Book Two: Magical Thinking
Part Eighteen
"Impossible," Arabella says, too quick to sound certain. "Impossible, it would have been in the papers—"
Kelly shakes her head, face void again. "Only if the children were local."
Arabella glowers, wonders as I do if she's enjoying the shock. Demons add about six new dimensions to conversation.
"Perfect outlet," Kelly says, and I think that high note there is despair. "Knows how to look for young psychics, knows the kinds of places they show up—"
"—knows how to gain their trust." Arabella's fuse is sparking.
Kelly answers her with a nod. "He must gather them from all over. Who knows how many. All for Master Gary..."
"He's been at this for a while," Paul says with all the pleasure of a field medic cleaning a wound. "The place is fuckin' caked with memories: fighting, struggles..."
"Paul," Arabella grates, "if you're trying to feed right now—"
Paul steps backward, hands up. He snaps his eyes toward me as his words avalanche around my skull: "memories, memories—"
"Randall..." he warns.
I stumble backwards, launch toward the couch. My hands are on the fabric before anybody can object, pawing huge green furrows into my hands
The game's on I'm losing anger boiling in my head, I clang the beer down on the table grab another one
Arabella tries to stop me, won't touch me with my mind so raw; I claw forward and grab the table, grab a beer can
There's banging again, banging from the walls and I want to listen, want to go over and open and wave my arms want to watch them run screaming from the house, want the scowling and the handcuffs and the headlines bright and bold "Monster", but I think up the barrel of a gun and the huge man behind it and I just put the lukewarm can to my lips
"He's leaving fingerprints," Arabella objects, the tape of her voice sped up.
Kelly stares at her. "Really think the cops will ever come near this case?"
Arabella's eyes turn to golf balls, and my hands are running along the door from the storage room to the main house.
The little girl's got fire, a fire that puts me to shame; she's squirming at me all elbows and knees, teeth bared like a wild animal and I've got every nerve in my body screaming this is not how it works and I touch her mind and see confusion, just confusion and snuffling for Mommy and I slam the trunk before I see it again
I run outside before I vomit.
Paul's the first one out, then Ara, both hesitating a safe five feet away. Out here all I can feel are the skulls, naked and white and not the house. I think I might be able to breathe.
"Randy," Paul chides, coming up in a distant form of alongside. "Randy, what the hell are you doing?"
"Evidence," I gurgle, while Hell tries to crawl out my throat.
"We're not the fucking People's Court!" Paul throws up his hands. "We've got all the fucking evidence we need."
I shake my head and dredge up a whole new flavor of vertigo. I struggle up to one knee. "We need"—the world's horizontal again—"location."
I barge back out to the carport, touch the steps before anyone can stop me. I get remorse from a corner of the door, the memory of tiny hands punching thin wood and a snarl at a child with the audacity to escape. I get days and days of long marching, skull and knees heavy as Foreman galumphs outside with another gift-wrapped kid...
Flashbulbs white out the world; I have that one moment of clarity where I don't either need or know words.
"Paul."
My favorite demon gives me a salute, a big spiraling affair meant to show me just how much he un-means it. If I had a smirk to spare I would use it.
"Inside," I say, not quite an order. "Look for keys, or a crowbar, or..."
"Got it. Right back."
He disappears inside, and I sag. The house whispers loneliness at me as my shoulder rests into the wood.
"Why would he do this?" Arabella's eyes are shining with pain. "Why would anybody do this to..." She's all horror as she tries not to think of the word.
Anybody else would get both barrels. For Arabella I keep it to one. "Human nature is too varied to be predictable. And demons are that if it were squared."
She looks like I threatened her with a grater. "Randy, if you think—"
That's the cue for Paul to come marching on out of the house. His face is blank; he doesn't need to say it, but he does.
"Found one," he tells me with a sigh. He raises his arm; a key and ring glint as they dangle off his finger. "Found it on the corkboard in the kitchen, looks like it was left there accidentally. Guy must have used it a dozen times."
I'm full of thunder. "What did you read?"
"It's a key to a house. Something out near Willits."
I don't bother to be surprised. "Can you get us there?"
"Absolutely."
That's all I need to head for the car. Red fountains spew up from the minds behind me.
"So that's it?" Arabella demands, a cannon of misdirected rage. "We have directions and we run off into the woods?"
I stop, turn around, feet raking the gravel. I like to think my eyes might just smolder.
"This time I think we might need a plan."
Second verse, same as the first: a packed car armored with baseball cards, full of ideas and white-noise conjecture. The only difference is the tone in the car, ice and stone in an earthquake instead of the naked outrage from before; I find myself yearning for the adrenaline.
"So Foreman picks them up," Arabella says, mind still circling the noun, "tricks them or tricks the people housing them after the birthday party, whatever." Her aura's like rusty nails. "Then he gift-wraps them so no-one can tell what he's transporting, and he delivers them up to Gary." She looks at me with eyes like gun barrels. "Why?"
I shrug, watch the headlights spilling over the road. "Can't know. Doesn't matter. We go in, we confirm, and we deal with it."
Her gaze stays on me for another blistering seconds, and then she's staring out her own window with her arms crossed. "You make it sound like it might actually be easy."
"Sorry I'm not communicating so well."
She wraps her thoughts up in black, rotting wings, and doesn't ask any more questions. The highway seems unusually dark.
"Scans up all over the place," Paul announces as we turn onto Highway 20. He's tracing lines in the fogged-up window, wet picture-frames around the Lincecum card taped to the glass. "Fucker must have every psychic in the county looking for us."
"Clued in then," Kelly says with almost-relish. "Kirk? Might have to follow up that threat."
"I'm not targeting a cop," I fire back. I keep studying the landscape in lieu of an apology. "We know he doesn't spend all his time at that house, and Kirk's contact was Doring, not Gary. It's possible they don't have their guard up yet."
Paul shifts in the back seat, leans up alongside. "And if the more probable outcome is true?"
A warped mind would call my expression a smile. "Then that's why we have a plan."
The argument arrives not five seconds later, loud and louder as the counterpoints compile. Arabella and I are there to suggest things, Paul and Kelly to poke them full of holes. I'm second- and triple-guessed every sentence, every plan defined in terms of what could go wrong. We hash out entry plans, marching orders, the sort of mess you expect from places called "compounds" with a gun rack and a dearth of tax payments. Demons make everything complicated; if they'd actually been working for Hitler the Allies could have just stayed home.
"So it's settled," I say prematurely, motivated by the straightening of the road. "Paul first, Kelly last, both of you ready to nail anyone who comes our way, me and Arabella in the middle on scan duty. Full mental jacket, think to kill, however you want to put it."
"Incapacitate," Kelly corrects. "Not kill."
And I'm again reminded the concept isn't a joke. "These guys have tried twice now to kill us. Courtesy is not high on my list."
"Stop here," Paul says.
The Impala jerks against its shocks. Paul keeps staring, thoughts glowing spiders as he spreads his mind over the area.
"Back up."
Kelly complies, slowly. Paul demands a fifty feet back, head cocked to one side and eyes two-pupiled. He raps a fingernail on the glass.
"Yes. Right here."
We all peer out at a bush-thronged piece of hill, doubt registering on the two faces used to showing it. Kelly backs up a little more, points the headlights at the hill, and clicks her tongue as she sees through the scrim of bushes between the hill and the flat stretch of forest.
"Right here," she corrects.
She flips on the high beams and we see the totality of the bushes: the loose roots scraping in the dirt, thin tracks left where they've been dragged back and forth.
"Clever girl," I breathe in my best Australian. No-one's laughing.
Paul and Kelly are the ones to hop out, the humans staying quiet behind the shielding. I can hear Ara's unasked questions in my head, backed up with purple swathes of resentment.
"So what is it?" I ask her, as the demons make too much noise outside.
It's a sign of growth that she doesn't feign any shock. She waits until I've turned around to answer.
"I think you're better at this than me."
It's hard to reconcile those words with Arabella's voice, cool and comforting as liquid nitrogen, but there's a wetness there that tells me this isn't a game.
"I..." I discard my first answer, and the second isn't any good either. "At what?"
"You're the one who's found all the clues," she tells me. "You're the one who put it all together. Paul helped, I helped, Kelly...well, okay, I helped more than Kelly"—I hear the hackles raise—"and you did keep me from coming out to Foreman's and finding that clue myself"—all that anger swings my way—"but you're still doing better than me."
"And it's your first mission." I won't pretend I don't find this silly. "You went out in the field first time a couple months ago, and this is your first time not just running research with Barg. Of course it wasn't perfect."
Her response is to stare at me, lips pursed and eyes loaded with meaning. I stare back as I try to decipher, not shifting even when Paul and Kelly get into the car.
"Definitely a road," Paul says. "As you could see if you weren't busy with astral necking." He claps the back of Kelly's seat. "Let's go."
I start to look back forward, and catch Arabella simpering as I move. I stop, and the grin gets bigger, with a derisive angle I'm not sure I've seen on her before.
"The right thing to do is to teach me."
For a second I'm back in the Cav in Redwood City, glancing at her between exits as we roll back from the debacle with Doctor Bingo. My face scrunches up, and I take a stab at the situation.
"Is this about Carmel?"
Arabella turns her nose up, and looks away.
"Nice time to be a teenager," Paul remarks, as Kelly cuts the lights and drives us down the road.
The dirt path winds around the side of the hill, into woods so thick the world disappears; we crawl up a slow, steady incline, and in the space of a minute we're looking at four yellow squares of light.
"That's the house," Paul says from the backseat. "That's definitely the house."
"The house" is a two-story farmhouse, sprawling, big and brown, with a porch like a restaurant's patio. It's got no decorations; black curtains; a paint job more defined by lack thereof. I'd call it abandoned if it weren't for the lights.
"No cars," I say with hope.
"They could be parked around back." I love it when Arabella proves points for me.
Kelly parks us as soon as the ground is flat, pops the door with slow grace. We converse in whispers as we advance, walking heads-down in our predetermined order.
"Downstairs first," I hiss to my favorite demon. "Make sure it's clear before we get trapped on the stairs."
"Yes sir, General Custer."
We move like dancers onto the porch, feet spread wide and testing for creaks. It's all quiet as we go to the door, movement inside distant and muffled. Kelly comes forward as Paul presents the key, leaves the humans to look out into the yard. It's all blackness and trees after fifty or so feet, leaves crackling or the brush-stroke steps of animals. The only thing more stressful is hearing Paul open the door.
Paul first, like we planned; Arabella; me; Kelly. The front hall is narrow and tiled, no doors before it opens into a dining room. Ara's scanning as soon as we're inside, eyes darting around with an immature sort of precision. Paul's locked up nice and tight; whatever's on his mind won't be pleasant for the receiver. Grinning like hyenas, we advance about five feet, and are stopped by steps thumping out into the dining room.
I freeze look for cover, but it's bare in here; there's an end table that might just block one kneecap. I hunker low, drag Arabella into doing the same; Paul and Kelly both stand tall as our host marches into view.
I'd peg the guy at five feet and forty years; blue eyes, pasty face, head shaved in a way that tells you God did part of that for him. His mind's naked, fear and anger so thick it has a current. He stops with his arms limp at his sides, and looks at us with recognition in his eyes.
"Who the fuck are you?" I'm stupid enough to ask; the look on his face should tell me all I need.
Kelly shuffles forward, face and body language empty. "Arthur?"
The pasty man sways, head to one side and features all scrunched. He's about to cry.
"I'm sorry," he whispers.
I feel the surge in his emotions, bark in alarm; I try to turn but it's already too late.
From behind us, the wielder cloaked in a mask and Arthur's emotions, comes an archetypal sound, the metallic note of fear from every action flick: the giant, god-of-war chk of a shotgun being cocked.
