Finch by Jeff VanderMeer (2 page)

239 Manzikert Avenue, apartment 525.

An act of will, crossing that divide. Always. Reached for his gun,
then changed his mind. Some days were worse than others.

A sudden flash of his partner Wyte, telling him he was compromised,
him replying, "I don't have an opinion on that." Written on a wall at
a crime scene: Everyone's a collaborator. Everyone's a rebel. The truth in
the weight of each.

The doorknob cold but grainy. The left side rough with light green
fungus.

Sweating under his jacket, through his shirt. Boots heavy on his feet.

Always a point of no return, and yet he kept returning.

I am not a detective. I am not a detective.

Inside, a tall, pale man dressed in black stood halfway down the hall,
staring into a doorway. Beyond him, a dark room. A worn bed. White
sheets dull in the shadow. Didn't look like anyone had slept there in
months. Dusty floor. Even before he'd started seeing Sintra, his place
hadn't looked this bad.

The Partial turned and saw Finch. "Nothing in that room, Finch.
It's all in here." He pointed into the doorway. Light shone out,
caught the dark glitter of the Partial's skin where tiny fruiting bodies
had taken hold. Uncanny left eye in a gaunt face. Always twitching. Moving at odd angles. Pupil a glimmer of blue light at the bottom of
a dark well. Fungal.

"Who are you?" Finch asked.

The Partial frowned. "I'm-"

Finch brushed by the man without listening, got pleasure out of the
push of his shoulder into the Partial's chest. The Partial, smelling like
sweet rotting meat, walked in behind him.

Everything was golden, calm, unknowable.

Then Finch's eyes adjusted to the light from the large window and
he saw: living room, kitchen. A sofa. Two wooden chairs. A small
table, an empty vase with a rose design. Two bodies lying on the pull
rug next to the sofa. One man, one gray cap without legs.

Finch's boss Heretic stood framed by the window. Wearing his
familiar gray robes and gray hat. Finch had never learned the
creature's real name. The series of clicks and whistles sounded like
"heclereticalic" so Finch called him "Heretic." Highly unusual to see
Heretic during the day.

"Finch," Heretic said. "Where's Wyte?" The wetness of its moist
glottal attempt at speech made most humans uncomfortable. Finch
tried hard to pretend the ends of all the words were there. A skill hard
learned.

"Wyte couldn't come. He's busy."

Heretic stared at Finch. A question in his eyes. Finch looked to the
side. Away from the liquid green pupils and yellow where there should
be white. Wyte had been sick off and on for a long time. Finch knew
from what, but didn't want to. Didn't want to get into it with Heretic.

"What's the situation?" Finch asked.

Heretic smiled: rows and rows of needle lines set into a face a little
like a squished-in shark's snout. Finch couldn't tell if the lines were
gills or teeth, but they seemed to flutter and breathe a little. Wyte said
he'd seen tiny creatures in there, once. Each time, a new nightmare.
Another encounter to haunt Finch's sleep.

"Two dead bodies," Heretic said.

"Two bodies?"

"One and a half, technically," the Partial said, from behind Finch.

Heretic laughed. A sound like dogs being strangled.

"Did the victims live in the apartment?" Finch asked, knowing the
answer already.

"No," the Partial said. "They didn't."

Finch turned briefly toward the Partial, then back to Heretic.

Heretic stared at the Partial and he shut up, began to creep around
the living room taking pictures with his eye.

"No one lived here," Heretic said. "According to our records no one
has lived here for over a year."

"Interesting," Finch said. Didn't interest him. Nothing interested
him. It bothered him. Especially that the Partial felt comfortable
enough to answer a question meant for Heretic.

The curtains had faded from the sun. Tears in the sofa like knife
wounds. The vase looked like someone had started a small fire inside
it. Stage props for two deaths.

Was it significant that the window was open? For some reason he
didn't want to ask if one of them had opened it. Fresh air, with just a
hint of the salt smell from the bay.

"Who reported this?" Finch asked.

"An energy surge came from this location," Heretic said. "We felt it.
Then spore cameras confirmed it."

Energy surge? What kind of energy?

Finch tried to imagine the rows and rows of living receivers
underground, miles of them if rumor held true. Trying to process
trillions of images from all over the city. How could they possibly keep
up? The hope of every citizen.

"Do you know the . . . source?" Finch asked. Didn't know if he
understood what Heretic was telling him.

"There is no trace of it now. The apartment is cold. There are just
these bodies."

"How does that help me?" he wanted to say.

Finch usually dealt with theft, domestic abuse, illegal gatherings.
Flirted with investigating rebel activity, but turned that over to
the Partials if necessary. Tried to make sure it wasn't necessary. For
everyone's sake.

Murder only if it was the usual. Crimes of passion. Revenge. This
didn't look like either. If it was murder.

"Anyone live in the apartments next door?"

"Not any more," the Partial replied. "They all left, oddly enough, soon
after these two ... arrived."

"Which means they made a sound." Or sounds.

"I'll interrogate anyone left in the building after we finish here," the
Partial said.

What a pleasure that'll be for them.

Still, Finch didn't volunteer to do it. Not yet. Maybe after. Not much
worse than door-to-door interviews in unfriendly places. Many didn't
believe his job should exist.

"What do you think, Finch?" Heretic asked. Just a hint of mischief in
that voice. Laced with it. Just enough to catch the nuance.

I think I just walked in the door a few minutes ago.

The bodies lay next to each other, beside the sofa.

Finch frowned. "I've never seen anything quite like it."

The man lay on his side, left hand stretched out toward the gray cap's
hand. The gray cap lay facedown, arms flopped out at right angles.

"Might be a foreigner. From the clothes."

The man could've been forty-five or fifty, with dark brown hair, dark
eyebrows, and a beard that appeared to be made from tendrils of fungus.
That wasn't unusual. But his clothes were. He wore a blue shirt long out
of fashion. Strange, tight-fitting long pants. Dirty black boots.

"He's not from the city," Heretic said. Again, an inflection that bothered
Finch. A statement or a question?

What's on his mind?

Finch squatted beside the bodies. Took out his useless pen and his useless
pad of paper. Above him, the Partial leaned over to take a picture.

The dead gray cap looked like every other gray cap. Except for the
one glaring lack.

"I don't know what caused the injury to the other one, sir."

I don't know what caused the leg situation.

"When we find out," Heretic said, "we will be just as understated."

The exposed cross section, cut almost precisely at the waist, fascinated
Finch. He almost forgot himself, poked at the tissue with his pen.

The cut had been so clean, so precise, that there was no tearing. No
hemorrhaging. Finch could see layers. Gray. Yellow. Green. A core of dark red. (A question he was too cautious to ask: Was it always that
dark, or only in death?) Within the core, Finch saw a hint of organs.

"Is this ... normal?" Finch asked Heretic.

"Normal?"

"The lack of blood, I mean, sir," Finch said.

Gray caps bled. Finch knew that. Not like a stream or a gout, even
when you cut them deep, but a steady drip from a leaky faucet. Puncture
wounds healed almost immediately. It took a long time and a lot of
patience to kill a gray cap.

"No, it's not normal." The humid weight of Heretic was at his side
now. A smell like garbage and burnt glass. Made him nauseous.

"None of this is normal," the Partial ventured. Ignored.

Finch looked up at Heretic. From that angle: the pale wattled skin of
Heretic's long throat.

"Do you know who . . ." Finch hesitated. Gray caps didn't like being
called "gray caps," but Finch couldn't pronounce the word they did use.
Farseneeni or fanaarcensitii? The Partial circled them, blinking pictures
through his fungal eye.

"Do you know who that is?" Finch said finally, pointing at the dead
gray cap.

Heretic made a sound like something popping. "No. Not familiar to
us. We cannot see him," and Finch understood he meant something
other than just looking out a window.

"Have you ... ?" Couldn't say the whole sentence. Too ridiculous.
Terrifying. At the same time. Have you eaten some of his flesh and picked
clean the memories?

But Heretic had been around humans long enough to know what he
meant. "We tried it. Nothing that made sense."

For a second, Finch relaxed. Forgot Heretic could send him, Sintra,
anybody he knew, to the work camps.

"If you couldn't decipher it, how will I?"

Then went stiff. Richard Dorn, a good detective, had questioned
Heretic too closely. Nine months to die.

A bullet to the head. In that case.

But the gray cap said only, "With your fresh eyes, maybe you will
have better luck."

Heretic pulled a pouch out of his robes, opened it. Finch rose, stood
to the side as Heretic sprinkled a fine green powder over both bodies.
Could've done it using his own supply, but Heretic enjoyed doing it.
For some reason.

"You know what to do," Heretic said.

In time, a memory bulb would emerge from both corpses' heads.
Did the fanaarcensitii rely too much on what made them comfortable?
No autopsies, just mushrooms. But also hardly any experts left to
perform them.

Nausea crept back into Finch's throat. "But I've never. Not a gray
cap. I mean, not one of your people."

"We don't bite." The grin on that impossible face grew wide and
wider. The laughter again, worse.

Finch laughed back, weakly.

"Write down whatever you encounter, whether you understand it
or not."

Mercifully, Heretic looked away. "A gray cap and a man. Dead in
such a manner. We need to know everything."

"Yessir," Finch said. He couldn't keep the grimace off his face.

Heretic seemed to take it for a smile. As he walked past on his way
to the door, he patted Finch's elbow. Finch shivered. A touch like
wet, dead leaves sewn together and stuffed with meat.

"Report in the morning," Heretic said. "Report and report and
report, Finch." The laughter again.

Then Heretic was gone. The hallway shadows ate him up, the
apartment door opening and closing.

Finch could hear his own breathing. Shallow. The sudden panicked
drumming of his heart. The butterfly blinks of the Partial, still
snapping photographs.

Took a breath. A second. Closed his eyes.

A sunny day by the river. A picnic lunch. A tree with shade. Long, cool
grass. With Sintra.

o obvious bullet or stab wounds. No tattoos or other marks.
Grunting with the effort, Finch turned the man over for a
second. He seemed heavier than he should be. Skin warm, the flesh
solid. From the position of the arms, Finch thought they might be
broken. A discoloration at the edge of the man's mouth. Dried
blood? When Finch was done, the man settled back into position as
if he'd been there a hundred years.

No point checking the gray cap. Their skin didn't retain marks or
burns or stab wounds. Anything like that sealed over. Besides, the
cause of the gray cap's death was obvious. Wasn't it? Still, he didn't
want to assume murder. Yet.

Out of the four "murders" in his sector over the past year, two had been
suicides and one had been natural causes. The fourth solved in a day.

Disappearances were another subject altogether.

He stood. Looked down at the tableau formed by the dead.
Something about it. Almost posed. Almost staged. But also: the
man's neck, half-hidden by the shirt collar. Was it ... twisted? Who
could tell with the gray cap. Impossibly long, smooth, gray neck.
(Did that mean Heretic was old, this one young?) But also torqued.

Finch glanced up at the tired, sagging ceiling. About ten feet.

"They look like," Finch said. "They look like they both fell."

Could that be the sound the neighbors heard?

"The spore camera's first shot is of them on the floor," the Partial said.

Finch had forgotten him.

Turned, stared at the Partial. The Partial stared back. Taking Finch's
photo with each blink.

"I could ..."

"What?" the Partial said. "You could what?"

I could tear out your eye with my bare hands. Not a thought he'd seen
coming.

"You know what I think?" the Partial said.