we go home please?”
It did look nice. She had needed a haircut for some time. Kim had managed to get April to part with half the length. The remainder of her hair was loosely braided, and now I could see most of her witchy face. Whenever our eyes met, April would blush, and then we both had to look away.
The apartment was as depressingly barren as before. My purchases mitigated that a little, but not much. Some food – fruit, cereal, bread and frozen stuff, the staples. A change of clothes for both of us, just the basics, plus a shirt and a pair of slacks that I hoped would be good enough for job interviews. Soap, shampoo and toothbrushes. However, it was my final purchase that caught April’s attention.
“You got a TV!”
April literally jumped in celebration, clutching the box to her chest.
It was true, though it wasn’t much of a television. Thirteen inches and light enough to hang on the wall, I had bought it in a suspect Chinese grey market electronics place downtown. It was an expense we could hardly afford. April, however, needs TV the way other people need food.
“Yeah, but I wouldn’t get attached. It will probably fall apart before we move.”
April ignored me, totally consumed by the process of opening the box. One of April’s quirks – containers were to be opened systematically, in the manner by which they were sealed. When she was finished, the box would be flattened and neatly folded, the interior foam and plastic laid out in parallel lines. April often used packing tape to draw things that looked like her private language on the carpet. I shrugged and left her to it, heading for the shower.
I let the hot water run over the back of my neck for a couple minutes. Then I took a good look at my side, a souvenir of our abrupt exit from the last hotel where they had caught up with us. The knife had cut in above my belt on the right side, and I had probably been lucky that nothing important was punctured. The wound was half-open, an ugly red mouth on my side seeping blood and puss. The bruising around it had a couple days to develop, and was now in full bloom, a mottled and unpleasant purple and yellow blotch that stretched to the top of my hip. It hurt to the touch, but it didn’t seem to be getting worse, so I soaped up, washed my hair, and got out to check on April.
She was watching a sitcom, sitting far too close to the television.
“April, reasonable distance, okay?”
She grumbled and scooted back a grudging five feet. I went to the kitchen and put on water for tea, which had just finished steeping when there was a knock at the door. April never even looked up. I sighed and went to answer it.
I wasn’t surprised to see Kim.
“Are you serious about needing work? April says that you are broke.”
If April was not completely oblivious to the glare I shot her, then she did a remarkable impression of it.
“Not broke exactly,” I said, mindful that I was talking to the person charged with the collection of the rent. “I am going to start looking for work tomorrow, though.”
“You’re not a slacker or a thief, right?”
I shook my head, puzzled.
“Okay, then. Have you met Holly upstairs? No? Okay, well, she is in 3C. She has a few days worth of work for you, at least. Go up and see her tomorrow. If you get along, then great.”
“Thanks,” I said carefully. “Can I ask what kind of job it is?”
“Can I ask who is looking for that girl?” Kim said, nodding in April’s direction, who was still staring raptly at the television.
I took her point.
“What time should I be there?”
“No earlier than noon. No; let’s say one, to be safe.”
I meant to thank her again, but she turned abruptly on her heel and disappeared down the hall.
“What do you think, April?” I asked, shutting the door behind me. “Do we have some time before they find us?”
She looked up from the television, her eyes misty. I have never understood why, but April cries almost constantly while watching television. Not sobs, just a sort of gentle welling of tears, even though she prefers comedies and reality shows.
“I think so,” April said, biting her lower lip while she concentrated. “This place is... obscure. And you said yourself that we can’t keep running forever. We have to stop somewhere, at least for a while.”
“Okay,” I said, sitting down on the blanket she had spread on the floor in front of the television. “Are you going to be alright if I go and see about this job tomorrow?”
She crossed her arms and huffed.
“Are you going to try and sleep on the floor tonight?”
“No,” I lied. “We can start having that fight when I have a couch to sleep on.”
“Then you don’t have anything to worry about.”
That made both of us liars.
2. Rain Fade
We were never hidden. The code spelled out by a portion of her DNA became the telemetry used by a suborbital broadcast satellite to invade our dreams.
The floor was both colder and harder than it looked, even with a blanket spread over it. Fortunately, I woke up early enough that April was still asleep, so I could shower and clean up; hopefully before she realized that I had not come to bed last night. I’d put her down once she started yawning, then spent the night in the living room, the door cracked so I could hear her toss and thrash in her sleep.
I found periodically waking to her audible nightmares reassuring – at the very least, it meant that she was still here, that they hadn’t taken her back; they hadn’t caught up with us. Yet.
I woke early, not even nine, so I had time to head to the convenience store for eggs, orange juice and a can of instant coffee. If the job that Kim had promised me came to naught, we were going to be in financial trouble sooner rather than later, but no point in worrying about that. Better to get back before April woke, better to keep moving and not think too much.
I scrambled two eggs with water, remembering too late that I forgot to buy butter. They came out okay, but the pan was going to be a bitch to clean. April didn’t wake up, but that wasn’t too unusual. Sometimes, she slept for the better part of a day, left to her own devices. Other times, she would not sleep for what seemed like days on end. I had been trying to get her on some sort of schedule since we hit the road, but given how exhausted she had been yesterday, I decided to let her wake up on her own.
After eating an unsatisfactory breakfast and forcing down a cup of the acrid instant coffee, I went about the process of removing the tags from the clothes I had bought the day before. I combined them with the handful of items that I had brought with me, trying to figure out what to wear that day. Kim hadn’t actually mentioned what kind of work it was that this Holly person wanted done, so I wasn’t sure what would be appropriate. I decided that it was probably physical labor and passed on the new slacks and shirt, not wanting to ruin them clearing out some old lady’s storage unit or cleaning rain gutters, and stuck with jeans and a sweatshirt.
There was still time to kill, so I decided on a long overdue shave, then brushed my teeth and clipped my fingernails for good measure. I paused to inspect myself in the mirror and decided that even if I looked presentable, I did not much care for anything I saw. I was in the kitchen making myself another cup of terrible instant coffee when April emerged, rubbing both of her eyes so hard it looked painful.
“Do you want eggs?”
She shook her head and marched grimly into the bathroom. Progress had been made in the last few weeks. If April was not fully convinced to begin bathing daily, she at least was willing to wash her face and brush her teeth in the mornings. She came stumbling out a few minutes later; face scrubbed pink, presenting herself for inspection.
She had passed on the plain clothes that I had picked her up yesterday in favor of a light shift bordered with lace and a pair of sandals. I tied her hair back with a rubber band left over from the television packaging and then started the daily ritual of putting in her contacts.
“Your side of the bed was cold this morning.”
“I got up early,” I lied, pouring solution into clear plastic vial.
“I waited up. I don’t remember you coming in.”
“You were asleep. I didn’t come to bed till late.”
The lenses lifted carefully from their packaging, moist and vaguely organic. April blinked her pale eyes, as blind as a mole in sunlight.
“You shouldn’t lie so much,” April scolded. “It’s a bad habit.”
“As if I don’t know that. You sure you don’t want breakfast? I’m supposed to work today, and I don’t know when I’ll be done.”
She shook her head when I tried to get near her, the contacts on my fingers.
“Kim said she would come get me for lunch. She thinks you’re a creep, you know,” she confided happily.
“I did get that impression. You didn’t tell her anything, right?”
April stuck her tongue out at me.
“Don’t be stupid. I convinced her not to call the cops on you.”
“I appreciate that, April. I don’t mean to be paranoid. I have just been feeling… exposed, since we got here. I don’t know why. Nerves, I guess. They got too close to us. That last one rattled me.”
April wrapped me in an enthusiastic and unexpected bear hug, her arms tight around my bruised ribs, her face pressed against my sternum. I held my arm up in the air to save the contacts and did my best not to whimper in response the agony in my side.
“We can’t run forever, Preston.” April’s voice was muffled by my chest. “This place isn’t safe, because there isn’t any safe place. Nevertheless, we can hide here for a while. And we can trust Kim.”
“Yeah, I think you’re right.”
Eventually, we got the contacts in. It was always an ordeal, since April flinches when I get near her eyes. Then we settled down in front of the television for late morning nonsense. It is not good for anyone to watch as much television as April does, but given the situation, that seemed like the least of our worries. At a quarter to one, I gathered up my things.
“All right, I’m heading upstairs to see about this job. I don’t know when I will be back, but I will text you later and let you know. You have your phone with you?”
April held it up, not looking away from a documentary show about crab fishing.
“Okay, I’ll be back as soon as I can. Call me if anything happens.”
“Bye.”
I shut the door firmly behind me then waited until I heard April obediently bolt and chain the door behind me. It wouldn’t make much difference if they caught up with us, but living on the run successfully involves the cultivation of a manageable degree of paranoia, an innate security routine. April had only lived this way for a few weeks, but she was learning.
It took me five years to figure it all out, but she has always been smarter than I have. It was weird, how little she had changed since I left – a little bit older, a little bit thinner, but still the same wide-eyed and deceptive enthusiasm. April had not seemed surprised when I came back for her.
The steps leading to the third story were more decayed than those on the second story, the exposed concrete loosened and crumbling under the beating of God-knows how many years of rain and cold. The third floor was laid out exactly as the first two – three apartments arranged in a square around a fenced-off opening that descended to the empty courtyard below, the shaft of sunlight smothered by afternoon shadows before it hit the ground. The ivy dominated the interior stone of the breezeway, and the air was heady with the perfume of the purple flowers. Units A and B appeared identical to ours. 3C, where Holly lived, was a double, like the unit Kim occupied, and I envied the space.
There was something up on the frame next to her door, like one of those Jewish things, a mezuzah, but I had never seen one like this. It was made from a single piece of clear quartz, and the writing on the suspended parchment inside was in a language that I was certain was not Hebrew. I tried the doorbell, but nothing happened, so eventually I knocked. The doorbell must have been broken, because the door opened almost immediately in response to my knocking.
“Oh, hello, dear,” the woman holding the door open said sweetly. “You must be Preston. Kim said you might be interested in helping me out. Please, come in.”
“Um, sure, Mrs...”
She laughed, and her laughter was surprising rambunctious.
“It’s Holly, okay? And even if you were going to call me by my last name, it would be Miss Diem,” she scolded gently, leading me into a living room that was as cluttered as my own was barren. “I know I’m older than you, Preston, but that doesn’t mean I’m ancient.”
“Right, no, of course not. I didn’t mean anything like that.”
Smooth, right? Well, I was nervous.
“Come on inside.”
“Uh, sure.”
For one thing, Holly was beautiful. She was in her mid-forties probably, but she had aged gracefully. Her hair was almost as long as April’s, and light blond to the point that it was almost silver. She was tall, with a generous and inviting figure that her black-and-white polka-dot dress set off to her advantage, taut calves emphasized by her impractical heels.
“Don’t mind the cat,” Holly said from the other room, while the aforementioned black feline looked lazily over at me from his perch on an overstuffed chair. “That’s Lovecraft. He won’t bother you. He pretty much has the run of the whole building.”
“No problem. I like cats,” I lied, shifting from one foot to the other, while Lovecraft stared at me knowingly.
There was so much stuff in the room, I could not help but worry that bumping into or sitting on something was almost inevitable. And such strange things – I could not begin to describe them all. Heaped on every available surface, with the exception of a couch and an easy chair near the middle of the room, there was an assortment of books, candles, rose quartz and jade figurines, scraps of paper and framed photographs of places I did not recognize. Looking closer, I realized that none of the pictures had people in them; just shots of decaying buildings and lonely wilderness scenes, many featuring ancient standing stones.
The cat decided he had better places to be, after giving me a look that warned that the contents in the room were carefully inventoried, should I get any funny ideas in his absence.
Then there was the statue. It was set back in a glass case, shadowed by a thing in black onyx that looked something like an elephant combined with a flower, so I could not get a good look, but I recognized it from the outline. The girl with her tragic, vacant face, a tentacle about to snap tight and pull her down somewhere that the sculpture had mercifully omitted. I had seen similar figures here and there, around the city. The face on this statue, however, was hauntingly familiar. I leaned forward for a closer look, and was startled by Holly bustling past me.
“Sit down, sit down,” she said, motioning toward the couch. “Would you like coffee? Tea?”
“Yes,” I said by reflex, quickly moving my gaze from her ample bust to what appeared to be a stuffed eagle mounted on top of one of the overflowing bookcases. He looked about as out of place as I felt. “Coffee, please.”
Holly disappeared into the kitchen, while I tried not to look too hard at my surroundings and hoped against hope that she did not need help cleaning the place up. After a while, Lovecraft reemerged from one of the bedrooms and gave me a cursory examination, but he didn’t seem to be all that thrilled with what he found and moved on to greener pastures. I wasn’t hurt. It is a common reaction.
“Here we are,” Holly said brightly, clutching two steaming mugs. She set one down in front of me, the other on her side of the table, and then sat down. I sipped the coffee, grateful that it was real,
and not poisonously acidic like the instant stuff. “I’m glad that you were available to help me, Preston. I am in something of a jam, you see.”
“Ah, right. About that. Kim wasn’t actually too specific about what you wanted me to do…”
“Does it matter?” Holly asked, appearing genuinely curious. “Are there things you wouldn’t do?”
“Of course! Well… it all depends.”
“Good to know.”
Holly sipped her coffee and smiled at me. I was nervous and sweating despite myself. It was downright embarrassing.
“Not to be pushy, but what is it that you want me to do for you?”
“I pay well. You will certainly earn more working for me in a day than you would anywhere else around here.”
Paranoid Magical Thinking (Unknown Kadath Estates) Page 3
