I laughed as rudely as possible.
“You guys are too much. What is April’s mother’s name? Sorry, Margaret. I meant Margaret’s mother.”
“Polly Essex, and she would very much like to…”
“You have to be kidding me,” I laughed, barely able to breathe. “What a ridiculous name! Can’t you guys make up better fake names?”
“That woman,” the smoker growled, hiking up his pants, “is a mother, you piece of shit, a mother who is crying her damn eyes out right now over that little girl. You sure you wanna laugh about it, asshole?”
“No,” I said somberly. “That story was very sad. Would you like to tell me a funny one instead?”
“You bastard,” the red-faced man snarled, coming at me again.
I did not bother to turn the other cheek. The smoker got tired of hitting me eventually, though not as quickly as I got tired of it. The Good Cop sat patiently, watching the entire thing as if were a television show that was only barely managing to hold his interest.
“Enough,” The Good Cop said curtly, waving the smoker off. “Mr. Tauschen, we have all the time in the world. No one will come for you; no one can help. You have been misbehaving again, haven’t you? We can help you with that. We know that you don’t want to hurt anyone…”
“You’re wrong,” I said cheerfully. “There are at least three people that I want to hurt right here.”
“Oh, come on now…”
“You did read my file, right?” I snarled at the placid face of the man who had found me. “What is it you think I won’t do for her?”
“For her?” The Good Cop snorted with contempt, nostrils flaring as his act disintegrated to open contempt. “Hardly. Whatever delusions of grandeur you are suffering from, you are nothing more than a kidnapper. Tell me, Mr. Tauschen – why do you want Margaret? Are in love with her? Do you think that you are saving her?”
“You idiots,” I laughed. “Do you seriously think you can confuse me?”
“What have you done to her, you sick piece of shit?” The smoker socked me a good one in the stomach before I could even contemplate an answer. He followed that with a backhanded slap to my lips that made my eyes water. “Probably the only way you could get some action, right?”
That was a little too close to home for comfort. Maybe he saw me wince, because he seemed encouraged.
He smacked me again.
“Or maybe you think you are some kind of goddamn hero…”
“No.” I spoke with bleeding and swollen lips. “Though I did meet one recently.”
The Good Cop shook his head as if I were the saddest thing he had ever seen.
“We want to help you, Mr. Tauschen. And you I am afraid that you do need help. Before we can do that, though, we must return Margaret to her family. Be honest – are you going to tell us where she is?”
Can’t lie all the time.
“Not a chance.”
“Alright,” the Good Cop said resignedly, waving for the bearded man with leaded gloves to join us. “If we have to do things this way, then we do. My friend is very skilled. He will hurt you, but you will not die. It would be easier for everyone if you told us where Margaret is now. You will, eventually. You could do it now while you still have all your fingers and toes.”
“Very frightening. One question,” I said, smiling at him so that he would not notice what my hands were doing, now that the bearded man had finally moved from behind me. “Why do you genius detectives think I didn’t change my last name?”
“What?”
The poor bastards appeared genuinely puzzled.
“Come on. You didn’t even think about it? I knew you guys were chasing me. Why do you think I wouldn’t at least change my last name? Seems like the first thing somebody who didn’t want to be found would do.”
My hands were already loose, but I had to take a second to slip on a concealed pair of blue latex gloves, no mean feat with my hands behind my back. I had already touched too much stuff in the room to get away without completely wiping everything down, but doing this sort of thing, I just felt better with them on. The right tools for the job, I guess.
“Maybe because you’re a fucking nut,” the smoker huffed.
“I don’t know, Mr. Tauschen,” the Good Cop said curiously, while the bearded man took his tools out of one of those old black leather doctor’s bags. He made sure I could see every one as he removed them – pliers, bolt cutters, razor blades and a blowtorch – hell, he looked ready to open a hardware store. “Why didn’t you change your name?”
“Because I wanted you to find me, you stupid bastards,” I said, casting aside the cut zip tie as I stood. “Because I wanted you to.”
About then they must have noticed the scalpel my gloved hand, but it was too late for them to do anything about it.
***
Cleaning took most of the evening. My side was leaking all over the place, and I kept getting waves of terrible cramps that made it impossible to do anything but hold still, breathing through clenched teeth, until they passed. April’s texts grew frantic, but I continued to respond with platitudes, if I remembered to respond at all. I used all of the bleach I found under the sink wiping the place down, but DNA is a bitch and I wasn’t satisfied with the job. I went out and found a car in one of the nearby alleys, a tired Honda hatchback, and used a length of rubber tubing from the bearded man’s bag and a fuel can I found in the closet to siphon some gasoline.
I made it back up the stairs without passing out, though it was a near thing.
I was careful not to slop gas haphazardly around the room. I put down one painstaking coat of gasoline across the place instead, a reeking sheen that made me cough and my eyes water like faucets. I turned the stovetop on full blast without tripping the pilot light, leaving it ominously hissing away in the kitchen while I worked. I tried to move quickly, but my head was spinning long before I stood outside the front door, tossing one match after the other from the book I found collecting the contents of the red-faced man’s pockets. Fires are, in my experience, surprisingly hard to light, and this one was no exception. The seventh match caught, and I headed for the street.
The rain wasn’t quite as intense as it had been earlier, but it had done its work well. The street was empty and quiet. There was no one to see me descend the stairs, look both ways down the unfamiliar road, then limp down the street in the direction of downtown. Chances were the neighbors would be all right, assuming there were any. The rain would hamper the fire’s progress everywhere but inside the room I wanted destroyed. As long as they were light sleepers and didn’t asphyxiate before they woke, they had as good a chance as most people did at making it through the night in this city. I passed the nearest train station, the hateful rain beating down on my head and soaking through my jacket, before I heard the sirens.
I hate the rain. Have I already mentioned that? I spent a winter in Seattle, much of it homeless due to a series of not particularly comedic romantic misunderstandings. One of the kids who huddled in a porch with me near Pioneer Square told me that because it was at sea level, the rain that fell on Seattle was actually well below the freezing point. Only altitude kept the rain from becoming snow. It certainly felt like the truth on those frigid nights. Nevertheless, I plodded on to the next station, where I could be sure that no one would ask difficult questions.
The streets were slightly less desolate at the edge of downtown, but there were still no more than a handful of people huddled underneath umbrellas or wrapped tightly in waterproof gear. Some of them spared me a leery glance and I was not surprised – my face was a mess, after all, and I had opened up the wound in my side, the wound staining my t-shirt brownish-red. My jacket was torn and insufficient for the weather, but I pulled it around me as best as I could to try to hide my sorry state. I would have liked to duck into a store to buy new clothes, but in my current condition, I was afraid that they would call the cops.
I would, if I bumped into someone who looked the way I d
id right now.
The walk to the next train station was a miniature odyssey, my ribs creaking with every step, always on the edge of blacking out. At one point, I came to with my head and shoulder leaning against the bird-shit stained concrete of an overpass. I had no idea how long I had been there or how I had come to be in that position. I gritted my teeth and forced myself to continue on, a fever running rampant inside my head, rattling my thoughts with a sound like glass falling on metal. I caught a reflection of my face in a side-view mirror on a parked car, but I felt no sense of recognition, only horror and revulsion.
Walking became my entire world, the process of putting one foot in front of the other the total extent of my thoughts. It was all I could do to maintain balance on my shaky legs. My eyes crossed, the world in front of me blurring and doubling, swimming back into focus to be consumed by flurries of black snow, whorls in my vision that left me stumbling and half-blind. People crossed the street when they saw me coming. It could not be very long, I realized, before someone I fell down and stayed that way. Nevertheless, I had to get back, had to move April before they found her.
“Objectively speaking, my friend,” an amiable voice said from beside me, “you are fucked.”
Swinging my head to the side was an endeavor. Imagine my disappointment when I found nothing but bare street, boarded vendor stalls, and a dingy white cat with half of a tail, looking at me with what could be mistaken for pity.
“I must be,” I agreed numbly. “I’m talking to a cat, after all. I must be fucking dying.”
“It very much looks that way,” he agreed, licking one paw. “You belong to Lovecraft, don’t you?”
There was nothing for it. I could not turn away from the conversation.
“Pardon me?”
“Lovecraft,” he explained patiently. “Black coat, yellow eyes, missing part of his left ear…”
“Oh, yeah,” I said, trying to wipe the blood on my hand on the wall beside me, not even sure where it had come from. “You mean Holly’s cat, right? I live at the Kadath Estates. I don’t belong to a cat, though.”
He cocked his head to the side. I wondered how I had not recognized him immediately. It was Snowball, the cat from Ulthar, covered layers of ash and dirt. His voice, however, was rich and regal, oddly noble for such a mangy stray. It was enough to make me wonder, listening to it…
“Is that so? What a pity for you, then. To whom do you belong?”
“April Ersten.” I was no longer sure whether I was hallucinating, going mad, or dying from blood loss. Alternatively, I suppose it was possible that I was actually having a conversation with a cat. “Maybe you’ve seen her? Short girl, long hair, never leaves her room. You probably haven’t seen her. Whatever. She lives at the Estates, too.”
“Does she?” Snowball scratched behind one ear while he considered it. “Then we had best get you back to her.”
I stared at the cat as if it was the first time I had seen one.
“Can you help? Because I’m pretty sure that I am dying,” I said earnestly, lifting up one flap of my jacket to show my leaking side. “And I really need to get back home.”
“Well, I can’t take you to The Estates,” he said slowly, with what sounded like genuine regret. “Out of my territory, you understand. Nevertheless, I can see you as far as the border of Ulthar. And, perhaps, someone else can take you the rest of the way…”
Ulthar. Almost home, then. Hang on to that. On to the ragged remnants of the white tail that danced in front of me…
“Why would you help me, Snowball?”
“There are any number of games being played in this city, Preston,” the cat said without looking back, picking his way daintily around the puddles on the sidewalk. “We have at play for a very long time. You don’t need to understand your part.”
“Well, I’d like to, if it’s all the same to you, Snowball.”
Can I cat sigh? Because it sure sounded like Snowball did.
“We are territorial by nature, Preston, and we like to toy with our food before we eat. This city is ours until the ocean comes to swallow it. Until that night, we will not allow anyone to interfere in our affairs. Not the Out Dark or the city beneath the sea, and certainly not your Institute, Preston.”
“What? I’m not following you.”
“Everything is permitted, Preston. Nothing is real.”
“Why does everyone keep saying that? I don’t even know what that means.”
“Why would you? Don’t worry too much about things outside of your control. Let me tell you something worth knowing, instead.”
Trudging along the sidewalk, weaving as if I were drunk, I followed a mangy stray and struggled to keep my eyes open while he told me things in his soft, ambiguous voice. He told me about a city perched at the end of everything, suspended above nightmare and dissolution, and another city, an ominous twin beneath the waves of the harbor where dead gods slept. Snowball spoke of other worlds and paths between them in dreams, walked only by cats and worse things. The stump of his tail swayed as he described The King in Yellow, a forbidden book that held a secret, the simplest secret of all: a way out. There was more, but eventually Snowball’s voice faded into a sound that reminded me of the humming of power lines. I may have fallen. I am not certain of anything except that there was blackness and more lost time.
I woke up with my cheek on the concrete. I had to peel myself off the sidewalk; my side was stuck to the ground and hurt like hell tearing free. I looked around for Snowball and could not find him. It took a few seconds longer for me to realize that I could see the bridge across the river, and behind it, the vacant tenements surrounding The Estates.
How had I come so far? Moreover, had I actually had a conversation with a cat?
Better not to concern myself with things that did not matter. I forced myself to my feet and continued my unsteady march home.
Cursing my suddenly unreliable memory, I groped my pockets blindly for my phone. That search went on for what seemed like a very long time, though I never actually found anything. I must have fallen again, because the next thing I knew I was at eye-level with a battered pair of sneakers.
“April?”
My vision swirled and mutated for a moment to match my expectations. April, her face etched in marble, delicate stone tears, and something terrible below her, the ground eroding beneath her bare feet…
“Who’s that? Your girl? ‘Fraid not,” said a hard voice, like flint striking on steel, ringing in my ears. For some reason, the first part of her that swam into focus was the spray of multicolored stars tattooed across her collarbone. My vision cleared enough to make out a girl in a red sweatshirt leaning against the concrete embankment fronting the canal. A stray lock of blond hair poked out from the side of her hood. “You ain’t that lucky.”
“Jenny,” I croaked, smiling as I said it for some inane reason.
“Preston, you weird motherfucker,” Jenny said, leaning out of the shadow so that I could see her popping her gum and grinning like a skull, her eyes bright and dilated by whatever she was high on. “You look like shit, man. What’s going on with you? You fucked up or something? Somebody roll you?”
“I’m glad to see you…”
Jenny’s expression vacillated between surprise and amusement, eventually settling on a sneer and rather ugly laughter.
“You crazy bastard! The last time we talked, I told you to fuck off. Most people listen when I say that. And nobody is ever happy to see me, not even Fenrir. What’s wrong with you?”
I managed to sit up most of the way. I couldn’t decide if that made my side hurt more, but that didn’t matter much in the balance of things.
“Aggravated an old injury,” I managed. My lips were cracked and my throat parched, and I wondered how long I had wandered. “I’m sick…drugged. Something like that. I need help.”
“Yeah?” Jenny sounded unimpressed, chewing her gum thoughtfully. She had gotten a black skirt from somewhere to replace her stained short
s, but otherwise she was dressed exactly as I had seen her last. “Okay. You want me to call somebody?”
I shook my head.
“That won’t cut it. I need to get back to the Estates.”
“You’re shitting me, right?” Utter disbelief written all over her face. “You actually want me to get you a cab? You are really pushing it, Preston. You should know that I am flat fucking broke, even if I felt like helping you. Aw, fuck it. But you are gonna owe me for this shit…”
Jenny sighed and reached for her phone. I shook my head again, wondering how long it would be until her bewilderment turned to violence. I did my best to talk fast with an addled head and a tangled tongue.
“I need to get home before they find April. If they found me, then they are going to get to her if they haven’t already. Please, Jenny. I need your help. But no cabs, no records, no witnesses. You’ve got to help me walk home.”
Paranoid Magical Thinking (Unknown Kadath Estates) Page 14
