The Insides (17 page)

Leave it alone
, she thinks, but she’s already reaching out for it.

She grasps it, and she whirls, and she is graced with a sudden understanding: the understanding of how exactly to carve the rift. She can see it as clearly as if she had a butcher’s chart in the air before her. She moves. She lunges forward, slashing a diagonal through the portal, bisecting it. Each half wobbles and flickers and she swings back, cleaves again, this time drawing the knife in a line from ceiling to floor, leaving four quadrants hanging in the air, just for a moment, and then they sputter and are gone.

Victor breaks from whatever trance he’d been in, rears
back, gaping at her in what might be awe, as though she were some primal force made manifest. She rises from her crouch and he turns away from her, rubbing at his face with his fists. But even once his eyes are no longer on her she has a sense that she’s still being watched. Her skin prickles. She can’t quite shake the feeling until she’s returned the knife to the box, and even then it persists, tickling at the edge of her perception.

Victor coughs, wipes his mouth with his hand. “Well,” he says.

“Yeah,” she says.

He tries to look over her shoulder, get a glimpse of the knife, but she’s already closed the case and latched it.

“So all that stuff,” he says.

“All what stuff?”

“All that stuff you said about how we’re not going to look at the knife, we’re not going to touch the knife, the knife doesn’t belong to us, the knife is dangerous?”

“Oh, that stuff.”

“Yeah,” he says. “What happened to all that stuff?”

“I don’t know,” Ollie says.

For a minute, both of them look at the box in silence.

“It’s hard, isn’t it, being good all the time,” Victor finally says, softly.

Ollie frowns, then gives one curt nod.

“You should give yourself a break from it more often,” Victor says.

To this, Ollie says nothing.

“Well,” Victor says, after an interval. “Can I just say that I’m wide awake now?”

“Yeah,” Ollie says. “I hear you.”

“I’m kind of wanting to get out of here,” he says, stubbing out the herb bundles on the edge of the sink and trying to fan away some of the pallor that’s accumulated in the room. “You want to go grab a booth at the diner? Bad coffee? Lumberjack Special?”

She has to work tomorrow, and that’s going to suck if she stays up all night, but she doesn’t really want to be here right now either. She uses the toe of her sneaker to poke at the little melted crater that the rift left where it touched the floor. “Yeah,” she says. “Let’s go.”

While Victor changes back into street clothes she goes and hides the knife under her bed. It’s not exactly an impregnable fortress, but it’ll do for the night.

At the diner. The two of them bathed in neon. She sips at the aforementioned bad coffee, stares groggily at the laminated menu.

“Eggs,” Victor says.

“Ugh,” Ollie says.

She ends up straying from the menu, eyeing instead the desserts revolving in their tower.

“Pie,” she says.

“No,” Victor says. “I eat pie for my job. And good pie, too, not shit made from Sysco fruit out of a
can
.”

“Pie,” Ollie says again, almost growling the word.

Victor grimaces, then seems all at once to succumb to the inevitability of pie. “Fine,” he says.

“Two orders of apple pie,” Ollie says to the waitress.

“Ice cream with that?”

“Yes, please.”

Victor shakes his head once she’s gone. “Apple pie,” he says.

“American as,” Ollie says.

“Actually,” Victor says, “that reminds me.”

“Reminds you of what.”

“Reminds me of Rufus. You remember Rufus?”

At this, she has to give up a smirk. “Sure,” she says, “I remember Rufus.” Rufus was the oldest street warlock they ever knew, probably, although his actual age was tough to figure out. At first glance you might say sixty, if you were judging from his sun-blasted, grizzled face, the broken blood vessels in his nose, or the decade’s worth of tangle in his beard. But if you were judging from his quickness, the litheness of his movements, or the mirth in his laughter, you’d guess two, maybe three decades younger. But the important thing about Rufus is that Rufus was crazy, and Ollie says as much.

“Crazy?” Victor says. “Yes. But.”

“No but,” Ollie says. “Rufus was crazy, period.”

“Yes. Period, but.”

Ollie sighs. “But what.”

“But do you remember: he was always talking about American history?”

Ollie casts back. “Yeahhh,” she says. “The—oh, God, how did he put it?—the occult underpinnings of America? America as a—something, a vessel?”

“A Hermetic vessel?” Victor says. “I don’t know. Who can remember. But I
do
remember that somewhere in that
mix of crazy shit he also talked about these special blades? That were key to the whole thing somehow?”

“What did he call them,” Ollie says. She thinks for a second. “World Knives?”

“Something like that,” Victor says. “Knives that could cut through space and time.”

“Whatever
that
means,” Ollie says. “That doesn’t mean anything.”

Victor ignores this. “Rufus said that the World Knives might still be around.”

“If I recall correctly,” Ollie says, drily, “he also used to say that one of the World Knives used to belong to
George Washington
.”

“Was
stolen by
George Washington,” Victor adds. “During the—the Siege of Boston?”

“Who knows,” Ollie says.

“You know,” Victor says, “I think Rufus still works as a third-shift parking lot attendant,” Victor says. He sucks down the last of his coffee. “You up for an adventure? You want to roll on down and find him, see what he has to say on the topic?”

“No I’m not
up for an adventure
. We’ve had far too much adventure already. I want
less
adventure.”

“It could be interesting, to see what he might say.”

“If he’s going to say that Guychardson—a tiny Haitian man, let’s recall—somehow ended up with a knife that once belonged to George Washington and changed the destiny of U.S. history, I’m pretty sure I don’t want to hear it.”

“But that would be
amazing
,” Victor says.

“It
would
be amazing,” Ollie says, “if it weren’t so obviously
insane. Guychardson works in a kitchen. He doesn’t know George Washington. He doesn’t know anybody who ever
knew
George Washington.”

“Maybe,” Victor says, “maybe somebody in his
family
knew somebody in George Washington’s family?”

“Unlikely,” Ollie says.

“But you don’t know.”

“I’ll ask him,” Ollie says. “I’ll ask him exactly that.
Does anybody in your family know anybody in George Washington’s family?
I’ll ask him tomorrow.”

Victor issues the correction: “Later today.”

Ollie looks out the window. Blue predawn light has begun to collect in the streets.

“Ugh,” she says, pressing both hands into her face.

“Cheer up,” Victor says, as the waitress returns. “There’s pie!”

It turns out it’s not that hard to kill someone. Guns, like Pig uses, make it easy, of course. But even without a gun it’s still not as hard as maybe it should be. You just have to hit a thing and keep hitting it until it stops moving. Then you hit it some more. As a series of physical motions it’s no harder than any other kind of repetitive work. Like digging a hole or chipping at ice. Emotionally it’s a little more challenging, but the trick is just to ignore everything that tells you that the thing you’re hitting is a person. The noises that it makes, the way its face looks, the fact that it has a face to begin with. You just decide not to listen, not to look. It’s a decision you can make, like any other.

As Pig drives them back toward Jersey, Maja remembers making that decision: remembers being eighteen, standing there, over the destroyed thing that used to be a boy, the bat in her hand. Looking at the ugly house’s orange shutters so that she wouldn’t have to witness what she’d done. But the Archive was waking in her then, for the first time, and it
undid that decision, because it wanted to look. That was the first thing she learned about it. Her brother was an observer, a photographer, and so it was with the Archive: always after some way to make a moment into record. She could feel its hunger inside her skull. And so, as a kindness, she looked down, eyes open, fed it, gave it something to see.

Well
, it said. The first thing it ever said to her.
I guess this means I’ve been avenged
.

A minute passed.
We’d better go
, it said, then. She was shaking. The Archive guided her through what she had to do. She got back to her bike. She balanced the bat across the handlebars. She rode down the hill. She kept her face neutral so that in case anyone passed her she would look calm, unremarkable. And before they’d reached the shore her feelings matched her face. It was because she knew exactly what was going to happen next.

She knew that she would leave her bike by the road in order to clamber out onto a jetty that the Archive cherished as a favorite point. She knew that she would throw the bat into the water. She knew that it would never be found and she knew that she would never be caught.

The two crimes—the murder of her brother and the murder she’d committed—were so close to being identical that the police would be forced to consider them as the work of a single assailant, which would leave them unable to consider revenge for the first killing as a motive in the second. And as long as that first, faulty assumption held—and she believed, correctly, that it always would—she would never be considered a suspect; the flawed logic would never allow for it.

Even if they had some reason to suspect her, she still knew, as she stood there, as the bat left her hands and fell into the choppy black waves, that she was safe. There were no witnesses. She’d left nothing behind save the crumb in the road. Maybe a hair or a flake of skin, but the idea that the police officers of Hammerfest, groping through the infinite world of things, guided only by their ordinary perception, would be able to find such a mote—? It was laughable.

And so she learned that this part, the part where you get away with it, was easy, too.

And it always has been. She’s had five jobs that ended in the death of at least one person, and not one of her clients has ever been arrested. Ultimately she’s no more worried about it now, with Pig, than she’s ever been. She reads up on forensic science, every now and again; she’s watched the press enshrine the practice, as though it were the gesturing of some conjuror, summoning evidence out of the aether. But the crudeness, the limited utility of the actual findings, does nothing but make her smirk: compared to what she can do, at the height of her powers, police officers are nothing but bumblers, helplessly believing that they are the architects of the labyrinth within which they stumble.

Pig drives them across the bridge into Jersey. She can feel a camera mounted above them take a photograph of their license plate, store it within some dense array. She can imagine, theoretically, some scrupulous cop gathering the casings left behind at the restaurant and the apartment, linking those casings through a ballistics analysis, finding witnesses of one murder or the other to interview, piecing
together observations of the town car, gleaning the license plate number, querying it against the database, learning of their comings and goings across this bridge—

And yet she also knows full well that, no matter how much she might look, she will never find such a cop.

Ollie finally gets into bed right as the sun begins coming up and she sleeps uneasily, with turbulent dreams, until around nine, at which point she wakes in a panic, certain that the box under her bed is gone.

She pulls herself up, crouches down on the floor to look. It isn’t gone. It hasn’t even been moved: it’s in exactly the spot where she shoved it, drunk, just six hours ago.

“Christ,” she mutters, half-relieved but mostly irritated at her own nerves.

She gets back into bed, pulls the sheet up over her face to block out the light, tries to let herself go under again. But after an hour of trying to force her way back into sleep, she has to admit that she’s getting nowhere.

She pulls the box out from under the bed, sits it in her lap, rests the palms of her hands on its surface, and thinks about how glad she’ll be to rid herself of it later today, when Guychardson comes and picks it up from her.

It’s not that she’s worried about being attacked. Guychardson
seemed serious about the existence of some psychopath out there, willing to kill in order to get this knife, but now that it’s daytime and she’s sober, that whole line of thinking seems a bit like paranoia. She believes that people got shot but there have to be other explanations. Victor was right: it could have been petty robbery gone wrong, or somebody else’s crime of passion, with Guychardson just a guy who was in the wrong place at the wrong time. True, being close to the knife does make her feel like someone’s eyes are on her, even now, even with it safely in its box, but that could just be her imagination stirring up feelings. Just because you feel like you’re being watched doesn’t prove that there’s a watcher.

No. What she’s afraid of is that she’ll want to use it again. She used it last night to banish Victor’s spell, but she knows that it could be used the opposite way, too: not to close a portal to another world but to open one. That was what Victor wanted it for in the first place, and after having felt it in her hand she feels certain that it could serve that function.

She carries the box out into the hallway, past Victor’s room, his door ajar. She looks in on him: he’s in his bed, soundly asleep.

In the kitchen she starts a pot of coffee. She sits on a bar stool and listens to the coffeepot drip and looks at the spot where they opened up the Inside last night. Even now that the portal’s gone, the air doesn’t look quite right: its emptiness seems fake, labored, like it’s hanging together only with effort. If she weren’t so tired she’d rise from her stool and wave her hand through the space just to make sure that she can.