Vicious Grace bsd-3 Page 10

  We lay in the near darkness, and I traced my fingers along his flank. My mind felt clear and calm. Nothing was going to break into my little corner of peace and contentment. Whatever was under the hospital, it wasn’t here. I yawned, stretching my arms out above my head, and the joint in my spine cracked.

  “The thing is,” I said, resting my head on Aubrey’s side, “I want to go back.”

  There was a moment’s silence.

  “Back to Montana?” he asked.

  “Back to Grace,” I said. “I hate the idea of waiting and reading and poking around. What I want to do is head back in, find where this whatever it is lives, and face it down. I don’t know if I could, or if that’s what Eric would have done, or anything, really. But I want to go. I want to do something.”

  “Fight it out,” Aubrey said. The amusement in his voice told me he’d understood.

  “There are no problems that can’t be solved by enough duct tape and a hammer,” I said.

  “What a wonderful world it would be,” he half sang.

  Classical conditioning. That’s what Chogyi Jake had called it. It was true, everything I’d faced since Uncle Eric had passed his legacy on to me had eventually come down to violence. And even when I’d had the crap kicked out of me—and oh, I had had the crap kicked out of me—I’d wound up on top at the end. Evil vanquished, peace restored, nothing wrong that a few stitches, a couple handfuls of Tylenol, and a week’s rest wouldn’t cure. Something in my hindbrain had learned from that. Maybe not the right lessons.

  I heard Ex’s footsteps in the kitchen, the clink and gurgle of coffee being poured into a cup. Aubrey snuggled into the bed, his breath growing deeper and slow. The red numbers on the clock said it was almost two in the morning. Sleep seemed like a distant rumor to me. My mind kept going back to Grace Memorial: the strange angles of its walls, the windows staring out into the street like they were looking for something. The maze of corridors and rooms, twisting in and back on each other. Stairways that skipped whole floors or led to nowhere. It reminded me of something I’d heard about when I was a kid. A mansion built by a rich, crazy woman with false halls, stairways that went up to nothing and ended blind. She lived in a labyrinth so that the evil spirits would get confused. Grace was the same thing, writ large. Only it was also a hospital. The place where people go to be born and to die and to linger in the weird halfway place in between.

  And like a dog chasing a car, I wanted it.

  I didn’t think I could stand another day of going through Eric’s cryptic notes to himself and apparently random articles about everything from Jews fleeing Germany in the thirties to the communication signals of Argentine ants. Not to mention the unlabeled pictures of men and women and rooms. And those boxes of surveillance reports on Declan Souder. Or, no. Not Declan. The guy’s name was David. Why was I thinking Declan? Who was Declan Souder?

  I started grinning before I knew why. My one, delighted cough of laughter roused Aubrey enough that he opened an eye. He grunted a wordless question.

  “Declan Souder redesigned Grace Memorial in the 1940s,” I said. “He built the place. And what do you want to bet David’s his son?”

  TEN

  I would have lost the bet. David was his grandson.

  Chogyi Jake sat on the kitchen counter, a cup of green tea steaming between his laced hands. Ex sat at the table, squinting against the blasting light of early morning. Aubrey and I were splitting a blueberry bagel with cream cheese. Outside, Lake Michigan had an eerie mother-of-pearl look to it: water and mist and sunlight.

  “Nice work,” Ex said. He sounded almost disappointed. His all-night study session had also borne fruit. Looking through Eric’s Lisbon notes, he’d Googled every YNTH notation. Every city listed had a building or natural structure that might have worked as a second-stage prison, like Grace: ancient catacombs in Italy, a network of natural and constructed smuggler’s tunnels under a port town in Maine, the Winchester Mystery House in San José. Good, solid research that tended to confirm our view of what was going on, but no breakthroughs. My flash of postcoital insight rankled him a little, and the mere fact that it did made me want to tease him a little.

  “Really?” I said, my eyes wide. “Did I do good?”

  Ex rolled his eyes.

  “It is suggestive, at least,” Chogyi Jake said. “Declan died at the end of ’51. Daedalus-as-sacrifice has some very strong resonances, and it would tie the two layers of imprisonment together.”

  I took the last bite of bagel and raised my hand.

  “Too jargony?” Chogyi Jake asked.

  “Kind of, yeah.”

  “Two of the three things they did in ’51 are bindings,” Aubrey said. “The buried-alive part being the first, and the . . . the maze. The hospital itself. That’s the second. If this guy was the sacrifice that went into the coffin, it would help those two spells reinforce each other. There’d be a connection.”

  “It’s not proof,” Ex said. “But as circumstantial evidence goes, it’s not bad. And then there’s the fact that Eric was interested in his bloodline.”

  “Which he’d need,” I said, “if the point was to break whatever’s under Grace out, right? So we can start working with the assumption that Eric was looking to undo everything the Invisible College and their buddies did here. Crack the thing free.”

  “Very good, grasshopper,” Ex said, actually managing a smile. “Soon you will be able to take the pebble from my hand.”

  I looked at him blankly. Instead of explaining himself, he shook his head.

  “We don’t know why, though,” Aubrey said. “Or even what exactly Rahabiel is. Why it would attack Jayné.”

  “If it even did,” I said. “I’m starting to like the idea that it was the hospital that got pissed off at me. Allergic reaction to other magic, maybe.”

  “I don’t see what Eric planned to lock up in the cell he built,” Ex said.

  I pulled back my shoulders and refused to be discouraged. I had a lead, by God, and one I’d figured out for myself. If it hadn’t cracked the whole case open wide, that mattered less than the feeling of making some actual progress. That I could follow up on it without braving Grace Memorial itself only made it better.

  “Okay,” I said. “So what’s the plan for the day?”

  Ex spoke first.

  “I have a meeting with the hospital chaplain at noon,” he said.

  “You’re going back there?”

  “No,” Ex said. “Meeting him at a bookstore well off the hospital property. I won’t need backup.”

  “I was going to read and organize more of Eric’s notes,” Chogyi Jake said. “We still have two drawers we haven’t looked through. And I believe Kim was planning to call in sick and come help with that.”

  “Cool,” I said.

  “And you?” asked Aubrey.

  “I was going to take you and the laptop up to Waukegan and meet David Souder,” I said.

  “Saw that coming,” Ex said.

  “But before we go,” I said, “I want to make a couple phone calls.”

  Aubrey hoisted an eyebrow.

  “I want to see if they’ve cleaned up Oonishi’s dream data yet,” I said. “I’m wondering if there’s something in there our man Souder might recognize.”

  IT WAS a two-hour drive, and we didn’t get on the road until almost ten. Aubrey drove, and I sat in the passenger’s seat, my laptop open, replaying the cleaned-up dream file over and over. It wasn’t, I’d been assured, the absolute final version, but it was pretty great compared with the originals. The six feeds of Oonishi’s data had been put together, cleaned, sharpened, averaged, and then tweaked so that whichever one had the greatest level of detail in any single frame was given greater weight. The man I’d talked to was going through now and making the same adjustment within frames, so that if one subject had better resolution in the upper left and another in the lower right of any given frame, the relative weight of the image could be split between them.

  All i
n all, it wasn’t more than thirty seconds, but now I could see the soil sliding and shifting as the black coffin split open and the light poured out. The digital-imaging man had also sent an e-mail with four frames set apart from the flow of images. The details in the stills were as clear as photographs. The eye caught in a flash of light, clearly human only with an uncanny elongated pupil like a goat’s. The splayed hand, its palm out toward me, the fingers just too long to be right. A detail (he’d noted that it was the clearest single image in all the data streams, and it had only been really clear in two of them) of thin, pointed teeth like some kind of deep-sea fish. And then one thing I hadn’t noticed before; as the coffin split, in the instant between the fine-lined cracks and the whiteout of arcing light, there was a moment when the side of the coffin was lit and showed carved letters. In the moving image, they were just a moment of uneven texture. In the still image—captured, manipulated, sharpened—they were readable.

  Nomen mihi Legio est, quia multi sumus.

  The Bibles I grew up reading were all in English, but I didn’t need to Google this one to place it. My name is Legion, for we are many. Seeing the words there made the hair on my arms stand up and a vague, electric sense of vertigo swim at the back of my head. Bible stories were what I grew up with instead of comic books. Jesus casting the unclean spirits into a herd of swine and driving them over the cliff was for me like the Kiefer Sutherland version of The Three Musketeers had been for my college boyfriend: something that had seemed thrilling and mysterious when you were eight and seriously cheesy when you were twenty.

  It didn’t seem as cheesy now.

  “You okay?” Aubrey asked.

  “Yeah,” I said, closing the laptop. “Just ducky.”

  The streets sliding by outside the car seemed too normal to be true. Pizza Hut and Burger King didn’t belong in the same world with the thing I’d just been watching. When we stopped at the corner of Sunset and Northern, a blue Corvette with tinted windows pulled up next to us, pushing out a bass line loud enough to sterilize anyone inside. An old man with skin the color of weathered wood and white hair as short as his beard crossed in front of us with an air of utter superiority. I took a deep breath and tried to calm myself down. It wasn’t going to make things easier if I went into this freaking myself out.

  Souder Roof and Tile was tucked between a Payless shoe store and a three-bay car service joint called Merlin’s. The sign was jauntier and more optimistic than the building. There were only two cars in the parking lot, and neither of them had been made in the last ten years. Aubrey pulled into the space nearest the glass-paneled office door as the faux-British GPS voice told us we had arrived. He killed the engine. We sat for a few seconds, looking at the place.

  “Any idea what you’re going to tell this guy?” Aubrey asked.

  “Nope,” I said. “Figured I’d wing it.”

  “Sounds like a plan,” he said.

  Sounds like one of my plans, I thought, but I popped open the car door, and we headed in. The interior wasn’t much more inspiring than the outside had been. The cool air smelled a little bit like dampness and old fish. Carpet patterned in beige and brown almost hid a few old stains. The white walls were hung with pictures of houses sporting new roofs. The lone desk was topped with bright glass, an Apple computer, and a pile of three-ring binders advertising products like coal tar pitch, polyiso roof insulation, and waterproof caulk. The woman sitting at the desk looked up at us with bare surprise in her expression. The door closed behind us.

  “Hi,” I said. “I’m looking for David Souder. Is he . . . ?”

  I pointed at a door behind the woman with a plastic Staff Only sign tacked to it and started walking toward it as if the sign clearly couldn’t apply to me.

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” the woman said, shaking her head. “Big Dave’s not in the office today. Was there something I could help you with?”

  I smiled and tried to decide whether I believed her. Maybe forty-five, maybe fifty, she seemed like the kind of woman I’d grown up around: careful makeup lightly applied, bright blouse and skirt in a lemony yellow that didn’t quite suit her. An empty cross hung from the silver chain around her neck. Her concerned and helpful expression was so practiced that I couldn’t tell whether she was lying or not.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “It’s not a business thing. I just need to talk to him.”

  Her hands gave her away. I’d just let her off the hook, told her that whatever this intrusion into her world was about, it at least wasn’t her problem. Her hands should have relaxed, even if just a little.

  They tensed.

  “I’m really sorry,” she said. “I can leave him a message if you want.”

  “Cell phone number?” I said.

  The woman laughed, but there wasn’t much mirth in the sound. Instead there was something rueful. I glanced back at Aubrey. The slight pursing of his lips and the carefully blank expression told me he was seeing the same things I was.

  “More than that. I’ve even got his cell phone,” she said. “Big Dave leaves it in the office when he’s not on-site somewhere.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Well, could I get his home address, then? I can swing by there.”

  “I’m sorry. We can’t give that out. There’s a policy. But if you want to leave a message, I’ll get it to him as soon as he comes in,” she said. “I don’t know when exactly that’ll be, but I’ll make sure he calls you back.”

  Calls you back. Not he’ll see it. Not that he knows you came by. She was promising to make him act on it. I was pretty sure by now that she wasn’t lying. The way she held herself, the way she spoke, reminded me of my mother talking about someone from church. Someone who wasn’t doing well.

  There was probably a graceful way to do this. Something subtle and clever. The right words. But since I didn’t know what they were, I went for blunt.

  “He’s in trouble,” I said. “You know he’s in trouble, right?”

  Her smile didn’t vanish, but the air went out of it. She swallowed once, and when she spoke her voice had lost its cheerfulness.

  “Big Dave’s doing fine.”

  “Something’s been wrong with him, though,” I said. “Acting strange. Missing work. Maybe he doesn’t look as good as he used to. Like he’s not sleeping?”

  “Well, I don’t know that—”

  “It started about a year ago,” I said. And then, “It’s getting worse.”

  The smile collapsed like a mask falling away. With the concern and fear clear on her face, she looked more genuine. When she spoke, it was like hearing her for the first time.

  “How do you know him?” she asked.

  It would have been easy to lie, but I had the sense that the woman was watching me very closely. I shook my head.

  “My uncle knew a lot about him,” I said. “I’d never heard of him until yesterday. But if there’s something eating him, I know what it is. And I can help.”

  She looked down at the table. Her jaw was set firmly. The computer chirped once and the screen changed. In my peripheral vision, Aubrey leaned against the wall, his arms folded.

  “If I’m right,” I said softly, “I may be the only one who can help.”

  “Can you tell me what’s the matter?” she said. “Is it drugs?”

  “It’s not drugs. And it’s not gambling. And it’s not women. But it is important.”

  “Can’t you just tell me?”

  I could, but it would blow my chances of holding her trust. I didn’t say anything, and let the silence drag. The woman sighed, leaned back, and pulled the thin top drawer of the desk open. She didn’t look at me as she picked out a business card and a pen. She wrote with small, fast strokes, like someone brushing away sand. When she did look up, she seemed almost angry.

  “We love Big Dave,” she said. “We need him back.”

  “I’m on it,” I said, taking the card. She’d written a street address on it. I put it in my pocket, turned to catch Aubrey’s gaze, and then nodded to th
e door.

  “I’m trusting you,” she said as we walked out.

  I didn’t know how to answer that, so I didn’t try.

  WE PULLED up at the place. Two stories, windows obscured by cream-colored drapes, a tree in the front yard with a tire swing on an ancient, untrustworthy rope. The green grass lawn got a little patchy at the edges, and the black fake-iron house numbers by the front door had chipped. A dog was barking somewhere nearby in a lazy, conversational way.

  Aubrey walked just ahead of me up the thin concrete path, and I had a small cascade of memories—Trevor chiding Aubrey for putting himself in harm’s way to protect me, another house we’d walked to about a year ago when a haugtrold had nearly killed us both, Chogyi Jake warning me not to push the wards and protections that kept me safe. And then I was at the door. I fidgeted with my backpack and took a deep breath.

  “I hate this part,” I said.

  Aubrey nodded.

  “Hi,” he said, “can I talk to you about your relationship to immaterial, abstract parasites? Does kind of make the Jehovah’s Witnesses seem plausible by comparison, doesn’t it?”

  “And yet,” I said, “it’s what we do.”

  I rang the doorbell. The dog, wherever it was, took note and stepped up its color commentary. We waited. I knocked.

  “Not home?” Aubrey said.

  “Maybe not.”

  The doorknob felt surprisingly cool. The door wasn’t locked, and the hinges were silent. I looked at Aubrey looking at me, and then I swung the door wide.

  “Hello?” I called as we stepped into the living room. “Anybody here? David?”

  Piles of paper littered the room—magazines, newspapers, printed websites, sketchbooks. The smell of rotting food was faint but distinct, almost more taste than odor. A worn leather couch dominated the room, a wide, low coffee table before it. An open doorway showed a small kitchen, and a dark hallway ran beside and behind a flight of carpeted stairs. The art on the walls mixed old-time ads for coffee brands and soda crackers that I’d never heard of with amateur photographs. David’s work, I assumed. A flat-screen television hung on one wall, an incongruous line of Post-it notes fluttering beside it. I walked to them carefully, trying not to disturb anything. I wondered whether it counted as breaking and entering if I didn’t have to break anything. Someone—David, I guessed—had drawn simple pictures on each little yellow sheet. Little architectural cartoons by someone who knew something about architecture. They were all slightly different, but since I’d seen Grace Memorial so recently and paid so much attention to it, I could see it in each of them.