Paranoid Magical Thinking (Unknown Kadath Estates)

by Zachary Rawlins

  It was filthy inside and smelled of sweat and fried food, but that was to be expected. If pressed, I would have told you that four people lived in the two bedroom apartment, judging from toothbrushes in the bathroom and bedrolls in the living room, but a couple of them must have been out, because there were only two bodies. One of them lay in the kitchen, head partially caved in and the contents leaking all over the linoleum. I did my best not to look at that. The other corpse was in the bathroom.

  “Jenny?” I asked, unable to stop myself or look away “What exactly happened to this guy?”

  She joined me at the bathroom door, glancing inside with the pride of a craftswoman in her work.

  “Looks like he drowned,” Jenny offered innocently, retying her ponytail with a flexible metal cord.

  “Yeah, that’s what I thought, too. But, well… how did he manage that?”

  “Must have tripped and fallen.”

  “And then just… stayed there?”

  Jenny shrugged and crossed her arms.

  “You got eyes, right? How else are you going to explain something like that? Besides, I wouldn’t waste much pity on a guy who tries to get it on with a strange girl in the bathroom when he’s got a bed in the next room. Fucking filthy bastard. What kind of girl did he think I was, anyway?”

  I looked at his body, his arms rigid and half out of his jacket, his pants unbuckled and hanging partway down, one of his sneakers kicked off and forlorn on the blue bathroom rug, and felt a weird and uncharacteristic flash of pity. Whatever kind of girl he had thought Jenny was, I thought to myself, he had almost definitely been wrong.

  Unless he had expected her to drown him in the toilet.

  “C’mon,” Jenny urged, riffling through his pockets. “We need whatever these guys got. Especially…”

  Her grin got even brighter as she extracted the pistol, a Chinese knock-off of a Smith & Wesson revolver, electrical tape wrapped around the grip and the serial numbers crudely filed off. When I left the room, she was staring at the gun the way people stare at paintings in a museum, as if they can see something amazing there in the canvas that I cannot.

  We tore the apartment apart, occasionally tracking blood across the shag carpet, making a pile of guns, drugs and money that we found stashed around the filthy rooms. It was almost like my move-in routine, and I fell happily into the mindless labor, using a kitchen knife to tear the mattresses and spare clothing to pieces.

  There was a little money, which we split. My share was not anything like half, but I did not argue.

  We found many little baggies that I did not look at too closely. Those all went to Jenny, who probably would not have shared even if I had asked.

  There were four guns, none of them in great shape. After some deliberation, Jenny stuck with the .45, adding an even more dubious Czech pistol converted to fire 5.56mm rounds as a backup. She picked up a matte-black revolver, which must have dated back to the War, and weighed it thoughtfully in her hand. Then she grabbed me by my belt buckle with a grin, and shoved the barrel down the front of my pants.

  “Hey! What the hell?”

  I eased the barrel of the pistol to the side where the consequences of an unexpected discharge would be less horrifying.

  “Come on, Preston,” Jenny said coyly, reaching for the door. “You can’t always expect to keep your hands clean.”

  A moment later, I followed her out, pausing to take one last look around. It seemed weird to leave the scene intact, but I had worn my knit cap and Neoprene gloves, so I would probably be okay. Jenny seemed unconcerned with the very idea of law enforcement.

  When I was halfway down the hall, I heard the door click closed behind me, the barest metallic scrape startling me from my reverie. It felt good, having a clear purpose, a next step to take.

  Don’t get me wrong. I don’t like this sort of thing. However, if it had to be done, I saw no reason not to make the best of it.

  11. Displacement of a Fixed Volume

  The lowest observed adverse effect level. Radiant suffering, the cost of defining physiological parameters measured in tears, convulsions, bruxism, and insomnia. Pharmaceutical Russian roulette.

  “This is one big fucking building.”

  “I noticed that, actually. Somewhere around the third story. Which is now many stories below us, as I recall.”

  “How many of these offices do you figure are theirs?”

  I had wondered the same thing.

  “I ducked my head into a few on one of the lower levels. Nothing in them besides old papers and broken lights. I think maybe the rest of the building is empty.”

  “Be nice to know what floor they are on.”

  “Yeah, it would. Maybe that guy back at the bottom of the stairs could have told us, if you hadn’t been so busy stabbing him.”

  Sometimes even I get lucky. I looked up just in time to step out of the way of Jenny’s half-hearted attempt to kick me down the stairs. Not that I would have been in any less traction because she was joking around.

  Two more floors. My calf muscles were entirely replaced with lactic acid. I was so focused on forcing my legs to climb that I almost smacked into Jenny’s before I realized she had stopped at a big metal door, her face pressed against the inset window. I tried to look over her shoulder, but she pushed me back, more gently than I was accustomed to, her fingers lingering on my shirt.

  “You probably don’t want to see that,” she said, biting her lip. “There are things for asking questions in this room, and things for restraining someone who wanted to leave. They have been used recently.”

  I could only fall down so far. The smile I showed her was thin, but it had seen many miles.

  “It’s okay,” I said, reassuring her, for some reason. “I don’t think they would hurt April, not after they came all this way to find her. She wouldn’t tell them anything, even if they did. There’s nothing in that room she hasn’t seen before.”

  Jenny took a good, long look at me. I was familiar with it. It is the look people get when they see a glimpse of the real me for the first time. The only difference between Jenny and everyone else was she did not seem alarmed at all. She shrugged and stepped out of the way, but her hand stayed stretched out, brushing my shoulder as it passed with unexpected compassion.

  Then again, some people get off on scars. It takes all kinds.

  What was behind the window was bad. I will spare you the details. Sharing them would not do anyone any favors.

  Someone had spent some time tied to a chair. It had been a bad long time, judging from the fast-food wrappers that were scattered around the room. Even torturers get hungry. Whatever poor soul had been strapped to that horrible metal chair had suffered unspeakable violations, but they were still alive when they left the room, though someone probably had to carry them.

  “Not April,” I said, feeling the relief as a rush of delayed panic, suspended adrenaline hitting my system all at once and making my legs shake. “Whoever they had in that room, it wasn’t April.”

  Jenny glanced back through the window as if she expected something to have changed.

  “How can you tell?”

  “The restraints are in the wrong place. April is short. Her wrists wouldn’t be so close to the end of the chair arm, and her ankles wouldn’t be near to the floor.”

  Jenny stopped and looked at me again, reassessing. I let her work it out for herself, moving on past the metal door and on to the anonymous hallway next to it. If they were using one room on the floor…

  “You tie her to a chair before?”

  …then they were probably using others.

  “None of your business.”

  Snickering from behind me.

  “Sounds like fun. For one of you, at least.”

  “Shut up, Jenny.”

  “That what she’s into? Or is that what you’re into?”

  “Seriously, shut up.”

  “Sure, you’re talk like a big man now, but you were totally useless when it came to d
ealing with that guy downstairs…”

  I waved frantically at Jenny and she trailed off, her eyes narrowing, making almost no noise as she stepped lightly across the molding carpet to where I stood. I stayed far enough back that I could not be seen, but close enough to duck my head around the corner. I risked another look, realizing as I stuck my head out into the corridor that I was holding my breath. People probably do that a lot without realizing when they think they might be shot.

  Neither of the two men in suits at the end of the hallway noticed me, probably because their job was very boring. One of them was busy manipulating the touch screen of his phone, while the other had his back to the hallway he was supposed to be watching. He was having an intense conversation over an earpiece with someone that he was annoyed with, in a polite way, plugging his other ear with his finger so he could hear well. Jenny almost managed to topple me into the hallway with her attempts to look around me.

  “That’s a long hall,” she observed, pulling the .45 semi-auto from beneath her sweatshirt and releasing the safety. “No way are we doing this quietly.”

  “Yeah,” I agreed, uncomfortably aware of the gun I did not intend to use, a substantial weight in my jacket pocket. “But this has to be the place. Assuming Josh’s information was good, then April has to be in there…”

  “And the book too, right? The King in Yellow?”

  The way Jenny said it did not sound like a question. In fact, it sounded as if I had made a very big mistake, letting that book slip my mind.

  “Right, of course…”

  Jenny frowned, and I could tell right away that she was not buying it. Wheels in my head started turning, and I knew before I moved that I was doing something I would regret later.

  “Wait a minute, Preston…”

  I ignored her, and edged toward the corner.

  “We’re gonna need a way to get down that hall without getting shot…”

  Jenny sighed at my single-mindedness. Then she leaned past me to look down the hall. At a distance, our juxtaposition would have appeared intimate.

  “Yeah,” Jenny agreed glumly. “What did you have in mind?”

  “A distraction. Something to get them to come closer.”

  Jenny glanced around the barren, decrepit hall, littered with acoustic panels fallen from the ceiling and then ground into the carpet like snow-white popcorn.

  “Like what?”

  “I’m not sure,” I fretted, leaning forward to sneak another look. “Maybe, we could…”

  It was not a great plan, but I never got the chance to suggest it. Because I went tumbling headfirst into the center of the hallway, courtesy of a firm push from Miss Jenny Frost.

  The guards froze and stared in disbelief. I untangled limbs from each other and tried to get my legs back underneath me. Jenny laughed as if a sitcom had paid her to.

  I never even thought to reach for the gun at my waist. The guards had better instincts, apparently, because both of them went for their firearms while I scrambled on the mildewed carpet, stumbling toward a corner that I knew I wouldn’t make.

  The thing about being shot – people play down how much it hurts. They talk a lot about the sound, the noise, the fury and drama of a gunshot, but that is not what I found myself thinking about.

  The initial impact wasn’t so bad, a tiny fist punching instantly through my shoulder. I felt the bullet's progress through my flesh and the burning trail left behind. The sense of violation, a hideous awareness of the foreign object in my body, had more of an impact than the pain it caused.

  The bullet took a chunk of meat from my shoulder and I howled like a hurt child on a playground. The force of impact spun around me sideways, executing an involuntary pirouette as I fell. I caught myself with my hands, sending shooting pain down my arm from my wounded shoulder, but I couldn’t force myself back up. Instead, I lay helpless on the floor, watching my blood go pitter-pat on the beige carpet, waiting for the shot that would end my suffering.

  A gun went off next to my head, so loud that I would have sworn it exploded rather than fired. I expected to find that the explosion had peppered my head with white-hot bits of shrapnel. When I turned to look at Jenny, I figured her gun would be reduced to scrap and her hand to a bleeding stump.

  As it turns out, she was still shooting. I had just gone deaf with the first round she fired.

  Jenny had not wasted the scene I had made. Right about the time I was flopping around the hallway and wailing, she had come around the corner with one neat step, hugging the wall to make herself less of a target, her gun level and steady. She emptied her automatic, firing wildly to keep the guards down and scrambling, eliminating any chance of return fire. She tossed the gun aside as she moved forward, the empty pistol landing silently next to my leg.

  Jenny charged past me without a sideways glance, firing her revolver as she went, steadying the heavy gun with her free hand. It took me a moment to understand the pieces of chipboard and drywall flying all over the place, covering everything in white powder – then something clicked in my stunned brain, and I realized that the guards shooting back. With much more impressive guns than Jenny’s cheap revolver. I was utterly certain we were dead; I couldn’t even figure out how we hadn’t been shot a dozen times already. Nevertheless, Jenny charged as if she was a star forward and the guards were standing between her and a game-winning goal.

  I felt a sharp sensation like an insect sting on my forehead, then something thick and warm dripping down my face. My pants spontaneously lurched to the side, and there was burning pain along the outside of my thigh. Jenny had finished her run by the time realized that I had been shot again.

  While I considered doing something about it, Jenny made her move.

  I have been told that the thing to do, when being shot at, is to run straight at the shooter. Don’t try it just because I said so – I can’t swear it is the best way not to get killed. For all I know Jenny was crazy, stupid, or just plain confident. Whatever the reason, the guards never managed to hit her. She’d fired off all five bullets in the revolver on her way down the hall, without doing anything more than making them duck their heads. When she got close enough, she tossed the empty revolver at the head of one of the guards, and then leapt at the other while producing her jackknife from somewhere.

  I am not sure what she did to him. As I said, I was busy trying to wrap a traumatized brain around several newly acquired bullet-holes. All I know is that by the time I lifted my head, Jenny was moving toward the other guard, while the one she’d left behind thrashed around on the ground and screamed, his hands pressed to his bloody eyes.

  The guard’s shot went wide, punching a hole through her sweatshirt below her arm. Jenny drove her knife into his neck with a sound that reminded me of a watermelon splitting, wet and organic. He gave a muffled cry when she stomped on his instep, then grabbed his head with both hands, and hammered it against the metal doorframe. Jenny smiled to herself while he sunk slowly to the ground. Then she turned back to the first guard, who was trying to crawl away and hold his face together at the same time.

  I had to use the wall to prop myself up to get back to my feet. Inspecting myself, I was surprised at the relatively light damage. My shoulder was the worst of it, blood leaking out from under the bandage when I raised or lowered my arm. For some reason, it did not hurt at all, even though I could see glimpses of congealed yellow fat and white bone inside the wound when I moved.

  The trivial wound in my thigh, on the other hand, hurt tremendously. I pulled myself together and stumbled down the hallway to where Jenny sat on the twitching back of one of the guards, her knife embedded in his chest all the way to the hilt.

  She did not look happy.

  “That wasn’t enough security here,” Jenny said, wiping her nose and leaving behind a streak of blood. “Not for April or the book. This couldn’t have been the right place. You are a damn liar, Preston.”

  She was right, of course. The King in Yellow was probably never there to
begin with.

  We tore the place apart anyway. Jenny was uncharacteristically silent.

  I found what I was looking for in a neat little organizer stored in a drawer in a bedside table. A station, an arrival time, and a gate.

  A Black Train.

  12. A Fully Functional Model of the Human Heart

  I do not remember her expression at the precise moment when our eyes met – only the satisfaction in her voice when she said my name.

  The night was too warm for the tent, so she had thrown down a pair of foam bedrolls on the ground. Then she stripped wordlessly down to her underwear, then lay down beside me but just out of reach. I did not have the courage to try to touch her. Not long after I fell asleep, however, I woke up to find Jenny naked and pressed against me, her hands around my throat. I pushed her down by her shoulders on to the grass while her fingers raked my back.