I wondered what that would be like. Was it similar to the life I lived during the five years that I preferred not to think about?
“What are you?”
The question popped out of me and into the open air, then hung between us, arbitrary and ridiculous. She smirked at me over her shoulder, exposing sharp and uneven teeth.
“What’s that supposed to mean? I am Jenny Frost, asshole, and there isn’t anyone else like me, so I’m not sure how to answer that. Except, maybe…”
Jenny stopped in the middle of the sidewalk. The pedestrians pushed against the building or the cars parked next to the curb without even realizing it, just to get away from this little blond girl.
“…I might be a little like you, Preston. I’m sure as hell not like them.”
Jenny walked off before I could say anything else, which was fine by me, because I did not have a clear idea of what I would have said. She continued several more blocks before we arrived at a train station I had never been to before, east of downtown. The tracks took a steep and ominous dive into the maw of an ash-blackened tunnel composed of crumbling brick and masonry. I stood a cautious distance from Jenny at one of the marked entrance points and waited for the train.
When making conversation, I prefer to start general.
“Where you from, Jenny?”
“That a question you should be asking?”
“Probably not. One you feel like answering?”
Challenging people love a challenge. Of course, banking on basic psych can get you killed, but I figured that as long as Jenny laughed, I was okay.
“You won’t know it,” Jenny said, sounding a little forlorn, huddling in her sweatshirt. “A place called Lost Creek.”
“Never heard of it.”
“What a surprise. You noticed that yet, Preston? That nobody has ever heard of wherever you came from, here in the city?”
“Are you basing that on personal experience? Because I’m sure it’s different if you’re from Los Angeles or something…”
“Maybe. Where are you from, Preston?”
The train arrived, whistling because some asshole way back in history thought that the sound of the air displaced and the metal brakes locking would not cut it to announce that a gigantic, multi-ton piece of machinery had arrived in the near vicinity.
“Nowhere you ever heard of.”
“I thought so,” Jenny said, grabbing my arm and pulling me into a car and an available, if threadbare, seat. “Every single other person on this train, if they aren’t natives, that’s where they’re from, too. Nowhere you ever heard of.”
I considered that while the train roared to life, then lurched into the darkness of the tunnel. The people on the train looked more or less like the other people I had ever known in a half-dozen different cities, except that they were extremely diverse, racially and linguistically. Other than the particularly cosmopolitan nature of the city’s residents, I had not noticed anything exceptional about it.
Except that wasn’t true, was it? I lived in a deserted neighborhood in a building full of very strange individuals, across the river from a neighborhood that seemed to be under the thumb of dictatorial cats. One of my neighbors believed herself to be invulnerable and engaged in a war with monsters from the moon, while another conducted incomprehensible business for reasons I could not begin to explain. Moreover, they adopted April without a second thought, which definitely said something.
Not entirely sure what, though.
A thick mesh of interlocking graffiti covered the tunnel walls, turning to blur-motion art with the movement of the train, too fast to read, like colorful and irreverent hieroglyphs or Saturday morning cartoons on fast forward. The train rattled, clunked, and occasionally veered dramatically from side to side, throwing Jenny’s hip against mine, and I felt the clasp of the knife strapped to her belt beneath her voluminous sweatshirt. Her nervous fingers strayed repeatedly to a frayed seam in her ragged camouflage shorts, and her jaw worked from side to side with an audible pop. I wondered if she was high.
We rode several stops, then transferred at an underground station, moving so quickly from one train to another that I did not even catch the station name. A gigantic man with Polynesian features and facial tattoos tried to cut in front of Jenny in his hurry to board the train, jostling her. Jenny pivoted gracefully on her toes as if it were the first step of an elaborate dance, and kicked him in the back of his leg. She hooked his knee with the toe of her sneaker so that he tumbled backwards, arms pin-wheeling in a desperate attempt to arrest his fall before he hit the platform. Jenny didn’t look back, but she smiled to herself as the train door slid closed, the cavernous station echoing with howls of pain and outrage.
It seemed like the wrong time for questions, so I quietly took the seat beside her after she intimidated a group of high school students out of it. Once the train started rolling forward, she put her ear buds in and closed her eyes, making me wish I had brought my own headphones. We passed three stops, and I was starting to wonder if she had fallen asleep when her eyes snapped open. She yawned and put her headphones away, then motioned for me to stand.
“Sarnath,” the train’s loudspeaker droned through an overwhelmingly loud burst of static.
I stopped to pay my fair at the machine on the way out, but Jenny calmly walked through the alarmed employee exit, then stood there, in full view of several transit employees, grinning and daring them to say anything about it. She seemed disappointed when they wisely chose to look the other way.
The station was deep below the sidewalk. I was out-of-breath by the time I made it up all five sets of stairs and out into the evening cool and the breeze coming off the water. The smell of chemical waste and diesel hit my nose as soon as I stepped out on the street. Sarnath was clearly an industrial district, and a tangle of factory smokestacks and the bulk of the city power plant blocked the view of the nearby ocean. Jenny seemed to know where she was going, so I followed in her bleak wake. That was starting to become a habit, and I shuddered with the horror I feel every time I catch myself falling into a pattern. Fortunately, we only walked a few blocks to a Szechuan place painted a brilliant red, the sooty windows plastered with yellowing Chinese newspaper and menus in a variety of different languages.
“Only sit-down place I know where they aren’t assholes to me,” Jenny said with a shrug, looking startled when I opened the door for her. It was even smokier inside. “Hope its okay.”
I shrugged and followed her in, thinking pretty much the same thing.
6. The Girl Who Never Came Home
The map of an invisible country, divorced from the hand running across her skin. Inferred topography, the depth of emotional possibilities embedded in every slow contour.
“You meet that little psycho bitch who thinks that she’s a superhero?”
I paused in the act of putting food in my mouth, a piece of fried eggplant balanced precariously on my chopsticks.
“Are you talking about Sumire?”
The eggplant was hot. I found myself sincerely regretting not blowing on it. Jenny laughed at the faces I made to cope.
“Yeah, dumbass, I’m talking about Sumire. What do you think about her?”
I picked at the foil-wrapped chicken in front of me while I considered her question.
“I think she’s crazy, for one thing.”
Jenny polished off her second beer, then waved the empty can at the infinitely patient young waiter, who hurried off to fill her request. All I could think was that she must be a great tipper.
“Come off it. You and I know both know better. Sumire is a lot of things, but crazy sure ain’t one of them.”
“Give me a break. She says that she’s fighting…”
Jenny waved me off with her chopsticks, her mouth half-full of whitefish.
“Yeah, yeah. I’ve heard it all too. Sumire is right about more than you would believe, but that isn’t my point. She’s the real fucking thing, Preston,” Jenny said, nodding sagely. “
Let me tell you a story about that bitch…”
It went something like this, but with a lot more swearing.
Jenny was somewhat homeless, in that she spent as many nights under the bridge where I met her as she had somewhere warm. It all depended, she said with absolutely no shame, on how much money she could steal, or if she found company. A few nights earlier, Jenny had not had much luck with robbery, so she was milling around downtown bars, nursing overpriced beers and scornfully dismissing frat boys, looking for someone wealthy and vulnerable.
It was a very slow night. In a bar named Crisis, she settled for the well-off owner of a small shipping firm. He was less than handsome, self-centered and crude, but she was feeling down herself, so that seemed about right. She drank the drink he bought, tolerated his advances and wandering hands, then she let herself be invited home. Because of her shabby appearance, he assumed she was a prostitute, and she didn’t bother to convince him otherwise. Jenny had not yet made up her mind what to do with him when they walked outside and into chaos.
People were running in any direction that was away from the street, where traffic was abruptly snarled. It was hard to see clearly in the flickering sodium lamps and the weak beams of the headlights, but near the center of the intersection, something was moving, something grey and formless that sat on fat hind legs, something that circled its prey the way a shark circles before it strikes. Opposing it was a defiant schoolgirl in a tattered uniform. Jenny had to suppress an urge to applaud, while her half-forgotten companion looked decidedly ill. Then the thing struck at the girl with one amorphous limb, easily twice her size, but Sumire acted as if she had all the time in the world, reaching over and picking up a car…
“…and then bash! Right upside the toad’s head!”
Jenny was almost standing in her chair, gesturing wildly in her attempt to describe the scene. I kept a firm hold on the table, worried that it would overturn as a result of her mildly intoxicated enthusiasm. The unflappable waiter chose that exact moment to deliver her another beer, which she received with surprising gratitude.
“With a car? Really? How do you even hit someone with a car? Wait! Wait – don’t show me. Sit down. Eat your dinner.”
“Hey, I’m buying; I’ll do as I like, asshole. Anyway, that was the first time I ever really noticed Sumire. She was kicking a monster’s ass in the middle of the fucking street, literally beating it into the ground with a goddamn car, Preston. I get excited just thinking about it.”
“I noticed,” I said, cautiously returning to my own plate. “What kind of monster was it, exactly?”
“Never got a good look,” Jenny said, shrugging and blowing on a piece of purple eggplant. “Can’t really say. People call them toads. Never seen ‘em anywhere else in my life, but, here… I don’t know. This city is a strange place, Preston. You’ll see for yourself, eventually.”
“If I stay that long.”
Jenny shook her head moodily.
“Good luck with that,” she muttered. “As much as they would like to, nobody ever seems to leave this city.”
“You don’t want to be here? I thought you did whatever you wanted to do.”
Jenny paused, her mouth half-full, looking at me with the pity that is reserved for the profoundly ignorant.
“I live under a bridge, asshole. Who would want to do that?”
We worked on the food for a while, which was fine with me because it was actually good, and because Jenny sort of shut up. Jenny never really stopped talking – I thought it was a fifty-fifty bet that she talked to herself nonstop when there was no one around for her to pester. I know that she talked to her damn dog as if it was a person, because Holly had told me so, rather snidely. Jenny filled the entirety of the meal with jokes, gesticulations, and pointed comments about strangers, punctuated with occasional chewing and swallowing. It was an open-mouthed spectacle, and I was not the only one watching, but that did not seem to bother her.
My chopsticks clattered off the plate when I attempted to set them down.
“Let me pose you a question,” I suggested. “If you thought it would be funny to mess with me, would you take a stupid story I was falling for and make it bigger, you know, for fun?”
“Sure,” Jenny said, grinning. “You got one?”
“And you and Sumire know each other, right?”
“Sort of. Like I told you, I've seen her around. We only talked once, and it wasn’t very friendly, so I can’t say I really know her…”
“And Holly, right? You know her too?”
“Sure. No way I couldn’t. That bitch fucking hates me.”
“What about Josh, and Professor Dawes, and Kim Ai. Do you know them, too?”
Jenny sighed and pushed her empty plate away. My words were somehow becoming sharper once they hit the air, but once I start digging a hole, there’s no place to stop except the bottom.
“Is Kim the bitch with glasses who runs the apartment complex? Then I’ve seen her. I have no fucking clue who Josh or Professor Whatever is. What’s your point?”
I spoke without thinking. That may be a chronic problem.
“Everyone I’ve met in this city seems to know each other, and you all keep feeding me the most outrageous stories. I was thinking that maybe you’re all in on it together, for whatever reason. You sure you and the people back at the Estates aren’t playing games with me?”
The sound of her beer can crushing against the table was enough to silence me, and during the silence, I started a belated consideration of exactly what it was I was doing, and more importantly, who I was doing it to. Jenny sighed, and all of a sudden my sanity returned, in a tremendous rush of unadulterated panic. I held my hands up to plead for mercy, but it was a little late for that, and we both knew it.
“Here I was being all nice and you had to go and ruin it. I don’t have friends, Preston. And I never play games,” Jenny said, smiling sweetly. “What did I ever do to make you think that questioning me was a good idea?”
“Jenny, I – ”
“You should go now. While you still can.”
The way she said it, my legs obeyed automatically, dishes clattering as I bumped against the table on my way up.
“Don’t let me see you around, Preston. Or that little girl of yours.”
It was a long walk to the front door of the restaurant, feeling Jenny’s eyes digging into my back every step of the way.
***
The bear hug from April was the best thing to happen to me all day. I held on to her a good bit longer than usual, despite Kim’s glower. April looked worried, but she clutched at me in return and held her peace, saving questions until we were alone. April gave Kim a hug goodbye, then shouldered her massive backpack.
“You ate already?”
Kim did not look at me, making it abundantly clear that she was not concerned.
“Yeah, downtown. Thanks, though.”
“Holly has more work for you tomorrow, but I can’t watch April. I have to do some shopping.”
“That’s okay,” I said bitterly. “I don’t think Holly will need me.”
“Are you sure? Holly stopped by here fifteen minutes ago asking for you...”
My head spun. I had already written off the possibility of any further work from that quarter, and it was more than a pleasant surprise. I even allowed myself a ray of hope that it represented a turning of fortunes, however late in the day it might be.
“Oh, okay. My mistake.”
“I suppose,” Kim said uncertainly. “Oh, yes, Professor Dawes would also like a word with you. I have his card somewhere…”
I took the card cautiously, stuffing it in my pocket without bothering to read it.
“What about?”
“The Professor stopped by today and spent a great deal of time with April, actually.”
My lips went numb first, followed by the rest of my body.
“He what?”
April tugged urgently at my sleeve.
“That’s right.
He works at the local university. The ‘Randolph Carter School for the Humanities’, I think it is called. He seemed to take quite an interest in April and her drawings.”
April tugged at my sleeve again while my body negotiated a response on autopilot. I followed Kim’s gesture to a pile of papers covered with April’s intricate and unmistakable language. My mind reeled, but my lips kept right on moving.
“Is that so?”
“That’s right,” Kim affirmed. “Sumire brought him over to meet her. I believe he is one of Sumire’s professors, in fact. He was very interested in April’s facility with languages. Frankly, I was startled myself. Do you realize that she speaks Korean?”
Paranoid Magical Thinking (Unknown Kadath Estates) Page 11
