Shoggoths in Bloom (23 page)

Melissa looked at Gina. Gina shrugged. “Those locks come loose with a credit card, anyway.”

“No. Not just no.”

“Oh, you can watch the stairs,” Gina said, sharp enough that Katie sat back in her chair. Katie swallowed, and nodded. Fine. She would watch the goddamned stair.

“You want to finish?” she asked.

Gina pushed her mangled but uneaten fries away. “No, baby. I’m done.”

The man’s name was Henry; he ate an extraordinary amount of fried chicken from a red paper bucket while Matthew crouched on the stoop beside him, breathing shallowly. The acrid vapors of whatever Matthew hunted actually covered both the odor of unwashed man and of dripping grease, and though his eyes still watered, he thought his nose was shutting down in protest. Perversely, this made it easier to cope.

“No,” Henry said. He had a tendency to slur his speech, to ramble and digress, but he was no ranting lunatic. Not, Matthew reminded himself, that it would matter if he was. “I mean, okay. I see things. More now than when I got my meds”—he shrugged, a bit of extra crispy coating clinging to his moustache—“I mean, I mean, not that I’m crazy, but you see things out of the corner of your eye, and when you turn? You see?”

He was staring at a spot slightly over Matthew’s left shoulder when he said it, and Matthew wished very hard that he dared turn around and look. “All the damned time,” he said.

The heat of the cement soaked through his jeans; the jacket was nearly unbearable. He shrugged out of it, laid it on the stoop, and rolled up his sleeves. “Man,” Henry said, and sucked soft meat off bones. “Nice ink.”

“Thanks,” Matthew said, turning his arms over to inspect the insides. “Hurt much? You don’t look like the type.”

“Hurt some,” Matthew admitted. “What sort of things do you see? Out of the corners of your eyes?”

“Scuttling things. Flapping things.” He shrugged. “When I can get a drink it helps.”

“Rats? Pigeons?”

“Snakes,” Henry said. He dropped poultry bones back into the bucket.

“Roosters.”

“Not crows? Vultures?”

“No,” Henry said. “Roosters. Snakes, the color of the wall.” “Damn.” Matthew picked up his coat. “Thanks, Henry. I guess it was a cockatrice after all.”

What happened was, Katie couldn’t wait on the stairs. Of course she’d known there wasn’t a chance in hell that she could resist Melissa. But sometimes it was better to fool yourself a little, even if you knew that eventually you were going to crack.

Instead, she found herself standing beside Gina, blocking a sight line with her body, as Gina knocked ostentatiously on Doctor S.’s door. She slipped the latch with a credit card—a gesture so smooth that Katie could hardly tell she wasn’t just trying the handle. She knocked again and then pulled the door open.

Katie kind of thought she was overplaying, and made a point of slipping through the barely opened door in an attempt to hide from passers-by that the room was empty.

Melissa came in last, tugging the door shut behind herself. Katie heard the click of the lock.

Not, apparently, that that would stop anybody.

Katie put her back against the door beside the wall and crossed her arms over her chest to confine her shivering. Gina moved into the office as if entranced; she stood in the center of the small cluttered room and spun slowly on her heel, hands in her hip pockets, elbows awkwardly cocked. Melissa slipped past her—as much as a six foot redhead could slip—and bent over to examine the desk, touching nothing.

“There has to be a utility bill here or something, right? Everybody does that sort of thing at work . . . ”

Gina stopped revolving, striking the direction of the bookshelves like a compass needle striking north—a swing, a stick, a shiver. She craned her neck back and began inspecting titles.

It was Katie, after forcing herself forward to peer over Gina’s shoulder, who noticed the row of plain black hardbound octavo volumes on one shelf, each with a ribbon bound into the spine and a date penned on it in silver metallic ink.

“Girls,” she said, “do you suppose he puts his address in his journal?”

Gina turned to follow Katie’s pointing finger and let loose a string of Spanish that Katie was pretty sure would have her toenails smoking if she understood a word. It was obviously self-directed, though, so after the obligatory flinch, she reached past Gina and pulled the most recently dated volume from the shelf.

“Can I use the desk?” The book cracked a little under the pressure of her fingers, and it felt lumpy, with wavy page-edges. If anything was pressed inside, she didn’t want to scatter it.

Melissa stood back. Katie laid the book carefully on an uncluttered portion of the blotter and slipped the elastic that held it closed without moving the food or papers. The covers almost burst apart, as if eager to be read, foiling her intention to open it to the flyleaf and avoid prying. The handwriting was familiar: she saw it on the whiteboard twice a week. But that wasn’t what made Katie catch her breath.

A pressed flower was taped to the left-hand page, facing a column of text. And in the sunlight that fell in bars through the dusty blind, it shimmered iridescent blue and violet over faded gray.

“Madre di Dio,” Gina breathed. “What does it say?”

Katie nudged the book further into the light. “14 October 1995,” she read. “Last year, Gin.”

“He probably has the new one with him. What does it say?”

“It says ‘Passed as a ten?’ and there’s an address on Long Island. Flanagan’s, Deer Park Avenue. Babylon. Some names. And then it says ‘pursuant to the disappearance of Sean Roberts—flower and several oak leaves were collected from a short till at the under-twenty-one club.’ And then it says ‘Faerie money?’ Spelled F-a-e-r-i-e.”

“He’s crazy,” Gina said definitively. “Schizo. Gone.”

“Maybe he’s writing a fantasy novel.” Katie wasn’t sure where her stubborn loyalty came from, but she was abruptly brimming with it. “We are reading his private stuff totally out of context. I don’t think it’s fair to judge by appearances.”

Gina jostled her elbow; Katie shrugged the contact off and turned the page. Another record of a disappearance, this one without supporting evidence taped to the page. It filled up six pages. After that, a murder under mysterious circumstances. A kidnapping . . . and then some more pages on the Roberts disappearance. A broken, bronze-colored feather, also taped in, chimed when she touched it. She jerked her finger back.

One word underneath. “Resolved.” And a date after Christmastime.

Doctor S., it seemed, thought he was a cop. A special kind of . . . supernatural cop.

“It sounds like Nick Knight,” Melissa said. Katie blinked, and realized she had still been reading out loud.

“It sounds like a crazy man,” Gina said.

Katie opened her mouth, and suddenly felt as if cold water drained down her spine. She swallowed whatever she had been about to say and flipped the journal to the flyleaf. There was indeed an address, on West 60th. “He’s not crazy.” Not unless I am.

“Why do you say that?” Melissa, gently, but Gina was looking at Katie too—not suspicious, or mocking, anymore, but wide-eyed, waiting for her to explain.

“Guys,” Katie said, “He’s a magician or something. Remember how he vanished on Gina? Remember the ink that you somehow just don’t see? Remember the damned invisible rings?”

Melissa sucked her lower lip in and released it. “So did he kill that woman or not?”

“I don’t know,” Katie said. “I want him to be a good guy.”

Gina patted her shoulder, then reached across to also pat the journal with her fingertips. “I say we go to his apartment and find out.”

There were drawbacks to being a member of Matthew’s society of Magi. For one thing, nobody else liked them. And with good reason; not only was the Prometheus Club full of snobs, Capitalists, and politicians, but its stated goal of limiting and controlling the influence of wild magic in the world put him in sworn opposition to any hedge-witch, Satanist, purveyor of herbs and simples, houngan, or priest of Santeria he might want to contract with for ritual supplies.

Such as, say, a white, virgin cockerel.

New York City was not bereft of live poultry markets, but given his rather specific needs, Matthew wasn’t sure he wanted to trust one of those. He’d hate to find out at the last minute, for example, that his bird had had a few sandy feathers plucked. Or that it was, shall we say, a little more experienced than Matthew was himself.

And then there was the recent influenza scare, which had closed several poultry markets. And what he really needed, now that he thought about it, was an illegal animal; a fighting cock.

He booted his desktop system, entered an IP address from memory, wended his way through a series of logon screens, and asked about it on the Promethean message board.

Fortunately, even if Matthew didn’t know something, it was a pretty good bet that somebody in Prometheus would.

Before close of business, he was twenty blocks north again, edging through a flaking avocado-green steel door into the antechamber of a dimly lit warehouse that smelled of guano and sawdust and corn and musty feathers. It drove the eyewatering stench of the cockatrice from Matthew’s sinuses, finally, and seemed in comparison such a rich, wholesome smell that he breathed it deep and fast. He coughed, sneezed, and waved his hand in front of his face. And then he did it again, feeling as if the inside of his head were clean for the first time in hours.

There was a desk in a cage—not unlike the ones inhabited by the clucking, rustling chickens, but far larger—behind the half-wall at the far end of the dirty, hall-like room. Matthew approached it; a stout woman with her white hair twisted into a bun looked up from her game of solitaire.

He cleared his throat. “I need to buy a cockerel.”

“I’ve got some nice Bantams,” she said through the grate. “And a couple of Rhode Island Reds.” Not admitting anything; those weren’t fighting cocks. “You got a place to keep it? There are zoning things.”

“It just needs to be pure white.” He hesitated. “Or pure black.”

She reached up casually and dropped the shutter in his face. Of course. He sighed, and rapped on the grate, rattling the metal behind it. No answer. He rapped again, and again.

Five minutes later she cracked it up and peered under the bottom, through the little hole for passing papers and money back and forth. He caught a glimpse of bright black eyes and a wrinkled nose. “I’m not selling you any bird for your Satanic rituals, young man.”

No, but you’ll sell me one for bloodsports? Matthew sighed again and stuck his hand through the slot, nearly getting his fingers up her nose. She jerked back, but he caught the edge of the shutter before she could slide it closed again. His biceps bulged inside his shirt sleeve; his tendons dimpled his wrist. She leaned on the shutter, and couldn’t shift him.

“Young man.” A level, warning tone. She didn’t look intimidated.

Oh, what the hell. “It’s for the cockatrice,” he said.

Her hand relaxed, and the weight of the shutter lifted. She slid it up; it thumped when it reached the top. “Why didn’t you say so? About time somebody took care of that thing. Though I notice you didn’t give a shit when it was just in East Harlem.”

Matthew glanced aside. The cops were always the last to know.

She hesitated. “You’ll need a human virgin too.”

“Don’t worry,” he said, biting the inside of his cheek. “I’ve got that covered.”

When he returned home, there was a woman waiting in his apartment. Not surprising in itself; Jane had a key and the passcode for the locks. But it wasn’t Jane. It was the homicide detective, Marion Thornton.

She had an outdoorswoman’s squint and silky brown hair that framed her long cheekbones in feathered wings; it made her look like a brighteyed Afghan hound. She showed him her badge and handed him back the keys before he was fully in the door.

“The victim was an alcoholic,” Marion said, re-locking the door as Matthew put his chicken on the counter. It was in a cardboard animal carrier. Occasionally a glossy jet-black beak or a malevolent eye would appear in one of the holes along the top. It scuffed and kicked. He pushed it away from the counter edge and it grabbed at him, as he thought of a line from a Russian fairy tale: Listen, Crow, crow’s daughter! Serve me a certain service—

“The nun was a drunk?”

“To put it crudely. And we found another possible for the same bogey, about three days ago. Elderly man, never married, lived alone, drank like a fish. We’re continuing to check back for others.” She flipped pages in her report pad. “Here’s something interesting. He was castrated in a farming accident when he was in his teens.”

“Oh,” Matthew said. “It’s always virgins, isn’t it?”

“For dragons and unicorns, anyway,” Marion answered. “But I’d guess you’re correct. And more than that. Heavy drinkers. Possibly with some talent; a link my . . . secular . . . colleagues won’t come up with is that Promethean records show that we considered inviting both of these victims for apprenticeship when they were young.”

“So they saw things,” Matthew said, thinking of Henry, living on the monster’s doorstep. If the thing had a preference for sexually inexperienced prey, that would explain why it hadn’t eaten him yet. Well, if Matthew was prepared to make a few conjectures. “Do you think it wanted them because they drank, or they drank because they saw things?”

“We operate on the first assumption.” Marion picked her way around him, leaned down to peer into the animal carrier. She pulled back as a grabbing beak speared at her eye. “Vicious.”

“I sure hope so.”

“Jane said you had a possible ID on the bogey?”

He knelt down and began peeling the rug back, starting beside the inside wall of the living room. “The black cock isn’t enough of a hint?”

“Basilisk.”

“That’s a weasel. Cockatrice, I’m guessing. Though how it lured its victim into hurling herself from her window is beyond me. You’re describing very specialized prey.”

She straightened up and arched, cracking her spine. She picked a spoon off the breakfast bar and turned it, considering the way the light pooled in the bowl. “Call it one in ten thousand? Then the Greater New York metropolitan area has, what, two thousand more just like ’em?”