Desolation (31 page)

“Feel good, being fucked to death?” she screamed, reaching down between them for his zipper. Whistler bucked and threw her aside, though her ankles remained locked behind his back.

“Get off me, whore!”

“Nothing less than what you do to your followers, you fucking monster!”

“Get your hands away or I'll cut them off!”

“Ahh, see, I knew you wanted me!”

They rolled into the road, cursing and screaming and fighting, and Cain turned away.

“Are they mad?” he asked Magenta.

“Aren't we all?” She turned from Cain and tugged at the corrugated iron front door to Heaven. “You won't find anything good in here, or anything fresh,” she said. “I suspect it will only compound those mysteries in your mind. But it's somewhere you'll be able to think.”

“Anywhere's better than here,” the shadow whispered in Cain's ear, still holding on to him like an infant grasping its parent. Cain could only agree. He heard the terrible fight continuing behind him, and he followed Magenta into the darkness of Heaven without a final backward glance.

He had seen enough madness for one night.

He hoped that he would discover no more inside.

“I can barely see you.”

“It's dark,” Cain said. “I don't like it in here. This is Peter's place.”

“Peter's dead,” Magenta said.

“That's why I don't like it. It's not fair. We shouldn't even be here.”

He heard Magenta rustling around, opening drawers, tripping over something and cursing as she landed on hands and knees. From outside, the fighting sounded as frantic and violent as ever.
No sirens
, Cain thought.
No people coming to help. Perhaps even if they can see, people want to keep to themselves. Even if it means someone else will die
. The thought depressed him suddenly and totally, and he let out a sob of loss for the Face and Voice, and safety.

“I'll never be safe again,” Cain said, and Magenta did not dispute his statement.

“You never were,” the shadow said. “Look what you had as a mother.” As if on cue, Magenta struck a match and lit a candle. There were dozens scattered around the hallway—in wall fixtures and candlesticks, and standing alone—molded to the antique furniture and floor by melted wax. She lit several more and handed one to Cain. Her movement caused shadows to dance behind her; ironic that the only true shadow was still at Cain's side.

“I see your shadow,” Magenta said, and then she turned away and headed for the stairs.

Cain panicked. Nobody had ever commented on the shadow before! It had always been his and his alone. Even his father had never known of it. But as he turned around he saw his true shadow cast behind him, distorting as his gasp of relief set his candle shivering. “She means that,” he whispered, but the shadow holding on to his side did not respond.

“Cain,” Magenta said. “Follow me. There's a room up here you should see. Peter was a very old man, contrary to appearances. It's actually a terrible shame that he's dead.”

“So nice of you to show some concern,” Cain said. Magenta looked around the hallway as if trying to place an errant thought, then turned and started upstairs without replying.

Cain followed. There was nothing more for him to do. Magenta was his mother, and he supposed out of all of them he must trust her the most.

“Don't,” said the shadow, “you can't choose your family.” Its fear seemed to have vanished, and the old bitterness was back.

But trust her he did. She had not changed since the last time he had seen her, and he took that as a mark of her respect for his thoughts. And though they had parted recently on such a sour note, still she had come back to him, his savior again in different clothes. She had taken him away from the terrible, impossible sights outside, and though she must know he had killed George, she had yet to mention that madman.

It's what they live for
, she had said of Whistler and Sister Josephine. For the first time, Cain wondered whether George really was dead. Perhaps tomorrow they would all return home and Number 13 would be full again. But he doubted that. He had heard the screams and sensed the change with which the others—Magenta included—viewed him now. Not exactly as one of them, but not as a normal person either.

Magenta talked as though he still had to make up his mind, but he had already changed.

“I'll never be like you,” Cain said. Magenta kept climbing above him, but her stance changed. More stressed, tensed.

“Wait until you see,” she said.

“What are you going to show me?”

“A room. Filled with dead people, I think. And every one of them knew the Way.”

“They're all here, dead, now?”

She paused and turned to look down at him. Her eyes were vacant, as if she were looking into some unknowable distance. The past, perhaps. Or the future, a time quite literally filled with change for her.

“The house
is
called Heaven, after all.”

“Perhaps Hell would be more appropriate,” he said.

“None of us are evil, Cain, not even those two outside. We simply know so much more. How can we live normally with what we know?”

“You can live
morally
.”

“Morals are a conceit of society.” Magenta looked into the flame of her candle and her eyes swam with fire.

“Someone else once said that to me,” Cain said.

“Your father. I taught him that very idea.” She turned and moved on.

“Then he was wrong as well,” Cain said, but she appeared not to hear.

At the top of the stairs, they turned left and walked along a narrow landing. The carpet was threadbare, the wall finish moist and moldy, and in several places the ceiling had caved in. Its remains had long since been trodden into the floor or kicked away, but the holes left behind stared back with pure darkness.
Could be anything up there
, Cain thought, and he held his candle high to ward off the unknown.

At the end of the landing, they came to a door. It was cracked and warped, as if something had tried to force it open from inside, but it still hung strong in its frame. Several large padlocks secured bolts in place.

“I've always wanted to see in here,” Magenta said dreamily. “But none of us are allowed.”

“Who doesn't allow it?”

“Peter. He may not have been like us, but he had a job to do. All of us know more of the world than anyone normal, but as you've seen from Whistler and the nun, sometimes we need protecting from each other.”

She placed the candle at her feet, reached up, and touched the first padlock. It sizzled and became fluid, re-forming into a metal tankard that clanged to the floor.

“Shit!” Cain said. He should not have been surprised, he supposed. He had seen Magenta change, from clown to warrior to mother. The fact that she could enforce a change on other things was only one step removed.

“I don't do this much,” Magenta said, and her voice held a trace of pain. This was uncomfortable for her.

“Don't hurt yourself.” He heard the shadow giggle at his shoulder.

Magenta laughed as well. “Concerned for your mother?”

Cain shook his head, but she had her back to him and did not see.

She touched the next padlock and it fell to the floor as a shower of ball bearings. The final lock
twisted, flamed briefly, and then dripped down the face of the door, scorching it, drying and hardening into a slick of melted metal. Magenta stood back and sighed, seemed to relax into herself, shook her head. Then she picked up the candle and turned to Cain.

Her eyes were scanning the landing behind Cain as if looking for a missing thought. “I've never been in here,” she said, “and I don't quite know what to expect. I think it's just the minds of dead people . . . I think. But they may have a strange effect.” She stared into the darkness beyond the candlelight, and Cain suddenly believed that she truly could not see him. “Cain? Are you with me?”

“You're just like me,” the shadow whispered, snickering.

“I am,” he said. As Magenta pushed open the door, Cain wondered which of them he had answered.

The light from their candles filled the room. Cain was aware of the smudge of shadow on his left, but he did not glance that way. He looked straight ahead. At the glass cabinets, and the things inside them.

“Oh, Peter,” Magenta said, her voice surprised more than disgusted.

“Fuck,” Cain said. “Monsters. You're all monsters,
all
of you!”

“Don't leap to conclusions,” she said. “Who knows exactly what your head would look like were it stripped of flesh and hair?”

Skulls. There were at least forty glass cases fixed to each wall, and in almost every case sat a skull. Cain turned in a circle, looking all around the
room, and the movement of his candle gave life to the skulls' eye sockets. Their ghost eyes followed him, and as he paused and stood as motionless as possible, still one or two of them seemed to move. Every skull was grinning. Smashed nose sockets snorted darkness.

“Monsters!” Cain said, and he turned to leave.

The door slammed shut. Magenta was there, waving the candle in front of him, her eyes still distant and uncertain. “You're there,” she said. “You're here. Somewhere. And now you have to see.” She stepped forward, and Cain stepped aside to avoid being burned by her candle.

“Can't see you,” the shadow on his shoulder said. “Your mother can't see you.”

“Did she ever?” Cain said.

“What?” Magenta turned, and her beautiful eyes were filled with sadness. Almost as if she knew what Cain had been talking about.

“Nothing.”

“See here,” she said, waving her hand around as if giving a guided tour. “The remains of dozens that knew the Way. All these were people like us, people with a knowledge of the universe that so surpassed normal understanding that it set them far aside. So superior that—”

“Superior,” Cain said, nodding. “That word again. So superior.”

Magenta must have heard his sarcasm, but she chose to ignore it. “Peter was our landlord, but he was a caretaker as well. When someone with the Way died, he would dispose of them. Some of them are too . . . different to be left lying around.”

“Was Peter left lying around?” Cain asked. “After George tore him to pieces?”

“Peter's body is somewhere apart from the world,” she said. “No one will find him.”

“And these?” Cain asked. “These freaks? What are these, your brothers and sisters? My aunts and uncles? Mother . . .”He did not feel the need to finish the sentence. Magenta looked right at him, and he shifted his candle to the side. Her eyes followed.

“Here,” she said, turning back to the wall. “I knew him. Markus Keene. He was a conjuror of fire. He died from his own gift. Corrupted. Power corrupted him.”

“I thought you were all perfect,” Cain said, looking at the skull. It had a part-melted appearance, like a wax model left out in the sun.

“Not all, no,” Magenta said. “But most of us are.”

“Whistler? Sister Josephine?”

“As unique as the rest of us. Look, here's Lockley! I haven't seen him for four decades, not since he was shot. A hunter mistook him for a deer. Such irony.” The skull she indicated had antlers protruding from its temples. They had been cut so that the skull would fit into the glass case, but their roots were thick, and Cain suspected they had once been grand.

There were more, dozens more, and Magenta knew more than a few of them. Ashley, with teeth so long that they would not look out of place in a crocodile's mouth. Arthur, an old, old man from ages past who had been killed by the stench of technology. The Twin, two skulls fused together so
that they shared a mouth but each had two eyes, a nose, a brain. The junction of their skulls displayed yellowed cracks like the map of a river and its tributaries, as if they had spent their lives going different ways. Angus, a skull with the snout of a bull, replete with a brass ring still fixed against its smashed nasal passage. And more, yet more, and for every five normal skulls there was one with three eyes, two mouths, and other less obvious differences that marked them as so definitely inhuman.

“And here,” Magenta said, “is George.” She reached into a bag slung over her shoulder. Cain cringed back, petrified at what he would see, but fascinated at the same time.

“Peter should be doing this,” Magenta said as she placed George's severed head in an empty case. She adjusted its positioning for a full minute, turning it this way and that, stroking hair from over one eye, finally settling on an aspect that seemed to please her. Then she closed the glass lid and stood back.

George had not reverted to his human form. Maybe he had died before the full change could be complete. His jaws were distended, teeth long and sharp, and it appeared that his top lip had been shredded by his own underbite. His forehead sloped backward, hairless and shiny even in death, and his eyes were buried in shadowed pits. Cain shivered, and his candle gave George flaming yellow eyes, filled with rage and a promise of pain to come.

Cain tried to look away but could not. Is this
why Magenta had brought him here? To watch her place George's head among these other dead freaks? Because he had killed George, and this made him involved. This made him
responsible
.

“I thought you said you weren't sure what was in here,” he said.

“I'd only heard. I'm never sure until I've seen something for myself. You've seen so much already, Cain. Aren't you sure? Have you no certainty yet?”

“Don't try to draw me in,” he said. “Don't try to involve me.”

“You're already involved. With all of us. We're unique, and you're beginning to realize—”

“Inhuman,” he said.

“
More
than human. But that's your choice. I believe, Cain, that it's a choice you still have to make, no matter what the signs tell me. Don't let yourself believe that it's cut-and-dried, because I know there's still doubt in you. You'd have gone from here by now if that wasn't the case. I hope that you choose to live for what your father believed in. You thought of him as mad, but he was far from that.”