I did that, admiring the girl’s audacity and questioning her sanity.
“Shouldn’t that be ‘hit by a car’? Or are you being cute?”
Sumire fell in beside me as I continued toward the store, wondering if she had been faking the injuries, or… but the bruises, the black eye seemed real enough a few hours ago. I tried to sneak an inconspicuous look at her face, but it was too dark.
“You’re the one being cute,” Sumire retorted gleefully. “Warning me about the neighborhood I’ve lived in more than a year, when you’ve only been here for a day. Still, I am glad to know you are that kind of guy. I don’t need your help, but I wouldn’t have thought much of you if you hadn’t offered.”
She was that kind of girl. Wonderful.
“Where’s April?”
Sumire hopped on the elevated edge of the curb, then started walking on it with arms tucked behind her on a sort of bizarre parade.
“In bed.”
Sumire nodded seriously.
“And you aren’t there with her?”
I sighed and shook my head. The question was getting old.
“We aren’t like that.”
The way I said it should have made it clear that there was nothing I wanted to talk about less. Sumire, however, was apparently unaffected by social niceties.
“Yeah, April said you were weird about that stuff.”
It was too dark for her to see me wince. I wondered exactly how much April had shared with her and Kim, on that subject in particular. The ornate wooden houses crowded around us, all gables and cornices, and I found myself lowering my voice as if they might overhear.
“I’m not weird about… ‘that stuff’. April and I have a complicated history. That’s all there is to it.”
“I bet. Don’t worry, I won’t pry. I don’t want to know the sordid details of your past...”
As if. Sumire had done nothing but pry since I met her.
“You are interested in that sort of thing, though. And it must be hard with April sleeping right there…”
“What are you getting at?”
I stopped at the corner and turned to face her, suddenly annoyed.
“I’m saying I can feel your frustration, big guy,” Sumire said, closing the distance between us, those laughing eyes locked onto mine. “You keep on running and you act like it doesn’t matter to you. Then you expect the rest of us to believe it when you say you aren’t like that.”
“You don’t know me,” I said unconvincingly, trudging off in the direction of the now visible lights of the convenience store.
“Maybe we could help each other out,” she suggested, walking alongside me, completely nonplussed.
“I doubt it very much.”
“You can’t say you aren’t a little interested,” Sumire persisted. “You want to know what I have to say, don’t you? You can’t just let it drop. I could be one of them. You have to find out what I want.”
The emphasis was hers. It did not quite stop me in my tracks, but it started my mind down a bad road.
“I wish you would stop saying things like that,” I complained, stepping over the concrete barriers in the parking lot. “Because it wouldn’t go well if you were one of them. Not that we are running from anyone. But if you were part of that…”
“If I was,” Sumire asked, skipping beside me, “what then?”
I stopped with the glass door’s handle in my hands, much to the annoyance of the customer on the other side.
“I would make you disappear.” I spoke with all the menace I could manage. “No one would ever find you or figure out what happened. Then April and I would take the next bus out of town.”
Sumire seemed to be taking the upper hand in this conversation. Maybe she was as invulnerable as she claimed. Perhaps her imperviousness was not merely a physical quality. Sumire smiled at my response as if I had done something she approved of.
“Good man,” she said cheerfully. “I’ll wait out here. Mine’s an IPA, alright?”
Sumire strolled over to the curb and took a seat. I swear that she was whistling. I sighed, hung my head, and held the door open for a wide-eyed, terrified cluster of shoppers who had apparently witnessed the entire scene. The smile that I tried out seemed as foreign to me as everything always did.
“Women. Am I right?”
***
“This area has a lot of these little parks.”
“Thank God,” Sumire laughed. “I’ve been sitting here, wondering if you were going to make me talk first.”
“I try to be a gentleman on occasion.”
“Thanks for this,” she said, sipping from the paper-bag wrapped bottle, “by the way.”
“No thanks needed. You owe me.”
That got her interest. She perked right up, like a cat’s ears standing at attention.
“Oh? What, like, three-fifty?”
“No,” I said gently. “Not going to do it. I’m afraid that was the most expensive beer you’ve ever bought, Sumire.”
“Really?” I could see her eyes in the darkness, playful, full of questions and unshakable superiority. “What’s it going to cost me?”
“I want to know what you want from us, and why, and I want it to be the truth. Right now. No ambiguous statements, no bullshit. Level with me.”
Sumire slumped back down on the concrete embankment above the river, disappointed.
“Is that all? I thought you were going to try something.”
“No insults, either,” I added. “You have no choice. You drank the beer.”
She thought it over for a while, and I let her, confident in my reasoning. It was airtight, after all. Or, so I thought.
Sumire sighed and brought her knees to her chest, ankles daintily crossed, the bottle resting against the inside of her leg.
“Fine. Did you ever have a dream that you didn’t wake up from?”
I said nothing. I am fairly sure my face said nothing.
“Wait. That’s the wrong place to start. Let me try again.”
I watched the river, so I cannot tell you what Sumire looked like while she talked, because I was afraid she would see what was in my eyes. Nobody would find her if I weighed down the body, and the river ran directly out to the sea. Her voice was amused and a bit distant.
“I came here for college a year ago. I lived in the dorms for a while, but I just didn’t fit in. For a number of reasons.”
That I could understand. I had trouble imagining a place where Sumire would fit in.
Except, of course, for the Kadath Estates.
“One night I had a bad dream – nothing I want to talk about. I got up and took a walk to clear my head. A few blocks from the dorms, I realized that I couldn’t remember waking up. I stayed out until almost three, walked across town and back, further than I had ever gone before. When I came back to my dorm, I fell into my bed without even taking my clothes off. It wasn’t until my roommate tiptoed out to catch a morning class that I realized I wasn’t even tired. And I never fell asleep again. Or, perhaps I never woke up. I’m not really sure.”
“You haven’t slept in a year?”
Sumire shook her head sadly.
“Wow. You’re both crazy and sleep-deprived.”
“You said no insults. Anyway, I started wandering around the city at night. You ever take a walk around here, Preston? You know anything about the city?”
“Not really. I’ve been here all of two days.”
“Well, it’s weird. Weird and old. Not like where I grew up. There are some crazy neighborhoods out by the docks and in the hills. I am not sure where those people are from, what country or whatever, but when the moon is close, it is a completely different world out there. A bad world. Everything here except the Estates is rotten to the core. This city drives people mad, then they go and do awful things, raving about black goats and octopus gods and The King in Yellow.”
The last phrase hit me right in the chest, though Sumire dropped the reference so casually that I was confi
dent it meant nothing to her. Still…
“That’s the modern world for you.”
“I stopped a boy from devouring his sister. She only lost an arm. I was too late to stop a mother from decapitating both of her children. You want to talk about rape? I’ve seen -”
“No,” I interjected. “I really don’t, actually.”
Sumire seemed disappointed.
“Well, let’s just say this place drives people mad, every single night. So, I started trying to be there first. Stopping anyone from getting hurt when I could. Helping whoever was alive when I couldn’t. And then, one night, I was too slow.”
Sumire laughed as if she had made a joke, but the sound reminded me of glass breaking in a restaurant – a sudden crash that I knew meant trouble for someone.
“I was naïve – but until that point I thought it couldn’t happen. Nobody ever beat me in a race, or scored higher than me on a test, or anything. I have never been sick a day in my life. One night, though, this guy – literally foaming at the mouth, by the way – managed to stick me with a kitchen knife. The blade went in between my ribs. I thought I was dead. Turned out all I needed was a new uniform and a Band-Aid.”
Sumire’s laughter was brittle and unhappy.
“Six uniforms in a year and a half, and this one isn’t looking so hot, is it? That gets expensive, you know.”
“Are you going somewhere with all of this, Sumire?”
“I’m getting around to it. One night, I stopped a group of cultists who were… attacking a woman. She was injured, but still conscious. I took her home after I dealt with the lunatics who had assaulted her. She was traumatized and afraid, so she asked me to stay the night. I didn’t want to go back to the dorms anyway, and she didn’t feel safe living alone. There was a free room next door, so I stayed.”
“That was Kim, right?”
“Wow, what amazing deductive reasoning,” Sumire said, smirking. “Yeah. I have lived at the Estates ever since. I help Kim out, taking care of people who bother us or don’t follow the rules. People who make it hard for everyone else.”
“You want us to leave.”
Sumire shook her head emphatically.
“No, I want you to leave.”
“Because April needs you to take care of her?”
April does have that effect on people. I am serious. I had to leave her with a babysitter in Montana – I paid the motel clerk fifty dollars to look after her for a couple hours while I did a quick piece of work. By the time I came back, ninety minutes later, he had already proposed.
Sumire hesitated. I risked a glance at her, but she was staring blankly at the tainted water, her expression composed and reluctant.
“I can tell, you know.”
“What?”
“Don’t make me say it,” Sumire complained, pulling her knees to her chest and resting her chin on them.
“What?”
“I can see inside of you. I started seeing all sorts of things, once I learned how to look for them. I can see how badly broken you are. I pity you, but being a victim doesn’t make you any less of a monster.”
I sighed.
“Is that all? Thanks for the character assessment, but we’re doing fine, thank you,” I said sourly, sipping my beer, which I didn’t like much. I had picked at random from the refrigerator, Sumire had rattled me so badly in front of the store. As it turns out, I don’t care for wheat beer at all.
“I didn’t think this would be easy,” Sumire said, sounding resigned. “What’s it going to take?”
“What on earth do you mean?”
“Don’t you get it, Preston? I am a hero.” Sumire explained it casually, the way someone would say, ‘I ride a bike to work’ or ‘I ordered the chicken.’ Except it was completely insane. Sumire poked me in the chest as if to emphasize that point. “April needs a hero, right? Whatever you are, Preston, you aren’t anyone’s hero. Am I wrong?”
“No, but…”
“But nothing,” Sumire huffed. “Kim told me already. April is a little crazy, right? She can’t leave the house by herself. Big deal. She needs company and a lot of psychotherapy. Anyone could do what you do.”
I laughed, shocking Sumire with my reaction. Woman’s intuition, I thought, and laughed harder.
“April isn’t crazy,” I wheezed. “She’s perfectly sane, at least as far as I know. Of the two of us, I am probably the lunatic. You are right, though – anyone could take my place. All April really needs is constant company and supervision.”
“Or what?”
“Bad things. You don’t want to know,” I said, shrugging. “You wanna know why you care so much?”
“What?”
“Why you care about her. It has happened a dozen times since we left. April was raised in a laboratory, Sumire. She has all sorts of unique traits. In particular, the involuntary release of tailored pheromones. They make people like her, want her, and want to take care of her. It’s simple biology – a defense mechanism, accelerated evolution. Everyone wants to save April. They just have to get to know her first.”
Sumire stared at me, trying to gauge the truth of the matter. It sounded plausible enough to me.
“You’re lying,” she decided.
“If you say so.”
“Even if you are telling the truth, you still aren’t in a position to protect April, isn’t that right?”
“Sure.”
Sumire’s eyes widened in disbelief.
“Let me do it, then! Why not? Are you in love with her?”
I shook my head.
“We aren’t like that.”
I had said it so often it felt like the truth. Who even knew anymore? Stories can take on a life of their own.
“Is it because you want her? Because it feels like you do, Preston. Or is just that you’re lonely?”
“I think maybe you have the wrong idea…”
“Do I?” Sumire paused, her head cocked to the side. “You seem awfully nervous, Preston. What are you so worried about, if I’m wrong?”
I watched the sway of her arched back, the way the wind ruffled her skirt, the unfettered intensity of the eyes set in her delicate head. It wasn’t like I could help myself. A deer in the headlights, waiting for impact, eager for an end to the suspense.
“You make me nervous,” I admitted.
“Why is that?”
“Because you are too close to me, Sumire. Bad things happen when people get close to me.”
She froze, and I could feel her breath on the side of my neck, then she settled back to her previous position with a rueful smile.
“Was that a threat or a warning? It was melodramatic, either way.”
I sighed again. My legs had started to fall asleep, so I stood up to get the blood flowing again, and tossed the remainder of my beer into the trash-choked river.
“You’re right, Sumire. I’m nobody special. But I will not let April be taken from me. Nothing else matters. There is only one person that I am completely confident isn’t one of them, and that is me. You could be one of their tricks. It wouldn’t be the first time.”
“You seriously think that?”
Disbelief and hurt on the face of a girl I barely knew.
“Yeah. Can you promise that you aren’t?”
“Of course,” Sumire said immediately.
“Don’t believe you,” I said, turning away and trudging up the embankment. “And I’m tired.”
Tentative silence. I dragged out the process of walking up the slope to give her time.
“Walk a girl home?”
I sighed. Last time, I promise. Then I waited for Sumire to catch up.
It was a rough neighborhood, after all.
4. The Tenant
Memory is a kind of haunting, a self-perpetuating viral thought form, instructions fed to the unconscious. Perfect and terrible numbers, subverting neural pathways.
I woke up to an insistent knocking at the door, and I immediately knew that I was screwed.
; For one thing, something warm pressed against my back. This meant that April had found me sleeping out on the living room floor in the middle of the night, and curled up next to me like a snake on a sun-warmed rock. Lifting my comforter hesitantly, I found her there, nestled beside me in my pile of blankets and sleeping bag, sleeping contentedly.
Paranoid Magical Thinking (Unknown Kadath Estates) Page 6
