Book Two: Magical Thinking
Part Nineteen
I pivot, hands high over my head, look right into Milk's eyes. His face is flat, the rest of his body rigid as he keeps the shotgun leveled at me. I'm not a ballistics expert, but if he pulls that trigger I'm pretty sure I'm getting buried in a hamburger bun.
"Nice trick," I say, trying to channel James Dean. "So is he just a psychic Judas goat or are you actually putting him to use? "
Milk's not in a playing mood. "Shut up." That shotgun's looking awfully big.
"Arthur, huh?" Paul says, up at the front of the line. "Gonna guess that you been here the whole time."
That gets Milk chuckling. "Used to be a teacher. Good thing."
For an inappropriate second, Arabella brightens. "That's what you had to do to save your lives."
Arthur's shame comes off him like a fist. "Dragnet pegged me out here." His voice is ragged, up in the upper octaves. "One of them came to the house. If I hadn't gone—"
"In the most dramatic manner possible," Arabella says, sardonic. "Is that some kind of theme with you people: act suspicious so you don't have to tell us you're in trouble?"
"You'd be surprised how well it works," says Paul.
"Shut up," says Milk, back in Stoic Jerk mode.
"Okay then." I raise my hands higher. "You're the Big Chief Gunhaver; you tell me how this is going to be."
The big man narrows his eyes at me, thrusts the shotgun forward. "Into the house."
This can't even pretend to be a good idea. The dining room is bigger, with a huge slab of cover in the middle; if Milk thinks he can catch all of us with that shotgun...I get the plan right as the footsteps sound in the hall. Anna Doring comes into the dining room from a side door, toting a shotgun of her own and a look somewhere between victory and having stepped in shit.
"Kirk told you, didn't he?" she asks as I turn her way. "Little pussy."
"Kind of a big pussy," Paul corrects.
Milk snarls. "You ever have a host body die?"
Paul shrugs and keeps his hands raised high.
"We know you know," Doring announces. She slides to the right, gets a better angle on us. "We know you think you know everything. And now we're dead sure Arthur tipped you off."
The pasty man doesn't speak up; I'm guessing from the way he vibrates that the backtalk got beaten out a few days ago.
"So"—Doring cocks her head—"we'll offer a deal. There are some nice comfy chairs in the next room; you three sit down in them, Milk here will blend your memories of the whole situation out of your heads, and you can all go home and tell your bosses that everything is A-OK. It's not an ideal solution, but it beats Option B."
"Which I'm guessing is the one where you turn us into walking cheese graters."
Doring sneers at me. "Again,"—the part of me that enjoys hating her sees satisfaction in those blue eyes—"it's not an ideal solution. But it's the best one I have. I can't let Master Gary's plans be interrupted."
Here I'd thought nothing could make this whole thing sicker. She gestures to her right with the shotgun, starts to drop back into the room she came from.
"So?" Her eyebrows ride high on her face. "Chairs?"
We all stand tensed, trading thoughts, weighing every undesirable option. Milk's finger tenses on the trigger.
Arthur answers the question with a frying pan thrown high over our heads.
Doring's gaze swings upward, reflex taking the shotgun with it. There's a boom, a racking noise, Doring swearing as the pan hits the floor; I turn to Milk but the trigger's already pulling, hit the floor with thunder, boggled that a shotgun blast missed me until I don't hear an impact and feel those stabbing fingers grab my brain again, feel the world melt down into memories as he gets inside my fear-opened head
No no no no no
I'm running somewhere and I taste rust, taste pennies taste me I've got a gut full of poison and bulging weight I'm not sure who I am who am I
I cradle my neck I arch my back I pray those hideous Clockwork-Orange screams are only inside my head fingers your fingers your name is Dave
"Stop."
I come back to reality in a jolt, start slapping myself down. Nothing new hurts; nothing new is missing; I squeak before I bite back the tears. Breathing has never felt so good.
In the doorway, behind Anna Doring, is Master Gary Callahan. Someone in this room is a strong sender.
"Mr. Chatham," he intones. You'd never mistake that droning cadence for pleasure. "What did I say about appointments?"
"They broke in here," Anna Doring insists. "They broke in, Master, they said—"
"Anna." His raised hand seems to silence her; he looks at us like we're his Christmas present. "I can guess exactly what they said. But that's no excuse for disrupting my work."
Doring starts to object and is again silenced; Gary looks at me and we're back to that iron fever, those diseased eyes probing me for excuses to flip.
"What do you want, Mr, Chatham?" The edge isn't there quite yet, but it's ready to come out at a moment's notice. "Why are you bothering us?"
"Bothering you?" I blurt. "Bothering you?"
His impatience is pretending it doesn't notice me. "Yes. What do you want?"
"I want you to let all the kids go and remand yourself to having your head turned into a milkshake. Murdering sicko."
The room's silent, a gun and a demon both pointed at my head. Gary's stalled out there in the doorway, faint bemusement at one mouth-corner while he looks at me through quizzical eyebrows.
"Murdering? Sicko?" That tears his composure; my guts drop into my kneecaps as I'm treated to a dry and forced chuckle.
"Hear that?" he asks Milk, playing at some inbred cousin of amusement. "I'm a murdering sicko." He sniffs, wipes his nose. "That's what Arthur thought, too. Wasn't it?"
The pasty man just glowers and backs up.
"See?" Gary's full-on chuckling now, belly heaving like an evil Santa. "Him and the whole rest of the world."
I give him my unimpressed face. "And what exactly is dear Arthur synecdochal for?" That's it, Randall, kill him with lit crit terms.
Gary's face is red, his body curled forward. "You think you get it, don't you?" he snaps. "You think you've solved my whole little 'caper'." His scare quotes are the most violent I've seen.
"I think I know enough to get you in deep shit," I say. "Cluing in norms like that, kidnapping children—"
"I suppose it would get the Inquisition on my back, wouldn't it?" He's a snake as he says it, accusing me as much as confessing; there's a hitch in his cadence I file away for later. "I suppose I had better be scared, in your eyes?"
"You won't be feeling much where you're going," Arabella chimes in.
It should bother me when that makes Gary chuckle. Arthur leans on the table and wishes he could disappear up his own asshole.
"I think not, Miss," Gary replies. Chaos ripples across his features. "I think not." His face is all thin black lines.
Then there's the smile again, scarier for how hard it's pretending to be cordial. He looks to me with a quick little lip-smack, folds his hands across his waist.
"So tell me, Mr. Chatham. What exactly do you think you're going to bust me for? What do you think"—he flaps his hands about in the air—"all of my planning is for?"
A dozen memories of this echo in my head: an old man, a dining room, a problem with his legs—and me on the spot, hot needles on my skin and water in my brain as I try to either answer correctly or shut him the fuck down.
"You're stealing children," I say, knowing I've got nothing else to fill that sentence.
"Unlike you, who helps steal children on a regular basis." He doesn't even bother showing that victory on his face. "You just have parasites to ensure they get legally adopted by loving and mentally unhinged families, some of whom might not even be human. You're the Mob telling off a petty criminal."
That's one, two, three slaps there; my metaphorical face is already raw.
"You're...you're breaking the deal," I stammer, five again with stolen chocolate on my face. "You're getting Foreman to kidnap kids right when they show what they can do and you're..."
"What?" He shares a grin with Anna Doring. "A slave trade, maybe? Some kind of porn shop? Oh, I know, I'm like Fagin from Oliver Twist." He settles into a triumphal smirk. "You want to judge me guilty, but you have no idea what I've done."
"Like hell—" Arthur says, but quavers before the muzzle of Doring's shotgun.
"This one's live." Doring seethes, all kinds of ready to fire.
"So what exactly have you done?" Arabella asks Gary, her nose high in the air. She tosses her hair back, sneers at the old, fat man. "I can tell you want to boast about it. Come on. Give us a shot."
Gary's chest puffs out; I want to give Ara a high five. He sits up in his chair, and, spokes squeaking, wheels backward out of the room, grease fires in his eyes.
"I would like you to follow me."
Milk circles behind me, not bothering to level the shotgun. Anna Doring keeps a bead on Kelly's head. They fall in at the back of the procession, everyone stumbling through the farmhouse after Gary's slow advance. Arthur's showing every one of us feels.
"You know what I used to do?" Gary asks us, a growl back over his shoulder. We go through another hallway, thinner, leading to a sitting room at the back.
"You were Jim Jones," Paul answers. "Kool-Aid man extraordinaire."
I see hate in Doring's eyes. Gary seems to think it's amusing.
"Close," he responds. "I made miracles. Real ones. Learned from books and old men in alleys." He's practiced this bit a lot. "People loved me. People worshipped with me." He flicks his eyes to Kelly. "Worshipped the demons."
"You slopped the hogs once a day and tried to milk 'em for favors," Paul shoots back.
Gary pauses at the far end of the book-crammed room, next to a screen door out onto a porch. "I traded favors for favors, Mr. McCartney. Some of you wanted admiration, submission ...you wanted things and I got 'em for you, and you made me powerful." There's those bulging eyes again. "Powerful back when that meant something."
"Look upon your works, ye mighty," I sneer. "Come on, Gary, make the god-damn point so we can get to the part where you call off your dogs and I bust your ass."
Gary quiets, simpers. He looks past me, gets Doring's attention. "Keep the rest in here." He's looking at me again. "You, come with me."
He opens the back door to a blast of cold air and a great, muscle-stuttering waft of something decidedly not right. I look back at the rest of the group, one shotgun per demon; the only one with any expression on them is Paul, and he's telling me to go ahead and go. I back out the door, and almost run into Gary, who looks at me like I'm handicapped and just wheels off away from me, his wheels growling across the back porch.
"You have all the components," Gary remarks, rolling down a low ramp onto the grass. "I'm surprised you haven't figured it out."
"Sometimes the reader just has to look at the back of the book."
He wheels across the forest/lawn toward the big metal doors of a storm cellar, padlocked and speckled with rust. Whatever he's got in there has me filled to the brim with vertigo; I wonder if I'm the only one who needs to piss.
"I've said it every time we've spoken," Gary says. "You even choked it out of me once, you con artist." His laughter is more like a scoff. "I figured you had to have known."
I look out at the forest, glance up at the house. My whole spine is screaming I shouldn't be here, and I'm not pleased by the hypotheses I've got brewing. The whole place feels like a fresh bruise.
"I'm not really in a 'games' type of headspace right now," I spit. "Open the cellar and show me your piece de resistance."
Gary looks at me as he clunks open the padlock, smiles as he grabs both doors.
"Say hello."
The doors swing open, and we're treated to a blast of fluorescent light, a cold snatch of recorded voices, the jaunt and shuffle of shadows coming toward the door. Thoughts hit me, one at a time then fast like raindrops, wonders and queries too mock-certain and spare, things I'm shaking my head and denying as we're peered at from the bottom of a wheelchair ramp by three gangly, greasy little human heads. They blink, shivering, looking at us like we might secretly be wolves.
I get it. Or I almost get it. Most of me is still squawking in denial.
"Hello," I say to the kidnapped psychics, my mouth full of static. I nod in the direction of the voices. "You enjoying the latest video?"
