The Karma Booth

by Jeff Pearce

  “Andrew,” prompted Tim, losing his patience.

  “Okay, okay. Listen… Thirty-nine years ago, a wild grizzly bear in Montana mauled a tourist on a camping trip and was put down. It was one of those freak animal attacks—the bear just came out of nowhere and slaughtered the guy. No reason for it. I mean, the tourist wasn’t being an asshole or doing anything wrong like taunting the thing. You with me? So around that time a database got started for protected wildlife species, and the bear got all kinds of tests done on it, and then it got carved up, and tissue samples were sent to the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Maryland. Some records are with the Center for Disease Control, other places…”

  “That’s very interesting, but why do we care about a bear attack in America decades ago?” asked Crystal.

  “Because I got to thinking about the snow leopard attacks on that guy and the old lady,” explained Miller, standing up and gathering his notes. “You asked for samples from the victims, Tim, but you neglected to ask for samples or tests done on the animals.”

  Tim and Crystal traded a look.

  “The animals?” asked Tim. “Why would you want tests on the animals?”

  “Jesus, you guys don’t see it. It’s right there in the report from Delhi. Those snow leopards went after the old woman and the guy. The folks in that village said those cats went after them specifically.”

  Tim shrugged. “I know. It’s creepy, and we’ve talked about it ourselves, but we still don’t understand where you’re going with this.”

  Miller tugged on a shock of brown hair near the base of his scalp, a brief gesture of nervous self-destruction. He was still frustrated, still unable to say what was wrong. He hammered his fist on the table. Then he snatched up two sets of stapled pages and placed them side-by-side.

  “They look pretty much the same to me,” said Tim. “Are they from the same patient or something?”

  “No…” Miller flipped each stack of papers back to the cover page. “These are both scans of human brains, okay? Only the one on the left is the scan for that damn grizzly bear in Montana!”

  Crystal was shaking her head. “That… can’t be possible.”

  “Welcome to where I’ve been for the past three hours!” snapped Miller. “Hey, we share hormones with mice, pigs, all kinds of other critters. And scientists have been fooling around with hybrids—chimeras—for years now. The guys at Stanford grafted human glial cells into newborn mice, but this…This! We are talking human brain structure in another species! The shape of the entire brain is wrong for Smokey out in the woods! It’s insane! And it gets worse…” He trailed off, turning his back to them, giggling as if to cover embarrassment. “I’m a fool. I’ve done something wrong, or they’ve done something wrong, but it’s all there.”

  They stared at him, waiting.

  “You haven’t guessed yet?” asked Miller. “Two scans, remember? They’re both for Emmett Nickelbaum.”

  “What are you saying?” Tim asked, utterly bewildered.

  “I’m saying—and I can’t believe I’m saying it—that Emmett Nickelbaum used to be that grizzly bear.”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Crystal fell into a chair. “No. No, no—this can’t be right. If you could tell me a person was once a fish or a bird or vice versa, there would be more. Just the human brain scan thing alone—”

  “You tell me!” barked Miller. “This breaks every scientific rule I know about biology, genetics… I mean, shit, what about the sheer common sense of scale? Brain capacity plays a role in allowing higher functioning, so how the fuck would this even work if someone comes back as a bird or a fish or whatever? The structure could be the same in theory, but cognitive abilities would be extremely reduced, and… I mean, shit, do we run CTs on every damn wolverine or camel or bear or gorilla from now on to look for your Uncle Charlie? Why would you before? However this happened, there must have been a glitch in the system, the grand scheme, and maybe that’s how we stumbled over it. We wouldn’t know of this until…”

  Until the Karma Booth.

  “Oh, God,” said Tim.

  “What?” asked Crystal.

  “Mary Ash,” he explained. “She knows. Somehow she knows this! She told us when we visited.”

  Crystal was still confused. “How? She was so cryptic. I mean, she did say she carried Nickelbaum in her head.”

  “Yes, she did, but remember what else she said? May twenty-third, he eats fish. May twenty-fourth, berries of some kind, I don’t know what they are. May twenty-fifth, fish again, but you’d expect that.”

  “The diet for a grizzly bear,” Miller put in.

  Crystal shuddered. “Oh, my God…”

  It was a macabre joke, thought Tim, except that Mary Ash had been deadly serious in her casual recital. She had rattled off from her impossible otherworldly memory the mundane facts of Emmett Nickelbaum’s life in his previous incarnation. She had all the events linked to individual dates because, as she had plainly informed them, she carried him in her head. She carried all of them, every single soul. And damn it, she’d told them, but they just hadn’t put it together.

  “Fish again, but you’d expect that.” And then she had moved on to an incident in the life of Crystal’s father.

  “I don’t understand,” said Crystal, her voice cracking with feeling. “She talked about Nickelbaum, and she sounded mad—like a schizophrenic. But then she started talking about my father. My dad!”

  “Contemporaries,” said Tim with a flash of insight.

  “What?” she demanded. “Tim, what are you…?”

  “Thirty-nine, forty years ago,” he explained. “Mary Ash has the ability to rattle off your bio for any day, for any minute. She jumped from talking about Nickelbaum in his previous incarnation to where your father was at the same time. She picked a fixed point and told us what was happening with each soul.”

  “She’s making sense,” said Crystal softly, understanding. “Sense from her weird perspective, because she sees it all.”

  “Yeah.”

  Mary Ash, their haunted lens on the past. Offering the dark day of racism against Crystal’s father while miles and miles away, simultaneously, Nickelbaum had foraged and hunted and lumbered his way back to the soundless screams of his true nature.

  Tim looked to Miller. “You mentioned the snow leopards in Nepal.”

  Miller shrugged. “The cats were put down, destroyed. That’s what the Indian authorities say. We’ve got nothing to test. But I think…”

  “They used to be human, too,” Tim finished for him.

  “Yeah. The way they went after their targets. And they were targets, not just prey.”

  “What do we do with this information?” asked Crystal. “I mean, how do you tell the world? Do you tell the world?”

  She instinctively turned to Miller, who went back to clasping his hands in front of his face, still overwhelmed.

  “I don’t know,” he mumbled.

  Then she stood, seeming to gather her strength. “Maybe that can wait. Here’s a better question: How do we use it? It tells us more about them all, but I’m not sure what it says.”

  Now she was looking to Tim for the answers. He didn’t have any. It was almost too much to comprehend. Life after life after life.

  He thought of Daniel Chen, returning as that little blond boy who did not seem to belong in this world, unable to communicate except through the excruciating beauty of mixed senses. How many lives do we get? How does that even get determined?

  And if it were true that Emmett Nickelbaum had gone from animal to human form, he had still remained a beast. So what were they to make of those religious doctrines of the East that claimed you earned your way up from the dung beetle and the goat?

  The Booth. The Booth broke more rules than they could have imagined.

  “I don’t know what Andrew’s findings will mean for all of us,” said Tim. “Who can dare to even guess? Maybe the public got the name right. It is a Karma Booth in a way, screwing up
the natural karma of human beings.”

  They all fell silent a moment.

  “Wait a minute, wait a minute,” said Crystal. “Mary Ash is afraid of Nickelbaum coming back. But the Karma Booth exchanged him for her—it ripped her back from wherever she went after she died. Either he went there, or wouldn’t he bounce back to a lower incarnation?”

  “She said it herself to us,” Tim reminded her. “He’s not part of the cycle—same as her.”

  “But guys, none of the other killers are who were sent through a Booth!” argued Miller. “Why he’s so special? Geoff Shackleton’s murderer, Cody James, all the others… We haven’t, like, seen them or heard about them returning. I mean, have you?”

  “No, that’s true,” admitted Tim. “But I got a terrible feeling about this. Maybe, just maybe, Nickelbaum had help coming back. He was a genuine psychopath, and who do we know who recruits psychopaths?”

  She caught his meaning and shivered. “Limonov.”

  “Viktor Limonov is the only person we know to ever go through a Karma Booth and pop right out, with nothing happening to him,” said Tim. Then he added quickly, “That we know of. Okay, suppose there’s an in-between stage, a waiting room, a place that’s… I don’t know. If you like Dante, a Purgatory of sorts. Zorich and Tvardovsky were human believers—Limonov woke them up to their true nature. But when Limonov stepped through the Karma Booth, he went in and showed Nickelbaum how to come back.”

  “That’s a lot of conjecture,” said Miller.

  “After the bomb you dropped on us today?” asked Crystal, holding up his findings. “I could almost believe anything now!”

  “Nickelbaum matches the description of the man who put the dogs on the boy,” Tim pointed out. “I know it’s thin, but he fits. And if it is Nickelbaum, he has no motive to go after that boy except as a task for Limonov. Mary Ash is convinced he’s back in this world. But Nickelbaum was an auto-mechanic, not very bright, just pure sadistic appetites and cruelty. I’m convinced Limonov is using him as a pawn.”

  Miller sat up, clapping his thighs, his voice bitter. “This is great. This is just fucking great! Psychos come back and can’t die, people walking around with weird shit happening… Terrific! I helped set off a worse disaster than global warming and nuclear holocaust. The whole fucking universe gets screwed! How do we fix that?”

  “We’ve still got an ally,” Tim reminded him. “We got interrupted with Leary and his demented crusade, and so we’ve got unfinished business.”

  Crystal read his mind. “Emily Derosier.”

  “We find her,” said Tim, “before Limonov and his cronies murder her like the others. I, for one, never like to keep a lady waiting.”

  That night, Tim trudged wearily back to Exiles Bound, hoping to chat with his old friend, Ron, for a bit of conversational comfort food. But when he reached Rue de la Parcheminerie and Saint-Jacques again, he grew annoyed. Not a gray sedan this time—a different car, but it was parked with its engine running, and he knew, he just knew, it was idling across the street for him.

  “Hey!” he shouted. “Hey, what do you want? You want to talk or play games?”

  He jaywalked in a self-righteous march across the street, but before he could bang on the windshield, the driver got out and raised a hand for him to calm down.

  “Crystal? Jesus! What the hell’s going on?”

  “Tim, please get in the car before you make a complete scene.”

  He slipped into the front passenger seat, and she turned the engine off. “Right, listen to me. I’m not here over you, I’m here for Emily Derosier.”

  “I thought we’d built up some trust,” he said tartly. “Especially after what happened in Northern Ireland. Crystal, we’re supposed to be finding her together.”

  “Listen to me, Tim. You are very good at what you do, the whole analysis thing, but you nearly got your ass blown off outside the Beaubourg. I told you before: when there’s any kind of danger, leave it to law enforcement professionals. This is what I do. Watch the bad guys, go after the bad guys—”

  “We don’t even know if she is a bad guy,” he broke in.

  “No, we don’t. Fair point. But I’ve seen this before, yeah? I’ve seen plenty of times how a witness or suspect can have a go at messing with someone. And I think your judgment is impaired over this woman.”

  “You don’t find it interesting that she comes from almost a hundred years ago and walks back into our time?”

  “She’s playing you!” said Crystal. “She researches you at the library. She leaves that weird octopus-skin or whatever painting for you at the hotel. The appointment on Thursday is with you. I happen to think we should find her and talk to her on our terms, not hers. She’ll know the police will show up at the restaurant—she can anticipate that. Easily. So I reckon she might pop up when you’re unguarded, maybe at one of your old haunts. Here…”

  She passed him a printout of a web page. “Do you remember this? The article’s about your mate, the bookshop owner, but you’re mentioned in it, and there’s you in the photo with the others. ‘The unique bookstore was saved from bankruptcy when a group of friends stepped in to offer Ron James a much-needed infusion of capital.’ Well, nobody does that unless they shop at the place. It doesn’t take much to figure out you visit here, and I bet she might come around to check.”

  Tim stared out the windshield. “Well, then we have a problem because you’re not the only one who got this idea.”

  He pointed across the street.

  “Oh, no.”

  Lantern Jaw. Same broken nose, same constant menacing threat in the eyes. Dmitry Zorich. He was no longer in a suit but a plain brown windbreaker, T-shirt and jeans. He was headed for the bookshop, his hands stuffed in his pockets.

  Crystal got out of the car. “Stay put,” she ordered. “Call the police.”

  He yanked out his cell, but he’d be damned if he let her go all by herself against a demented Russian mercenary. Call it macho bravado or chivalry, but either way he couldn’t just sit there. Plus his friend Ron was in the bookshop, a retired antiquarian who wanted nothing but to sip his Scotch while enjoying a quiet life and tending his books. Christ, he thought, if his friend got hurt, it would be his fault—

  He ran up just as Crystal informed Ron to leave as quickly as he could. The silver-haired bookseller was in the street now, looking confused and in mild shock. He was even more surprised to see Tim sprinting across the street to him.

  “Ron! You okay? You need to get out of here!”

  “Tim, what the hell’s going on? She says she’s a DI with the Met—we’re in bloody France! She pulls out a gun and—”

  “Ron, there’s no time. Get up the street and try to flag down a cop car. She really is with the London police. Go now. Go!”

  And as his friend mumbled a defensive “All right, all right,” Tim opened the door to the bookshop.

  The glass pane above his head exploded—gunshot. He dove for the floor.

  Beyond the overstuffed shelves and messy piles, he couldn’t see Crystal or Zorich, but there was another loud crack, and this time wood splintered and sheared away from a display cabinet. Where was Crystal? He still couldn’t see her.

  There was a back fire exit, but either Zorich didn’t know this or he had to shoot his way to get to it.

  Footsteps. Running, tripping over something… And another shot.

  Then he heard a high-pitched grunt and fumbling, and there was a metallic clatter. Bodies collided against the back wall and framed photos were bounced off their nails, shattering on the floor. Tim rushed in, having to turn sideways to get past the wooden ladder, and he spun around the corner to see Dmitry Zorich. The Russian yanked a vicious little blade out of a hidden sheath under his sleeve and slashed out at Crystal. Both their guns had been lost, knocked to the floor in the struggle.

  The blade sliced across her belly, and she yelled and jumped back. But there was little room to maneuver in here, and as she slipped to the floor, Zorich cro
uched and slashed again, slicing her right arm. Now he stabbed out to finish her off, and Tim kicked a thick English dictionary soccer-style into Zorich’s head, which bought Crystal two seconds of distraction to scramble out of the way.

  As the Russian went from surprise to full-blown hatred at his intrusion, Tim realized he had no other trick or weapon to save himself. Zorich sprinted towards him, and Tim spun around behind the shelf and pressed his weight as hard as he could—

  There was a thudding cacophony of books raining down, and the Russian growled and slipped out from underneath the fallen slab of wood. Then Tim heard his quick footfalls along the creaking floorboards. Zorich was trying to find his way through the rabbit’s warren of other shelves to escape.

  “Cops are coming, Zorich!” he shouted. “You don’t have a lot of luck in places like this, do you? Bookshops, libraries—she’s not here, and we know who you are now!”

  He dropped to his knees, looking for Crystal, and after a second, he found her already tying a makeshift tourniquet around her arm with a handkerchief. She was breathing hard, gritting her teeth against the pain of her slashed stomach. The wounds Zorich had inflicted were superficial, but they were enough to take her out as a threat to him.

  “Are you all right?” he whispered.

  “What did I say?”

  “Let the nice psychopath carve his initials in your arm?”

  “You’re not my bloody backup!” she snapped, but he sensed she was more embarrassed over getting hurt than truly angry with him. “If there’s a way out the rear, take it. Even if he gets out of the shop, we’ll have him this time.”

  “Yeah, like last time. He got away from a full contingent of cops in a public square!”

  “Tim.” His name as both warning and plea. “That’s bloody commando knife fighting he used on me. Don’t you dare take him on!”

  “I’ll just delay, I won’t fight,” he promised.

  “Tim!”

  You’ve got to do something, he told himself. Doesn’t have to be goddamn heroic or even brilliant, but the bastard was dangerous, and that outweighed his fear. As he stood up, he spotted Crystal’s fallen Glock 9mm that had slid under a cabinet of first editions. She was hurt. He wasn’t fooling himself; it really was up to him. But he would use the gun only if he had to.