CHAPTER NINE
“THIS IS WHAT happens!” I said, barely noticing the two front-desk employees looking up, startled, behind the glass of the lobby window. “You had to make an enemy, didn’t you? You don’t give a shit about people, fine. But you don’t give a shit about yourself, either! And it blows up in your face!”
“Where the hell did that come from?” she demanded. “What, like I’m in charge of what the stupid Society does? They’re watchers, it’s in their goddamn name!”
“I’m not talking about that! I’m talking about that bunker guy! He set up that… that fake protest or whatever, that herded us right towards the Society fuckers!”
“How do you know he didn’t do that the minute we took our eyes off him?”
“Why would he have? You’re the one who gave him a reason! And then you fucked up that too! You left him an outside line!”
“You can’t prove any of that! God, listen to yourself!” She spun, probably intending to stalk away from the hotel, but staggered instead and nearly fell. Reflexively, and hating myself out of reflex too, I grabbed her arm. She shook herself free.
“What are you doing?”
“I don’t want to stay here if the Society knows we’re here,” she said, and spat again, weakly, into the light skiff of snow. “You can stay here if you want.”
“I’m not…” I trailed off, feeling as sick as she looked. I’m not going to just leave you here, but my God, why not? Hadn’t I learned enough for the Society? What else could I possibly gather, what else did I possibly need to prove? What, that I could keep digging forever, that I’d never put down the shovel? That I’d just tunnel right into the core of the Earth? That when she eventually got nailed to the wall for killing half a billion people (and counting!), I’d insist on being right there beside her?
More than ever at that moment, watching her weave away from me down the alley, I missed the old days. When I knew nothing about what she really was, what I really was, what she had tried to make me into. When we were safe with each other. When the world was… well, it was never going to be safe, really, was it. But when we were alone, at least, in the universe. She had taken all that from me. From all of us.
“Come on,” I said, and followed her. “Come on. It’s fine. There’s nothing we can do about it anyway. And they’ll find us if they want to find us. Won’t they? Yeah, come on. Let’s go find a backup place.”
WE WALKED ACROSS the changing city, slowly, not encountering any more protests or marches (of course), getting the occasional dirty look from people out and about, as if them being out was any different from us. Strange grayish toads the colour of the stone curbs and statues hopped between buildings, apparently sluggish in the cold; a couple of the bare trees branched out with snakes as we walked. Several people, perhaps in an earlier stage of the infection, or just suffering one of its natural failures, began to transform, dissolve, struggle into the air, fall, slide to the empty streets and become a twitching heap of tentacles and eyes.
“Do you think we’ll catch it?” I said.
Johnny shrugged listlessly. “I don’t, actually. And I don’t know why that might be. Just a feeling that… maybe we’re… wanted for something else. And that merely turning into one of Them wouldn’t satisfy it.”
“Because it’ll be so much worse. Whatever it is.”
“So much worse.”
I was still thinking about it when we reached the other hotel half an hour later or so, another little jewel-box near the river, darkened, though they turned their lights on as we approached.
Making a show of it, they rejected her outheld credit card (Oh no, Miss Chambers, we know you, we trust you), I felt I knew how Johnny was seeing the world—as if I had possessed her, and was using her eyes. The darkness that shifted every time I moved my head, allowing only moments of clear vision.
Our room was much the same as the outside of the building—small, but plush, two small beds in dark purple and gold-patterned quilts identical to the curtains and walls. “What is this, protective camouflage?”
“Check for snakes,” she said, flopping onto the bed closer to the door.
“If there are snakes here, they’re fancy snakes. Fancier than me. I can’t kick them out.”
“Yes you can.”
“I’m a prole.”
“Revolt. Rise up. Overthrow the class of moneyed reptiles.”
“Which is you, by the way,” I added, as I kicked off my boots and headed for the bathroom.
“That’ll be the day,” she said, cut off as the door closed.
When I came back out, she was intently watching the TV, leaning forward as if she were about to topple into it. “What was all that screaming?”
“Shut up.”
“I did actually warn you, loudly, that there was a bidet in there.”
“Shut up.” I sat on my own bed, and stared at the TV too. BBC, volume low, captions on. “Did the grownups fix everything?”
She made a noncommittal noise. “Actually, attacks do seem to be tapering off. But... apparently protestors have been... breaking into scientific facilities, and causing some damage.”
“That’s not a protest,” I said. “That’s a mob.”
And by facilities, I realized, she included her own: there was shaky video, no flaming torches and no pitchforks but signs aplenty, and molotov cocktails sputtering against dark skies or invisible against bright ones, somersaulting onto roofs, cars, telescopes. People were driving cars through security gates, battering electrical fences with wooden rams, like something you’d see in a medieval manuscript. Harried guards fled as crowds spilled into low nondescript buildings, tumbled into the enclosures of telescopes.
“Jesus.” At least half the videos showed prominent CHAMBERS LABS logos somewhere. “What are they doing?”
“It’s interesting,” she said, not looking away, the colours of fires sliding across her face. “Nature did a study recently, the results were released around Christmas. About trust, and... perceptions of science, I guess, and scientists. Trust overall in scientists and scientific expertise has plummeted since the Anomaly.”
“Because they think scientists caused it?”
“Yeah. Also because there was no warning... there’s a persistent idea, they found, that scientists knew it would happen, and were trying to prevent it secretly, behind the scenes, but failed.”
I thought about that. “But that’s exactly what happened.”
“No, I know, but first of all, one scientist, which was me, and I knew for like... less than a week.” She toyed with the remote control. “And we did fail, yeah. We were so close to... to not having it happen at all.”
“We did our best.”
“That’s what worries me now. What’s happening now... Will our best be enough?”
I fell silent. We, our, our. We: as if we were still on the same side. I was still trying to decide whether it was true.
“After it happened,” she said, lying back on the bed and putting her hands behind her head, “I repurposed a couple of divisions to focus on detection, communications, advance warnings. It was so stupid, absolutely unbelievable. Perimeter fences with motion detectors, satellites to scan the space around Earth, sticking that facility on the moon. The unblinking eye: watching for danger! So, so ridiculous. As if anything would come from space. But we had to do something, and we had to be seen to be doing something.”
“Like the UN setting up that… special secretariat or whatever. Looks bad if you don’t participate.”
“Exactly. Exactly. But here we are. None of those other labs figured out what happened. Or how to prevent it. All the physicists, all the astronomers, all the colliders, the accelerators, the telescopes, every major piece of scientific equipment in the world that studies what things are and what things aren’t and what things are made of could be pointed at the Anomaly, and they would still never know. And if I tried to explain what I thought was happening now, they’d lock me up.”
“If
you had been locked up when you were a kid, none of this would be happening.”
“Yeah, but look at all the cool stuff you’d be missing out on.”
“I don’t need bionic eyes,” I pointed out.
“But the…” She trailed off, and pushed the remote aside. “I… I wanted to make those after the… after we got back last time. Because Rutger looked up the statistics, and so many people got blinded by the Anomaly. I thought people would want… and the brain implants too, for people who had neuralgia.”
“Yeah.”
“No, I mean… all those people who died. And the ones who tried to die and didn’t. And the survivors. Just from being exposed to that open gate for two minutes. Maybe that was how They got in, maybe that was the… the seeds of it. Their test population. People who had already been torn wide open, somehow, in some way, even if not physically, by the Anomaly. That would explain why it never really stopped in some places. Where… where They were experimenting, maybe.”
“Jesus Christ.”
She rolled over and looked at me, the eyes jittery in their bowls of shadow. “We should nap. We’re going to drop.”
“I gotta make some phone calls. I’ll be quiet.”
She yawned. “There’s a phone room downstairs. You can just charge it to the room.”
“Johnny. What happened to Dr. Huxley back there? Is it... it’s not what it looks like.”
She closed her eyes. “I think so. Yes. I think it’s exactly what it looks like.”
I said nothing. Of course. Of course that’s what they’d do. Not even a hostage, they wouldn’t call it that. Just a price. Of course you can leave, they’d say. If you pay up. Maybe children, if you had them. But they’d find someone else if you didn’t. They didn’t say it in the contract or the oath. What you said was: Never.
But there was a way around Never. And I had seen the bedroom, the clothes in Huxley’s TV room, I knew a man had lived there, much bigger than her. That sweater on the dresser. Like a sign.
“Okay,” I said unsteadily, watching Johnny’s eyelids tremble. “So she said: I want to go. And they said... what? All right, you can go. If you promise to... to not do magic ever again. And in exchange for one other thing...”
“Nick.”
“She had a husband. Didn’t she? And what the hell, I keep thinking. What could have been so bad about the job that she would give him up to quit? What? There’s nothing. Like, if I was going to quit my job, and my boss was like ‘No, you can’t, I’ll take your mother, I’ll take the kids,’ I’d go ‘Yessir, back to the keyboard, sorry I said anything.’ Nothing’s that bad. I can’t believe she wouldn’t have just... gone back. What’s the word. Backed down.”
Johnny’s eyes were watering, or she was crying; it soaked into the purple pillow, turning it black.
“Divitiacus,” she said at last. “Maybe.”
“What?”
“Who. An associate, supposedly, of Julius Caesar’s. Caesar thought he was a druid. He might have just been an ordinary maniac. Regardless, the name comes up in the records; he was known to the Ancient Ones. He wanted a covenant. They played with him... it’s fun to watch people want what they can’t have, I suppose. But the books say he persisted. He burned people to death, and he said he could tell the future from how they died, the shapes their bodies made... he called it ritual sacrifice to the gods. But what he wanted was Their attention. Anyway, he got his reward. And he wrote some very powerful spells when he got the real ability to prophesy based on those deaths. But his prophecies were destroyed, they say. And were never found. Despite the cost.”
I stared at her, trying to make my eyes focus. If I looked away, I thought for sure I would faint. Fix the eyes: fix the head. Carefully now. Why, how had I come to this place? Why had I agreed to work for these people? No, stop it. You knew. Part of you knew. And you signed anyway, thinking only of the money, the prestige, the new house, yes, but also her, her, her, getting back at her, thinking she’d never know. “You think the Society was making her kill people? They’re librarians!”
“Maybe. I don’t even know what really happened to her husband. Maybe he just left her.”
I was breathing hard again. God, all this hatred you carry with you, and you let it out, and you expect to feel lighter but you don’t; I felt as if I were encased in lead.
“There’s nothing you can do,” Johnny said, and yawned. “Close your eyes for five minutes. We’ll be okay here.”
When she seemed to be out (uneasily, muttering and twitching on top of the quilt), I crept back to the lobby and was shown to their phone room, a little padded cell tiled with laminated sheets bearing friendly instructions and diagrams in several languages.
“Would you like to bill to room?” the receptionist said brightly.
“Ye... no. No.” I gave her my credit card instead, wincing. The Society paid my phone bills, but I would have to expense the credit card. Although, not if the world ended…
After he explained how to call internationally, I tugged the door shut, feeling the silence increase inside the room till I could hear my heart beat, and then feel my stomach working to digest, and at last the movement of the blood inside my ears against the tympanum, a sound not like the sea reflected in a seashell but a crowd roaring in a closed space. Home first. What time was it there? The phone screen informed me it was 8:34 here.
I thought about Sparrow’s bunker, about the Cold War, dry paragraphs in a junior high social studies textbook. Millions of lives might have been decided there. If the government had been forced to take refuge, millions of lives might already have been lost. Sparrow chipping out the walls, humming as he welded, patched, spliced, reassembled. Putting the wards in, lugging a bag of cement home on his bike. The watching could wait. He had used tiles, Johnny had told me while I had half-snoozed against the wall of the console room: glazed all-over, self-contained, a framework containing glass marbles. Thinking that even if the place were flooded, for example, that the wards would not dissolve. Fired ceramic and glass were likely to survive a cataclysm. When the world ends, she’d chuckled sleepily, They will come back and dig up our perfectly-preserved toilets, and They will think we were a civilization made in a kiln...
“Hello?”
“Mom! Jesus. Hi! Are you okay, is everything okay?” I sagged in the chair, and let the tears flow, breathing carefully through my mouth.
“Oh, Nick! Hi, baby.” Her voice was high and nervous; I could almost hear her fighting for normality. It took all my strength not to simply hang up, stride outside, demand a cab to the airport.
“Are you okay?” I said again, drying my face.
“Well it’s… We’re fine, the kids are fine. Did you get my voicemail? I exaggerated a little bit,” she added, with a pained laugh. “The trees were fine, really. We just… well, we spent one night in a hotel. But we came back.”
“What happened? I didn’t get the voicemail.”
“It’s nothing, it’s nothing really. Don’t worry about us. How’s your conference? What’s the matter with your phone? Whenever I call, I just get the beep, and then the error message from Telus.”
“...It’s a billing error with work, it’s nothing. I, uh, borrowed a coworker’s phone to make this call, he’s from Europe or something. Are you all right? Is everybody all right? I’m sorry I called so late. Did I wake you up?”
“Yes, we’re fine!” But she was crying, holding the phone away from her mouth. Christ, I thought. Dad gone what, seven years ago, me the so-called man of the house, and now she’s there with Chris and Brent and Carla and I’m all the way over here, with fucking Johnny, fucking again, and… “It really wasn’t that bad. I think it’s mostly gone now. I’m staying out of the backyard, anyway. And the kids are fine. They’re not… Are you watching the news? American news?”
“Um, the TV in my hotel doesn’t work.” I breathed slowly through my mouth. It felt serpentine, dragonish. Breathing fire. Like at the archive: a flamethrower to back things into a co
rner. “Listen. I’m going to… we’ve got this program. At work. I’m going to call and see if they can come get you to somewhere safer. Not like last time. This isn’t anything like that. It’s… it’s employee assistance.”
“Baby, I’m sure that’s just for managers and whatnot. Now, you know I’m very proud of you and your job, but you can’t overstep your boundaries like that. Trust me, I know, I’ve seen it at enough places. They don’t like to see that. They want you to know your place.”
“I know. I know that. I know.”
“I’m glad to see Orlando is all right, anyway,” she said, gaining control over her voice again. “Cookie’s been searching about it on the internet, you know her. Are they feeding you? When’s your flight again? I can come get you at the airport.”
I scrubbed a hand across my face, the scratch of the unfamiliar stubble. The last few days seemed to come at me in a rush, a whirl of eyes and tentacles and wings, pain and terror, the glass teeth of a dragon nearly close enough to slap, the smoke still in my throat, still, somehow, still, and the feel of the cricket bat in my hand. Go. Go. Be with them: you’ve told them enough lies. It’s been a long time since they last looked at you with trust. You’ve done enough.
I can’t. I can’t. This is the world, it’s the whole world. But God I have never hated anyone in my entire life as much as I hate Johnny right at this second. She did this. She caused this. She drew a bulls-eye on us and drew Them in.
“Listen, Mom, with... everything that’s going on. My boss has asked me to stay afterwards. Go to some meetings. Meet some clients. We’re, um, we’re stretched pretty thin.”
A long silence. You’re such a bad liar, I heard Johnny say in my head, affectionate, reproving, a long time ago: a memory I had stored away like a commercial, unaware I had been watching it in the background while I had tried to do other things. You’re hopeless. Don’t quit your dayjob, you’ll never make it on the stage. You got the truth disease.
A Broken Darkness Page 19
