Bleak History (36 page)

He'd been rooting around in her apartment, then. Her clothes. Had they gotten into her laptop? Nothing there would get her in trouble. She just didn't like to think of Zweig chortling over it.

Loraine took the bag. “Thanks, Zweig.”

He just stood there, looking at her, cracking the knuckles on those big hands. She could almost see the wheels turning in his head.

“What's the team working on?” she asked, when she realized he wasn't going to just go away.

“Oh, they're monitoring Coster, and...well, I'll have to check with the General before I talk about it. I'm not sure where your clearance is right now.”

She felt a chill. “What's that supposed to mean?”

“Seemed to be some question about it. Got everything you could need in that bag there.”

“Thanks,” she said sourly. “Did you see my cats?” If they'd hurt those cats...

“I was gonna take them to the pound, like the general said, but that poof that lives next door came over, when I was trying to grab them, and they ran up to him so he picked them up and wouldn't give them to me. Said over his dead body. I was tempted to accommodate him. But what the hell, let him deal with that little loose end.”

Loraine felt like slapping him. Instead she said, as impassively as she could, “Uh-huh. So you hear anything about how long I'm supposed to remain on-site here?”

“Indefinitely, is what I heard. You know, I've got a bottle of bourbon in my—”

She closed the door in his face and went to the bed to unpack her overnight bag. It contained a pants suit she almost never wore, a dress she'd worn to work once, a few other more or less random items, her travel toiletries kit, and some of her underwear, crumpled up at the bottom.

Like he'd gotten at those first. Zweig, fingering her underwear. She was surprised he hadn't put her vibrator in the bag too.

She got undressed, showered, put on the rumpled flat-black pants suit, white blouse. Decided the jacket was too wrinkly. She was just brushing her hair when another, sharper knock came at the door. °

She opened it, knowing, somehow, that it was Forsythe. The general wasn't wearing his uniform. He wore khaki pants, a turtleneck sweatshirt. The sleeves were pulled back, showing beefy forearms. Behind him stood those same two black berets, looking calm but watchful, submachine guns in their hands. Not pointed at anyone. But ready.

Forsythe said, “If I may.”

Not waiting to see if he might, he started through the door, his bulk making her step back to keep from being trampled. She stood with the backs of her knees against the small bed. He looked her up and down, even leaning to look behind her. Not lasciviously, but looking for something. “She doesn't seem to be armed,” he said, half-turned, talking to the soldiers. “Wait outside.”

One of the soldiers nodded, reached over, and closed the door from the outside. She was alone in the room with General Forsythe.

He stood there a moment, audibly breathing, looking at her. Loraine felt as if something was pushing against her forehead, though he hadn't touched her.

“General, is there—”

“Sarikosca, you've been holding out on us. Last night, you kept things back.”

She shrugged. She wondered if he could hear her heart thudding—it seemed loud enough to hear in the hallway. “I hit the broad strokes, General. I wasn't as detailed as I might have been. I was tired last night.”

Forsythe acted as if he hadn't heard.
“
I
knew at the time you were keeping something back but I was pressed for time. Something to see to. Now. Let us see if we can get caught up.”

He grabbed her shoulders and dragged her close. His breath smelled like hot iron. She struggled to pull away—but this was the strongest grip she'd ever felt. It was as if something else was holding her too, keeping her from breaking free. Like the muscular paralysis that comes from an electrical shock.

He pushed his forehead against hers, hard enough that it hurt. She could feel the bone of his skull, grinding on the bone of her brow, the skin seeming barely there at all. “General—this is not necessary!”

“Silence,”
he hissed, and she felt his spittle on her face. “Let me in! You are more difficult than Gulcher. Your thoughts are guarded. You are inward. But...”
Loraine felt something pushing through her forehead.

Some part of her knew it wasn't physical—not the kind of physicality that body and bone had. The phrase
unconventionally bodied
came to her. It was a probing from something like that. From Forsythe—and from something else that came through Forsythe.

...Breslin is afraid of the man within the man who stands on his right...

Loraine knew, then. She was certain. That General Forsythe was no longer General Forsythe. For perhaps a long time now, he had been taken over by something inhuman.

Then the entity that was pressing into her forehead showed itself to her inner eye. She was staring into the mouth of a lamprey, a circular mouth with teeth all around, and another circle of teeth within those—and another within those. Inside the innermost ring was something like a polyp, but one that could stretch out, and on the end of the polyp there was an eye, a mucus-colored eye with a black iris, and this eye was rushing toward her, toward the center of her being, pushing into her mind to stare around at her inmost thoughts. It was a rape of the mind; it was a deep, bottomless violation, a stabbingly painful violation, a cold, cutting agony that plunged into the center of her, ripping into her living soul.

She had seen some bad things—pieces of still-bleeding bodies after the bomb attack in Kabul. But she hadn't lost control at that.

Loraine believed a woman should be as strong as any man—and she was stronger than most men. But now... but this time... Loraine screamed.

***

SOMEWHERE. OUTSIDE OF TIME.

A warm day—but not too hot, or humid. The air seemed to wrap around them with a velvety, pristine embrace. Truly it was not Hoboken.

It seemed to Gabriel Bleak that they had been walking for almost two miles. He and Shoella— dressed now, in the clothes they'd worn yesterday—were following a path made by forest creatures, along the bottom of the valley that meandered through the jungled hills. They passed through bands of mist that sparkled in shafts of sunlight; they crossed singing brooks and walked through sudden meadows of tropical flowers droning with bees that never threatened. Occasionally they saw termite mounds taller than a man, looking like models of dried-out hills pocked with tiny caves; they saw a leopard, with a small deer sagging from its jaws, in the crook of a broad-trunked baobab tree. Its muzzle red with feeding, the leopard looked at them with only placid curiosity as they passed—and Bleak could have sworn he heard it purring. They saw a large black buzzard feeding on a dead water buffalo; it ducked its naked red head under its wing, as if in obeisance to them. Flamingos quivering with pink light watched them pass close by and never fluttered in alarm.

And all the time, Bleak felt something, someone, watching.

They paused to eat from two fruit trees; mangoes and guavas, perfectly ripe and tasting as if they were infused with the sunlight—the sunlight that was warming, comforting, but never too hot. They passed through a meadow of fragrant, yellow flowers, like little hands opening to the sun. Beyond the meadow the path ended at a large pond at the base of a hill. Here a stand of gnarled cypresses encircled the pond, which was fed by another, higher waterfall. The thin cascade showed a shoulder of emerald green before tumbling in white lights from a beetling, mossy hillside. Glimmering gold-mottled fish luxuriated under the lily pads in the clear water of the pool. The lichened stones flanking the top of the waterfall seemed the worn, carved remnants of an ancient civilization that had never actually existed.

“Shall we swim?” Shoella suggested.

“Is it safe?” Bleak said vaguely, shading his eyes to look into the pool. Still stunned by all this. “Could be...I don't know...piranha in there or.

Shoella leaned against him, caressed his cheek. “You haven't noticed that nothing here does us harm,
cher
darlin'? There are no mosquitoes—or if there are, they will not bite us. The bees, they don't sting us. It is the ideal place of the ancestors, with all its pleasures, its shady places and water and food, and none of its harm, not for us. You could embrace that leopard we passed—she would not harm you. And me, I would not harm you.” She grinned. “You could embrace me here on the grass by the pond.”

Bleak drew away from her and squatted to trail his fingers in the water. He had gone on the long walk to make the drug wear off—and to see if this world ended, like a stage set; like a ride at an  amusement park. The walk had worked to clear his mind. “This just goes on and on, this world?”

“Yes. The gods created it for us. To go on and on.” After a moment she said, “You're angry.”

“You drugged me. I don't take drugs, Shoella. I tried them a couple times. They make me imagine the Hidden where it isn't, or miss it where it is. I only make mistakes on drugs.”

“This drug was something...
special.
Because—I didn't think I could get my chance any other way. It did not harm you—just a certain shaman's mixture. Some seeds from Hawaii, some bark from Haiti, some other things. It was only meant to bring us together.”

“You had only to ask. A couple of glasses of beer and a kiss would have worked, Shoella. In fact you could have left out the beer.”

She seemed genuinely surprised. “Truly? Years I felt this way—and you gave me no sign. I thought you wanted that Sarikosca woman, and if I was to have you...”

“I barely know her. Of course you're attractive to me, Shoella. I didn't know if it was wise for us to get together, so I didn't push it. I don't like being pushed
into
it—not the way you did it. If you'd just—”

“I'm sorry,
cher
darlin'. To push you. But...there is something else you should know.” She sat down by him, looked at him tenderly, spoke to him gently—but he felt she was talking to him like a perverse kindergarten teacher to a little boy. “I did not bring you here only to keep you away from her —yes, this was in my mind, but there was more. I have cast the bones and splashed the blood; I have listened to the growls of the great powers. The ancestors tell me
I must mate, and it must be this year.
And I must produce a child! This child”—she pressed her belly—”she is to be my great destiny! And I feel—I see it in the Hidden—
that you are the man
to make this child with me! I cannot follow my path as a priestess until I do this, Gabe. Life is ritual, my darlin'. If we make love, this is an invocation; if we make a baby, this is to please the powers of the Hidden.... And to do this, I must have you to myself. No one else may have you. Here we are safe, Gabe—safe from the devils at CCA, safe from that pale little liar who looks at you with big eyes and her lips parted...safe!”

“This is all to please your ancestors? And what makes you think those powers are the ones I want to please?” Bleak asked.

“Not just to please them—to weave a great destiny!” She took both his hands in hers; tried to clasp his gaze with hers, leaning toward him urgently. “The beginning of a magical dynasty,
cher
darlin'! What could be more
mervellous!
”

Bleak snorted and shook his head, drew his hands away. “And I was selected...for breeding?”

“Not only this! To be the high priest beside the priestess! Oh, Gabriel, you must know I love you. Have loved you since I first saw you, my
cher
darlin
’
! So I brought you to paradise.”

“Paradise.” He glanced around at the lovely, womblike tropical forest. A seductive place. But paradise? “Meaning what exactly? Where are we?”

She shrugged. “A...
world.
We can give it a name. A 'demiworld' some say, but also a real world.” She stretched her legs out, put her feet in the water, splashed it softly. “Magicians know these places. Many a sorcerer, many a sorceress, they create one such, and live there, in their own demiworld. It is...a
pocket
world, you might say.” She stood, walked a few paces up the bank, picked a purple-red orchid, growing from the base of a cypress that grew in the shallows, and brought it back to him. “Look! Perfect in every detail!
Fait
by the”—she tapped her head—”and magic. And a person can live there forever. And
not die,
no never die, in such a place. The wearing down of time, it is not here! It is between the universes and safe—made of the things of this world, and...oh, only the
bon Dieu
knows. Someday we will feel it right to return to the world of our birth. But until then—I know we can be happy here!”

He shook his head. “You brought your whole house and just dropped it here? Is there a witch under it?”

She laughed softly, tossing the orchid in the pool so it floated in its own dimple, the blossom reflected in the clear water. “It is only a copy of my house. But you and I—we came here entire. We are not here only in our minds. Our bodies are here, our souls, all of us. Forever, until forever is too much—and then we go back. But now, you and me,
cher
darlin' Gabe. Here you are safe with me.”

He looked at her. “You keep saying 'safe.'“

“Yes. Our enemies were coming for us, Gabe. This place”—she gestured at the world around them—”they cannot come to.” She plucked another orchid.

He wasn't convinced that no one else could come here. He suspected her of using magic that she had stumbled upon—and didn't fully understand.

A thought came to him. “Where is Yorena? I haven't seen your familiar. Unless it was that buzzard.”

“That...no! Yorena—” Her expression became guarded. “I chose not to bring Yorena. I want only you and I.”

Strange,
Bleak thought. She was never far from Yorena, and vice versa. “Shoella—do you respect me?”

She looked at him in open surprise. “Of course—
bien sur! “

“If you respect me as a magus—as a worker in the Hidden—you know I cannot stay here, if I'm...if someone else makes the decision. That would make me passive, a shrunken man.” She laughed. “You could never be shrunken!”