The other thing?
It had to be Kim at the door, judging from the abuse that it was absorbing. Moreover, I had a half-naked girl lying next to me that our landlady suspected me of abusing. I began a frantic search for pants while the door continued to take a beating. Upon finding them, I ran for the bathroom and hurriedly turned the shower on, hoping Kim wouldn’t notice that it wasn’t running earlier. Then I stuck my head in the ice-cold water as long as I could stand it. Then I shut off the water, toweled hastily, threw on jeans, and hurried to the door.
I only opened it a crack because April was asleep behind me, but it should have been enough for Kim to see my wet hair.
“I was showering,” I lied, immediately upon opening the door.
Kim glowered and crossed her arms in front of her apron-clad chest, Lovecraft darting between her ankles in agitation. With her hair tied up in a cloth to keep it clean, she looked like a tenement landlady from an old movie.
“I can see that. When you are dressed, one of the other tenants has some work for you today. Your upstairs neighbor, Josh. Have you met him yet? Well, he needs some things done.”
“Okay, that’s great. Thanks, Kim.”
I tried to close the door, but she kept standing there, so I figured she had something else to say.
“I made breakfast enough for both of you, if you hurry. If she’s interested, April can stay with me today, but she has to help with the cleaning.”
“Well, I will ask her, but I have to warn you that April is pretty lazy, and she usually doesn’t like to go outside, so…”
“Hey, Preston.” I heard her small voice complain from behind me. “It’s all cold now that you got up.”
I smiled. Kim’s eyes widened in stages, like time-lapse photography.
“Be down shortly for breakfast,” I promised, shutting the door as kindly as I could, given the circumstances and the enraged woman on the other side. Then I slumped down against it, half suspecting Kim might try and batter her way in.
“My back hurts,” April complained, sitting up and rubbing her eyes. “Sleeping on the floor is terrible, Preston.”
“You have no idea,” I snapped, stomping off to the bedroom. “No idea whatsoever.”
“Hey, Preston, what’s wrong?” April asked sleepily. “Are you upset about something?”
There was no civil response to make, but I was not gentle about combing the tangles out of her hair before we went downstairs.
Breakfast was a little quiet, with Kim glaring death at me, while handing around eggs sunny-side up and wheat toast on little white plates. Or it was quiet, until Sumire showed up in a t-shirt and jeans, a duffle thrown over one shoulder, and hit the table like a tornado, helping herself to bits and pieces of other peoples’ breakfasts.
“Good morning, Kim. Hey, April! How’s it going?”
“I’m fine, thanks for asking,” I said, munching toast.
Everyone disregarded me, which was a decision I could not criticize.
“It’s okay,” April answered cheerfully. “What are you doing today, Sumire? You aren’t dressed for school…”
Sumire patted her bag and winked at April.
“No classes till later, so I’m going downtown to do some shopping, then to the gym on campus ‘cause they have a pool. I’ll change after.”
“Oh, wow,” April said, her eyes huge, as if it were the first time she had heard of such a thing. “A swimming pool?”
“Are you having breakfast?” Kim asked, sounding a little miffed with Sumire, but a routine sort of miffed.
“Just toast and coffee, please,” Sumire said cheerfully, sitting down between April and me. “I’m in a hurry.”
“I thought you said you didn’t have morning classes,” I pointed out.
“It’s rude to listen in on other peoples’ conversations,” Sumire sniffed, accepting a steaming mug from Kim.
“You’re going to be late,” Kim warned me, glaring as she collected my plate.
“I can see I’m not wanted. April, are you…”
“Staying,” April said with a yawn. “Kim’s really nice when you aren’t around.”
Fine. I know when I am not wanted. And I was wanted with some urgency upstairs, by a neighbor that I had never met.
This made it all the more awkward when I knocked on his door and no one answered. For quite some time. As I was about to give up, I heard floorboards behind the door creak, and I realized that someone was creeping around behind it.
“Uh, hello,” I said, raising my voice and leaning close to the door. “Is Josh here? My name is Preston. Kim sent me. I’m supposed to do some work for you?”
The door opened with a gratuitous rattling of bolts and chains.
“Oh, sorry about that, man. I thought maybe you were the cops or something,” the man at the door said sheepishly, inviting me inside his darkened apartment. “’Cause you were knocking, you know.”
“I see… and you thought that why?”
“Come on, Preston. You know how these things go. You never know who is on the other side of your door. Good habits make for good security, right?”
I sighed, hearing him more-or-less quote my own internal monologue while he led me into a moderately cluttered and dimly lit room. It took a little while to figure out why it was so dark, but eventually I realized that layers of newspaper were plastered over the windows. Only a small amount of light leaked through the yellowing newsprint to compete with the three enormous monitors that dominated his living room, arrayed in a semi-circle on an oversized drafting table. The air was dense with a pungent, earthy smell that I could not place.
“I suppose I should be used to it by now,” I said resignedly. “But, how is it that you know about me?”
Josh paused in front of the kitchen counter, messing about with a lid from one of the many orange prescription bottles clustered near one end of it. His skin was a mottled grayish color, under a mop of thinning and unkempt brown hair.
“I didn’t get it all from Kim, if that’s what you’re thinking, though she did tell me about you.” Josh admitted it with a here-and-then-gone-again grin on his sallow face. “I looked you up, Preston, and April Ersten, too. There isn’t a whole lot to go on, but I am good at that sort of thing. I have a decent idea of who you are, and enough of an inkling of what you are running from that I don’t want to know more about it.”
I touched the thing in my front pocket for reassurance, but I did not actually reach for it, not yet.
“Why?”
He laughed, utterly mirthlessly, then tossed back a couple of pills with a sip of water from the tap. It was too dark to be sure, but Josh looked… unwell. There was an unhealthily pallor to his skin, a green tint that reminded me of someone in the grips of motion sickness.
“You moved into my building. That puts you in a position to threaten me. It’s only natural to protect myself by doing a little snooping on my new neighbors. Wouldn’t you do the same?”
“Sure,” I said, relaxing a little bit. “But I have reasons for living the way I do.”
“As do we all. You should know that,” Josh scolded, motioning me to sit down on an uncomfortable looking couch, lit blue from the glow of the monitors.
The apartment smelled musty, lived-in, mildewed, and I wondered when the last time Josh had cleaned, opened the windows, or left the apartment had been. Beneath the funk of body odor and mold, however, there was something underneath it that was genuinely unpleasant – maybe a meal left to rot in the piles of paper, or something that died inside the walls a long time ago.
“You adjusted to the neighborhood yet? To the Estates?” That furtive grin again. “You enjoy the ambience, or did you move here to shorten your commute?”
“Sort of, not really, and neither,” I said, borrowing a page from April’s book.
“Fair enough. Let’s move on to business, shall we?”
I raised a hand to stop him.
“I need to know one thing first. What kind of business
do you want to do, Josh? Because I don’t need more trouble than I already got, no matter how much you plan on paying me.”
“Nothing illegal!” Josh protested, his abnormally long fingers knotting together. “I’m not asking you to do anything illegal, anyway. I just… don’t get out of the house much. So, I need some things done.”
That, at least, I was well qualified to understand. Practically a subject of expertise for me. As long as she had television, April might literally never leave her room, not even to eat. I didn’t bother to explain that, though. I just gave a knowing nod and let Josh talk.
“Sumire does most of my errands… have you met Sumire? A helpful girl. She gets me necessities, and everything else I order online, you know? But a few things don’t come so easy…”
I shifted impatiently, wishing the room smelled less like unwashed clothing and sour milk, and waited for him to get around to the point.
“I have an associate in the city. Near downtown, I’ll give you the address and a map…”
“I’ve got a GPS on my phone…”
Josh snorted and looked at me pityingly.
“Have you tried it since you got here? It won’t get you anywhere.”
Actually, I had. It had been exactly as useless as Josh said, once I left the train station. The rest of the city was like a maze, and difficult to navigate even with the GPS, but our neighborhood, Kadath, and the whole district surrounding Leng Street did not even exist as far as the mapping software was concerned. I had figured my phone was broken.
“I want you to go see my associate. He will have something for you to bring back to me. Like I said, nothing illegal, but it’s private, okay?”
“He’ll know I’m coming?”
Josh gave me that look again, as if I had raised my hand to publically announce that I was an idiot.
“He’ll know that somebody is coming, Preston. Then you bring it all back here, not directly back, but quick as you can. I’d say make sure nobody follows you, but you already know all about that.”
He smirked. I couldn’t think of a civil response, so I bit my tongue.
“Alright. But what do I get out of it?”
“Ha! A man after my own heart! Direct and to the point. Well,” he said, scratching his unshaven chin, “you’ve done some work for Holly, right?”
“A little.”
“Okay. I have cash to compensate you for your time, of course, but maybe that isn’t your preferred currency. It sure isn’t mine, Preston. I deal in information, and I am thinking that you might have some questions you want answered. You know what they say, right? Keep your enemies close, and that whole bit. You decide what you want.”
He was right, of course. I needed money, but not the way I needed answers.
Josh grinned as if he had said something funny, then drew me directions on the back of a page torn from a technical manual he treated with the contempt most people reserve for a phone book. When he handed me the folded piece of paper, I caught a stronger whiff of the strange smell, simultaneously medicinal and meaty, sweet and rotten. Then he showed me out, without preamble, and frankly, I was happy to get back out to the open air. The paranoia in that apartment had festered so long that I would swear it became sentient.
Leng Street was its normal, deserted self. The abandoned tenements, permeated with ivy and decay, leered at me through windows edged with broken glass, like row after row of eyes lined with sparkling teeth. Or maybe I was in a bad mood. Things felt a little bit better once I got to the station.
I found a seat near the front of a rattling subway car when it arrived fifteen minutes later.
The subway system was a marvel, in that it operated at all. The tunnels were old and claustrophobic, lined with broken tile and punctuated with bundles of cabling and utilities bursting from the walls at odd angles. The subway cars were a hodgepodge of colors and shapes salvaged from defunct transit lines, crudely altered to fit the tracks and tunnels. Their original forms were marred by rough cuts and clumsy welds. Some cars were carpeted on the inside, while others offered only bare plastic flooring. Seats were varied and aging. The trains were frequent and miraculously close to on-time, though, and the system covered most of the city. Only the oldest neighborhoods, those clinging to the hills surrounding the city or the black water beside it remained unconnected.
My headphones remained where I had left them, on top of my duffel bag in the living room, and I hadn’t brought anything to read. Oh, who am I kidding – I’m not that much of a reader. That’s April’s thing, like television. I checked my cell phone, but there was nothing there to entertain me. I people-watched instead.
A pair of young men sat nearby, dressed like students, tall with sculpted features and new clothes. They were consulting a worn tour book in a quiet huddle, the ambient noise of the train too great for me to guess the language they used. The next bank of seats held a small, round family; a plump matriarch sat in tired repose while three small children played a complicated game that looked a bit like tag. Near the back of the car, a businesswoman in mirrored sunglasses worked intently on her PDA. Beneath a row of seats at the front of the car, a man wrapped in layer after layer of jackets slept fitfully. Standing in the middle of the car, holding the handrail with obvious distaste, two businessmen in suits of differing qualities held competing conversations on their respective cell phones, frequently interrupted as the car passed through tunnels.
I was drowsy by the time we arrived downtown. It wasn’t that long of a trip, but I had to double back and switch lines to ensure that I wasn’t followed. There were not many people on the street downtown, but compared to the quiet of Leng it seemed positively bustling. I headed for the address that Josh had given me, pausing along the way to wolf down a hotdog from a vendor operating a cart in front of a boarded-up post office. Josh’s map was detailed and precise, so it didn’t take me long to find the building in question. An aging apartment complex, eight stories tall, slumped at the end of one of the many cul-de-sacs, crowned with sad unpainted Victorian flourishes. The elevator screeched and whined all the way to the fifth floor and smelled like piss.
It brought back memories.
The hallway was empty, save for a solemn little girl in a blue denim dress, who watched with indifferent brown eyes as I walked down the hall and found the door I wanted. It opened on the second knock.
“What do you want?”
A twenty-something hipster who was not big on dental hygiene opened the door. He had the better part of a beard, piercings, and tribal tattoos covering one leg. The t-shirt and shorts he wore were wrinkled and threadbare. He basically had ‘dropped out of college’ written all over him.
“I’m here for a friend from the Kadath Estates. I’m supposed to pick up something for him.”
Suddenly, I had a little more sympathy for April’s complaints about the difficulty of not using names. It was just plain awkward. Moreover, the way the guy scratched his stomach and looked at me lazily made me wonder if I either hadn’t been clear, or had possibly misread the address.
“Wait here,” he said finally, shutting the door partway and disappearing to rummage around in the apartment. I stood and waited, trying to ignore the placid stare of the little girl down the hall.
“Here you go,” the man said, returning to shove a brown paper bag in my hands and give me a perfunctory smile. “Have a good one.”
The bag was heavy and worn. Whatever was inside it was cold, probably wrapped in ice or frozen. I crumpled it closed without looking inside. I didn’t even want to know. The more I found out lately, the more I wished that I had not bothered to find out.
It wasn’t far to the train station, but I took a roundabout way through a local park and a small shopping arcade that seemed heavy on the incense-and-carved-wooden-idol side of things to me. As I emerged from beneath a narrow archway built of stained plywood, about to merge back into the bustle of the main street in front of the station, I saw her standing next to a kiosk loaded with alarming pl
astic icons of octopus-faced gods. More accurately, I saw my own reflection in the mirror lenses of her glasses, as she scanned the crowd, one finger on her earpiece so she could hear over the traffic, obviously concerned.
Like maybe she was looking for somebody.
I didn’t want to jump to conclusions. I had seen her in two different places. By itself, that did not mean she was following me. It simply made it a possibility. Three times makes sure. It wouldn’t be enough to determine if she actually was a tail. I needed to discover whether her pursuit was related to the job I was doing for Josh, or if she was after me personally.
I turned around and plunged back through the shopping arcade that had probably given her grief in the first place. I took a right on a crooked alley about halfway down the arcade. It stank of rotting garbage and still water, desolate but for the cats that gave me resentful looks and then went back to whatever it is that cats do with their free time. I followed the alley all until emerged on a quiet commercial street, navigating on my memory of the landmarks.
Paranoid Magical Thinking (Unknown Kadath Estates) Page 7
