The Insides (16 page)

“The blade,” she says. She can tell right away that he’s not carrying it. She extends her awareness across the street so that she can rifle into his satchel with her mind, just to be sure, but it isn’t really necessary: if the blade were this close she’d know. She remembers the way it felt as it passed her, outside Café Soulouque, the way it seemed to warp the very fabric of the street, as though it were immensely dense. When she sees the young man now, she detects none of that accompanying immensity, and its absence glares. Now he’s just some furtive guy, not a king in exile.

“What
about
the blade,” Pig says.

“It’s gone,” she says. “He’s stashed it somewhere or handed it off.”

“You’re
kidding
me,” Pig snaps. His eyes widen, craziness in them. “No. We waited out here all night and we
lost
it?”

“We haven’t
lost
anything,” she says, hurriedly. “I can track everywhere he’s been. And I’ve been close enough to the blade at this point that I could—”

“You know what?” Pig says. “I think there’s a different way to handle this. I can
make
this shitbag tell me.”

“You don’t need to do that,” Maja says. “It isn’t necessary—”

Necessary or not, Pig is out of the car, and heading across the street, toward the young man, pulling his mask down over his face as he goes. She knows what is going to happen next. This isn’t going to be an interrogation, regardless of Pig’s intentions. It’s going to be an execution. And there’s no reason to watch an execution. They all go the same way, more or less. Sometimes you need to know when to stop looking.

But she doesn’t stop looking. Not this time. Sometimes it’s important to look, to remember exactly what you are complicit in. She sees the young man look up, his nerves clearly on alert. She sees him break into a run, and she sees Pig drop into a kneeling stance in the middle of the street and fire off a shot.

The young man, caught in the back by the bullet, goes sprawling down, and she loses sight of him as he falls behind a row of cars. His howl of pain rises. It all happens exactly as she thought it would.

Well, that’s good
, says the Archive.
I know how you hate surprises
.

Quiet
, she says.

Still horrible, though
, says the Archive.

Quiet
, she says again.

I was just trying to distract you. So you didn’t have to sit here and listen to this guy screaming
, says the Archive.
But whatever
. And then it goes quiet, just like she’d wanted.

She sits there, alone, listening to the young man’s screams, reading the desperation in the air, watching as Pig rises from his firing position and advances.

Watching this, she remembers what it was like, for her, that first time, as she was completing her own terrible advance. Standing on that garden path, outside that ugly house, staring at the back of a singing boy, holding a bat in her hands, paused there, waiting for the impulse that would impel her into action. As though it could come from anywhere other than inside.

Ollie and Victor are on the subway, heading home from O
VID
.

“Just let me hold it.”

“No.”

“Just for a second.”

“No.”

“Just let me
look
at it.”

“No.”

“I’m not going to
do
anything, I just want to—”

“Jesus Christ, Victor,
no
, OK? It’s not yours to mess with and even if it was I wouldn’t want you waving it around right now.”

“I wouldn’t be
waving it around
, just—”

“This thing is
dangerous
, Victor, do you not get that? Did you miss that part of the conversation earlier? People are”—she lowers the volume on her voice here—“people are getting
shot
over this thing.”

“We don’t know that,” Victor says. “He could have
been wrong. He talked about it like it was some big conspiracy but ordinary people
do
sometimes just try to rob restaurants. I mean, not ordinary people, exactly. Criminals. But, you know, criminals without overriding mystical interests.”

Ollie stares flatly at him.

“I’m just saying,” Victor says. “You don’t know.”

“I don’t know. I don’t care. I’m going to do exactly what I said I was going to do. I’m going to bring it
home
. I’m going to keep it
safe
. I’m going to bring it to
work
tomorrow and give it back to the person it
belongs to
. And that is it. That is the end of the story.”

Victor opens his mouth.

“Ask yourself,” Ollie interjects. “Before you say anything, ask yourself,
is what I am about to say a thing that Ollie will want to hear?
And if the answer is
no
, I would urge you to reconsider the wisdom of
saying it
as a course of action.”

Victor closes his mouth again. He turns away, sullen. His silence gives her the time and the space to think, which turns out in actual practice to be the time and the space to worry: about the safety of her friend, and the safety of her kid, and the safety of herself. After a minute of that shit she finds herself tempted to reopen the conversation, to find a way to get Victor wheedling at her again, just to buy herself a few minutes where she doesn’t have to worry.

“Hey, Victor,” she says.

But, deep in his sulk, he doesn’t reply, and she’s left alone, with a knife in her bag and terrible visions in her head: clowns and murderous thugs, corpses and worms.

They get home. It’s nearly three a.m., but their apartment still retains the day’s accumulated heat. Victor, groaning, heads off to the shower, whereas Ollie decides that the choice move is to drink some more. She heads into the kitchen, sets her bag down on the counter, and opens the freezer, her mind on a bottle of chilled vodka that she knows is back there somewhere.

She stops and stares.

At first she’s not exactly sure what she’s looking at: a weird clump of black foam? For a second she thinks maybe it’s one of Victor’s desserts gone wrong: her irritation at him flares up all over again. But then she sees the wet shreds of brown paper flecked through the mass and she realizes, with a sinking feeling, that the bag that she and Victor put in the freezer last night has burst, and that whatever she is looking at right now is the stuff that has burst out.

“Victor,” she says, but her voice can’t find its force; she’s trying to call out to him but it comes out softer than if she was simply speaking.

She looks closer at the clump. It’s made up of little spheroids, webbed together, each one about the size of a Concord grape. She doesn’t dare touch them but they give off the distinct impression of being unpleasantly sticky; their surface—their skin?—looks like it’s been swabbed with tar. And they’re
warm
: despite having been in the freezer all day, they’re radiating enough heat to have set everything else in the freezer to thawing, enough heat that she can feel it lap out wetly at her face.

She winces, closes the freezer, presses one hand into the freezer door’s surface just to make sure it stays shut.

They’re alive
, she tells herself, even though she wants very badly not to believe this.
If they’re generating that kind of heat, they must be alive
.

“Victor,” she says again, still not anywhere near loud enough for him to hear over the noise of the shower.

Finally she forces herself into motion, walks down to the bathroom. Knocks. Sticks her head in.

“Victor,” she says.

“What,” he says, from behind the shower curtain.

“We have a problem.”

They don’t let the things touch their exposed flesh. They use gloves. They use tongs. They use a silicon scraper. They get all the spheroids out of the freezer and onto a serving platter, and then they bring them over to the prep table so they can get a look at them under the intensity of some good light.

They don’t find the body of the worm, just some tattered bits of skin mixed in with the shredded paper.

“So—these things hatched out of it?” Ollie says, prodding one experimentally with a spoon.

“But they couldn’t
fit
in it,” Victor says, puzzled. He pulls off the yellow dishwasher’s gloves and ruffles his wet hair. “They’re
bigger
than it. The worm fit in the bag. But these things
didn’t
fit in the bag. So—”

“So they’re growing,” Ollie says, grimly. “They’re alive, and they’re growing.”

“They’re eggs,” Victor says.

“Fuck me,” says Ollie, although she’d been expending substantial mental effort to avoid reaching exactly that conclusion.
She looks at the heap on the platter and imagines it as a clump of black caviar, grotesquely magnified. Once the resemblance is seen, it can’t be unseen.

“So we cut the thing’s head off … and it basically exploded into a hundred copies of itself,” Victor says. “Is that what we’re looking at?”

“I don’t know,” Ollie says.

It would be a nasty trick, if it were true. They both lean in, look a little closer at one egg, imagining a tiny worm coiled within it, building itself.

“We have to get rid of these,” Victor says.

“No shit, but how?” Ollie says. “We can’t exactly just flush them down the toilet unless you want alligators in the sewers times a million.”

“We destroy them,” Victor says. “We stick them in the blender.”

“I don’t like it,” Ollie says. “We turn them into slurry, sure, but then what? We don’t know how this stuff makes copies of itself. I don’t want to grind up a hundred of them only to find out in the morning that we made a thousand more.”

“Blowtorch,” Victor says, after a moment.

“Maybe,” Ollie says.

“They couldn’t come back from a burning.”

“We can’t be sure.”

“Rising from the ashes?” Victor says, incredulous. “I’d like to see that.”

“I wouldn’t,” Ollie says.

That shuts Victor up for a moment. She takes the opportunity to get out the bottle of vodka and set them both
up with a heavy pour, no mixers. She drinks. Victor drinks. She drinks again.

She slams her glass down on the table. “We send them back.”

Victor grasps what she means immediately. “You think?” he says.

“Yeah. We open up the portal again, we shove ’em back to where they came from, we banish the portal, we call it a done deal. Can you open it?”

“I can open it,” Victor says, “but I don’t think I can banish it. Not if it’s like it was before.”

“I can banish it,” Ollie says.

“You’re sure?” Victor asks. He gives her a look that she can read. It says,
Maybe we could use the knife
. She gives him a look back that says,
Don’t even ask
.

“I’m sure,” she says, perhaps showing more confidence than she feels.

“OK,” Victor says. “Go, team.”

They high-five sloppily across the table, and begin to prepare. She retrieves her beat-up little reliquary of occult stuff out of the hall closet while Victor lights four bundles of herbs, one for each corner of the kitchen. When she gets back he’s begun to enact a sequence of murmurings and hand-wavings; as an assist she pulls a dry-erase marker out of the utility drawer, uses it to draw out an arcane symbol on the floor’s white vinyl, placing him at the center. When she’s done she leans up against the wall, and waits.

She can feel when it begins to happen. The air in the kitchen takes on a kind of structure, an architecture, as though the room were a nexus point, the square formed by
the intersection of two vast corridors, extending out in four directions, infinitely.

“There,” Victor says, and sure enough she can see the space before him wrinkle, like it’s wilting. She feels a neuralgic throb pulse through her skull. She smells the odor of ground-up batteries, which she remembers as the precursor to some Bad Shit. An uneasy sensation, not yet panic, begins to rise inside her.
Hold it together
, she tells herself.

She sets her vodka down on the counter and lifts the platter of weird goop. She looks down at it: maybe it’s just her imagination, but the protoplasmic mass seems to have come awake somehow, it seems to be seething, expanding.

“Hurry,” she says.

“I’m trying,” Victor says. He’s opened a rift that’s about two inches high, not wide enough unless they’re going to stick the eggs through one at a time. His face contorts with exertion and all at once the rift doubles in size. It seems to take on mass, a kind of doughy weight; it begins to sag.

“OK, that’s plenty,” she says. Victor groans, his face clenched. She can’t tell whether he’s heard her or not, but in either case he doesn’t seem to be able to stop the runaway growth of the shape. It elongates, drooping with sudden, scary rapidity, unzipping the world as it goes.

Well, all right. She steps forward. She tilts the platter into the void. The eggs, sticky, cling, creeping toward the edge at snail speed.
Damn it
, she thinks; she tilts the platter more steeply and gives it a good shake but to no avail. She considers just chucking the whole thing in there and being done with it; can’t come up with a good reason why not. So she does.

By this point the portal’s lower lip has touched the floor: it is puddling there, into a weird little heap that is also a hole. The vinyl of the floor’s surface seems to be reacting unhappily to these twisted physics; she can smell it changing form internally, as though it were being curdled.

She’s pretty sure that no good will come of it if she lets this thing burn down into the apartment beneath. So it’s time to banish. She turns to the counter, looks at the carton containing her old stuff. All those things from the past. She reaches for it, then hesitates. Next to it sits her bag, and inside it, Guychardson’s lacquered box. She can feel the knife. The ongoing ritual has awakened it, somehow, or awakened her to an awareness of it. She can feel arcane power radiating out of it, pouring through it, like fields around a powerful magnet.

And like a magnet it draws her hand. She opens the bag, takes out the box, flips the lid, and looks at the knife. It births within her the unshakable conviction that its handle would fit perfectly in her grip.