From the Nerd, nothing. The tumble spider deftly twirled to bring another leg into range. Let him turn his head, Millennium thought, and grinned into the dark. Finally he cleared his throat.
“Wait there,” he said, muffled but no longer whispering. “I’ll come down.” He closed the window and pulled down the blind.
Millennium shoved her hands in her pockets and smiled up at the Small One spinning a crazy course down the wall of the house. It was well hidden by the time the Nerd appeared, but as Millennium led him to an all-night coffee place on the Drive she knew the tumble spider was following. For once the knowledge didn’t make her skin crawl. Maybe it was too busy crawling at the proximity of the Nerd.
“All right,” he said, leaning over the small table at her. “So you found me out. So we’re even. What are you going to do about it? And don’t give me any nonsense about going to the police. We both know that’s the last thing you’re going do.”
If she’d hated him lurking on the edges of her life, she detested him out here in the open, blinking at her with a nervous triumph. She said through clenched teeth, “Really. Why’s that?”
“Because,” he said, oozing smugness, “of the small matter of a warrant for your arrest back in London.”
“You are such an asshole,” she said, wonder in her voice. A pause to let his smugness solidify, then: “There is no warrant for my arrest. There never was a warrant for my arrest. I’m not even a missing person, you dumb fuck, I called my parents when I got to Toronto.”
Smugness fell away, leaving him blinking and pale. He shoved his glasses back up his little nose. “Yeah? Well— If you were going to you would have called the cops by now.”
“Yeah? Well—” she mocked him. “I can always change my mind.”
“You won’t.” The smugness wasn’t back, but the sneer he put on was just as objectionable. “You tell them I’ve been following you, you have to tell them why.”
She put on a smile every bit as obnoxious as his sneer. “You mean tell them about how you’re so hung up on me you’ve been following me around the country, committing bizarre acts of vandalism to get my attention and then putting the newspaper articles about them in your pathetic little scrapbook?” She put her head on one side and added sweetly, “You know, I think you’re right. I guess I should talk to them after all.”
He gaped, blue eyes bulging behind their lenses. “You can’t tell them that. It wasn’t me. You know it wasn’t me! It was them!”
“Who? The cops? Man, you’re even crazier than I thought.” She pushed her chair back as if to go.
“Them!” He slapped the table, slopping coffee. “You know goddamn well what I mean. The Little People. The Fair Folk. The Deeny Shee. Don’t you try to put it off on me!” He actually shook his finger at her. “Don’t you dare!”
What the fuck were the Deeny Shee? Millennium shrugged and stood.
The Nerd gulped. “There are others who know,” he said, voice wobbling. It was obviously his last card. “I’m not the only one. If anything happens to me, someone else will carry on with the mission. You won’t get away with this.” The last few words disappeared into a squeak under her glare.
“Mission! Are you completely insane?”
But she didn’t leave, and by the look in his eyes he knew he had her. She dropped angrily back into her chair.
He shoved his glasses into place and said firmly, “We have a right to know.”
“Bull shit.”
“It is not bullshit.” The obscenity was odd coming from his prim little mouth. “What is bullshit is people like you using Them for your own secret ends.”
“Using—” But she bit it off. Because she had, hadn’t she, that very night. Instead she said, “What do you mean, ‘people like me?’ What am I, a conspiracy of one? Man, you been watching too many reruns of The X-Files.”
“Oh, please. You think we don’t know about Lucy Woo in Los Angeles, or Peter Legrange in Atlanta? I’m telling you, we’ve been onto you for years.”
A thousand questions crowded into Millennium’s brain. Los Angeles? Atlanta? But the only one that made it out was, “Why?”
The Nerd blinked at her. “Why?”
“Why are you onto—us?” Us?! “Why have you followed me around all these years? What does any of this have to do with you?”
“It—we—it isn’t right.”
Looking into his confused, magnified eyes, she felt fatigue sweep over her. “What isn’t right, exactly?”
“That you have this, this secret power and—”
“Power?” Millennium gave a short laugh and spread her arms. “Do I look powerful to you?”
Blink, blink, blink. “I just mean— We all know there’s more to the world than what most of us can see, but you actually get to live there. Inside the mystery.” He looked down at the table, his voice dying to a sad mumble. “That’s all we want. We just want to see inside the mystery too.”
Millennium said nothing for a moment. The silence filled with the buzz of conversation, the hiss of steam, Dave Matthews singing Halloween. Then she said softly, “Your wanting doesn’t give you the right to anything in my life. Do you understand that? Take a look at yourself. You’re a stalker. Just because you’re not after sex doesn’t make you any more righteous, or any more sane.”
A tide of red swept up under his fair skin. “I’m not—” He gulped for breath. “I just— It isn’t fair! Don’t you realize how desperate the world is for a little magic, how badly it needs a miracle? You’re keeping it all to yourself and it isn’t fair!”
“Fair. Jesus. How old are you?” She propped her elbows on the table and leaned forward. “Listen. I don’t owe you a damn thing, but I’ll tell you this much. It isn’t magic, and my life is not a goddamn fairy tale. For Christ’s sake, you think I like living on the road, moving on every time the Large Ones start to wake up? They aren’t my friends, and they sure as hell aren’t anyone else’s.”
He looked up with a frown that pushed his glasses down his nose. He shoved them up again. “I don’t understand. How can you say they aren’t magic?”
“Look, it isn’t—” She’d never had to put her years of thinking into words before. “It’s not an invasion from Fairyland or the Eighth Dimension or whatever you pretend for your little game. This thing that’s been happening around me since I was a kid—and don’t ask me why they picked me, ’cause I don’t fucking know—it belongs to this world. Maybe it is the world, even. Maybe it’s the life we’ve been squeezing out that has nowhere else to go. Do you get me?” By his face, definitely not. “Think about it. We’ve been trashing the environment for centuries, right? Cutting down forests, putting up farms and cities and dumps and all the rest of that human crap. Whole ecologies wrecked, hundreds of species gone, nothing standing in our way. Well—
“In grade ten biology they taught us about evolution, about how species evolve out of other species to fill in the ecological niches, keep the whole thing going. But these days we’re running out of species to evolve from. And more to the point, we’re running out of time. Evolution takes forever, but the new ecology, the urban ecology, has gaps that need to be filled now. You understand what I’m saying? I mean, Christ, it’s in every newspaper you read these days, biological diversity, critical density of ecologies, interdependency, blah blah blah. All it means is there has to be enough life on the planet, doing all the different things living things do to keep themselves and each other going, or everything dies. Everything dies.
“And the world knows. It knows that plain old animals and plants don’t stand a chance against us humans. I mean, they tried, right? Rats and pigeons tried invading the cities, coyotes, raccoons—pests, we call them, but it’s just the world trying to mix it up, keep us from taking over and burying everything under concrete. But they aren’t enough. It’s too slow. So—” She shrugged and leaned back in her chair, more tired than before. “So the world’s trying something new. Something tough enough to survive the new e
cology. Something so tough it’ll maybe even be able to slow us down a little, keep us in check.” She drank the last of her coffee. Cold.
The Nerd was staring, his eyelids almost still. “Show me,” he said at last.
Millennium stared back. “Excuse me?”
“Show me.” He leaned toward her, something inside him taking fire. “Show me what you know. Let me inside the mystery. Let me see.”
The anger that had dissipated while she talked leapt back into her veins. This asshole hadn’t heard a thing she’d said. Fine. Fine. She’d show the fucker his mystery and see how much he liked it up close and personal. She smiled a thin, hard smile and stood. “All right. I’ll show you. And then you leave me the fuck alone. Deal?”
He gulped and shoved up his glasses. “Deal.”
After the bright cafe, the construction site was a pit of blackness ringed by a plywood fence. Without the Small One to guide her, Millennium had to grope to find the gap that would let them in. Inside the mystery, she thought vindictively, listening to the Nerd squeeze his bulk through the splintery hole. As her eyes adjusted she could make out the pale blur of his face, the hand that pushed at his glasses, but the excavation remained a sinkhole of absolute darkness spined with rusty rebar. And inside, something lightly slumbered.
Largest One.
“What—” the Nerd began, but she shushed him.
“Wait,” she whispered. “And whatever happens— Don’t. Move.”
Largest One. In Victoria, it had been One from the harbor that had woken one night, drawn by her presence. A shambling monster of barnacle-crusted planks, bones, and anchor chains bleeding rust, it had created havoc along the harborfront, terrifying sailors and whores and Millennium alike. She hadn’t even tried to deal with it. She just ran, like she always did, hoping it would go back to sleep without her around. They always had, up till now. She’d never deliberately tried to wake one—up till now.
“Hello,” she said softly into the dark. “Great One, Mighty One, awake!” Putting on a show for the Nerd. “Tonight is your night to rise. Come on. I know you can hear me. Wake up!”
The Largest One stirred. Millennium was peripherally aware of the Nerd’s adenoidal breathing, and even of the more delicate presence of the Small Ones creeping over the fence, but the core of her attention was on the great being half awake and half formed at the bottom of its pit.
“Wake up, you beauty, you darling. It’s time to come out, now. It’s time to walk in the night.”
The Nerd’s breathing stopped: he’d finally seen the Small Ones edging into the scant light around the rim of the pit. Millennium ignored him, and them. The Largest One was waking. A slow, deep scraping sound came from the pit.
The Nerd gasped. “What—”
“Shhh!” Her heart was pounding, exhilaration and fear.
Scrape, scra-a-ape, rattle boom.
The Nerd whimpered in his throat. The Small Ones stirred, fell still. The rain glowed with the city’s ambient light.
The Largest One rose from its nest.
A damp gleaming angularity of leg. Another. A third. The domed, folded bulk of its core. The muffled fall of earth, the scrape and boom of steel. It rose, unfolding its legs. And rose some more.
Deep in the blood-thrumming moment, a tiny door in Millennium’s mind opened on a glimpse of her past: eight years old, folding paper on the top of a scarred wooden desk. Origami. If some vast hand could take half a dozen dumpsters and fold them into a nightmare crab—too many legs with scissor-hinged joints and a body of eye-twisting folds—and if it could be incubated at the bottom of a muddy, garbage-strewn pit, and then wakened on a black wet three a.m . . . that might begin to hint at what the Largest One was, climbing up into the city night.
The Nerd whimpered again. Millennium didn’t have the breath to shush him. The Largest One paused. One long jointed limb stretched toward them with a faint gritty squeak. Dirty water pattered from the knife point at its end. It groped, delicately feeling the air. Wet mud spattered Millennium’s face. Frozen with fear, she could not even flinch. But the Nerd—
The Nerd screamed and turned to run.
Rattle snap boom.
He hung soft and small between two pincer legs, squeaking, before Millennium even registered the cold wind of the Largest One’s move. That fast. But then it fell still again, as if it didn’t know what to do with its prey now it had him. The Small Ones could have been so much trash. Another door opened in Millennium’s mind: her father, pinned within the harvester’s writhing frame. She gulped for air.
“Easy—”
The Largest One didn’t move, but she felt its attention land on her like a blow.
“Easy, now.” The words drifted out of her, gentle as the rain. “Soft little one, he hasn’t done you any harm. No threat, no harm. Just a sad little squeaker. You can let him go. There’s more to the city than him. There’s buses and bicycles and cars. Park benches. Bus stops. Traffic lights and street signs and hot dog carts. You don’t need him. You can just let him go. Can’t you? You beauty, you marvel. You can just let him go.”
The Largest One shifted with a slow hollow grating of joints. The Nerd hung silent and limp. God knew what damage those steel pincers had done.
“Please,” she breathed, to the One, to God. “I’m sorry. Let him go.” The rain on her lips tasted of salt. “Please.”
There was a stir among the Small Ones. The tumble spider crept into the Largest One’s shadow, tin can limbs like a tiny reflection of the other’s steel. Then another moved, and another—the rebar stickmen, the dumb shock absorber frog—in a creeping, supplicating dance, a little eddy of movement that drew away from Millennium to the far side of the site. The Largest One shifted again, still holding the Nerd but its attention following the dance. Millennium loved them for that moment, those crazy lost little beings doing what they could to help.
She wiped her face on her sleeve, still afraid, but suddenly no longer frozen by it. “Okay,” she said aloud. “Just let him down and off you go.”
The Largest One paused, attention wavering between her and its small cousins. Then, as quickly as it had snapped him up, it let the Nerd drop. His body hit the edge of the excavation and slid to the bottom in a shower of earth. The Largest One, no longer interested, scissor-scrambled up the other side. It stepped delicately over the plywood fence and was gone, Small Ones scurrying around its feet.
In the silence of the city’s hum, Millennium could hear them on the street outside, a rapid pitter-patter and an echoing rattle boom. She took a breath, and another one, and then dashed to the edge of the pit and down.
After she’d bought her ticket, she used a phone in the bus station to make two calls. The first one to 911, telling them there was a very dazed and somewhat battered fellow sitting in the middle of a construction site just off Commercial Drive.
The other was to her folks.
Press one to accept the charges.
Beep.
“Em? Where are you, sweetheart?”
“Hi, dad. Um, the Vancouver bus station.”
Sigh. “What happened this time?”
“Well, you know— Things.”
“Are you all right?”
“Yeah. Actually—yeah. I’m okay. Only it’s raining like a bitch. So I thought maybe this time I’d go south.”
“Like how far south?”
She took a breath, and realized she was grinning.
“Well, I thought maybe I’d give Los Angeles a try. There’s somebody down there I want to meet.”
A WOMAN’S BONES
Our second day in camp I walked out into the grass. I had forgotten the wind. Born with it in my ears, how could I forget? As constant as a mother’s love, unnoticed until it was gone. The wind, at least, I could regain. A vast current of cold air, it sang through the stakes of the surveyor’s grid laid across the barrows, boomed in the walls of the tents, hissed and thrashed in the grass. Listening to its voice I did not hear Dr. Cahill approach until
he spoke my name.
“I’m sorry to disturb you,” he said, always courteous, though as the leader of the expedition he did not need to be. “We seem to have some visitors.”
The camp was as it had been all morning: the circle of tall white canvas tents, the untidy cluster of smaller tents and blanket shelters, the neat line of lorries in between. Archeologists and workmen gathered around their respective fires for the midday meal. But beyond, to the south, a dozen horsemen sat their ponies on an invisible rise in the steppe, black silhouettes against the shadowless haze of the sky. The Alyakshin, come to protest the disinterment of those they would claim (falsely, by Dr. Cahill’s theory) as ancestors.
They were polite about it. Instead of riding into camp they dismounted where they were, a mile or more away, and began setting up a camp of their own.
“Well,” said Dr. Cahill, humor disguising his relief, “at least they aren’t riding in waving their spears.” He was not a tall man by western standards, with sandy hair and a beard trimmed to a point, and round gold-rimmed glasses that flashed and winked in the sun.
“They will wait for you to invite them into your encampment,” I told him. “They mean to be polite about this. It gives them the advantage,” I added, not sure he would understand.
“Oh, yes,” he said. “Just like my Aunt Hilda.” He slapped his hands against the pockets of his khaki jacket, as if confirming he was equipped to handle the situation. “Shall we go?”
“Better, perhaps, to give them a little while to get settled.”
“A little while,” he repeated, a twist to his mouth that I’d seen often enough on the journey out. It is as hard for the English to live outside the efficiency of clocks as it was for me to learn to live within it.
“An hour?”
He nodded, looking at his pocket watch as I looked up at the sun, a brilliance behind the high white haze. “We can finish the preliminary survey today, start digging tomorrow,” he said, as if the Alyakshin protest had come to naught before it had even begun.
In the Palace of Repose Page 8
