Echoes of Darkness (26 page)

“Two.” Dagner set his shoulders, obvious in his intention to follow through with his threat and snap the little cat like a schoolyard bully breaking a pencil. Agatha shifted her head to the side, then further, leaning as much as her bonds would allow . . . and that was when Billy realized she wasn’t looking
at
him, but
past
him.

Wait!
He spun to look at the huge orange cat behind him, sitting high and watching the proceedings almost regally.
Buddy?
The golden disc flashed again, an errant bit of sunlight dancing across its surface. Billy leaned in closer, fearful of putting his face within reach of the beast’s undoubtedly huge claws, but with a burst of insight it was suddenly vastly important that he
know
. The tag, or whatever it was, lay flat across the broad chest, thrust forward by the thick ruff beneath it, and as Billy squinted slightly, the engraved lettering became clear:

Buddikshasa

“Buddikshasa,” Billy whispered, and with the word something about the cat changed. That feeling that he should run, should run
right now
, swelled to monstrous proportions. His gaze darted up to the big cat’s eyes—

—and was captured, as he realized what had changed. Since entering the kitchen, the big cat’s attention had been on the woman in the chair—and maybe the little man threatening her—but not Billy. Just as the woman had looked past Billy to see the cat, so Buddikshasa had looked past him to see the woman. At the mention of his name, though, his
full
name, the great orange animal’s attention had shifted, and was now wholly on Billy.

The eyes staring straight into Billy’s were wide, and golden, and beautiful, but they were also cold, and alien, and somehow merciless, and Billy felt the world shift as he met them, like the jounce at the end of a fast elevator ride. He nearly lost his balance, but though his body wanted to take a steadying step,
tried
to take a step, his feet refused to move. His bowels tightened, then loosened, as the sensation that the shit was hitting the fan washed over him.

“Three,” said Dagner, and Billy wanted desperately to spin and tell the little man to stop, stop what he was doing right fucking
now
, to forget about the money and just run. He
knew
the little man was doing it again, thinking he was
so
smart but was too caught up in what he was doing to see the world around him, to
feel
that it had all gone wrong, gone
so
wrong, and Billy desperately wanted to tell his friend to drop it, cut his losses, and they could just
go
.

But he didn’t.
Couldn’t
. Couldn’t look away from those beautiful, terrible eyes, as the bushy, orange tail lifted toward the ceiling as if drawn by a string. In his peripheral vision, Billy saw shadows shift across furry backs and haunches as feline muscles flexed and bunched, and the tension in the air was suddenly thick, and electric. The room was silent, but for Agatha’s quiet sobbing, so Billy clearly heard the voice of the small cat clasped in Dagner’s gloved hands: not a sound of pain, but of fear and confusion.

A request for help.

Buddikshasa’s mouth cracked open, and as his tail fell to the butcher’s block with a thump, he loosed a low, rumbling cry:
Mraaaaw!

The room about them exploded into motion and sound. A hundred tiny throats spat out a hundred terrible moans, sounds he’d never heard from the cats on television, like the wailing of lost souls falling into Hell. Though he couldn’t tear his eyes from those of Buddikshasa, all around the edges of the butcher’s block table he detected flickering motion, little kitty bodies flowing forward like water through a burst dam. They brushed his legs again, but rather than twining about his lower limbs like warm and purring climbing ivy, they sinuously slipped past his shins and ankles. He was standing in the flow of small forms darting by without pause, only brushing against him because that took them along the straightest path between where they’d begun and—

Dagner cried out: first in surprise, and then in pain, and finally he screamed in terror.

“Billy! Jesus fuck—stop ’em! Billy! Help!”

Words degenerated into another brittle scream, and then thudding footsteps mingled with the soft, rolling thunder of hundreds of paws and those terrible yowls. The screams and footsteps moved as Dagner made his way across the big kitchen, and the light in the room changed as the back door opened, then slammed.

No!
Billy thought.
Dag, please, man, take me with you!
Please
!

Though he strained to call out to his partner, wanting with all his heart to turn and follow the fleeing man out into the world, away from this crazy lady and all of her cats, Billy stood silent and still, staring into the wide and faintly glowing eyes of Buddikshasa. Screams faded into the distance, and the doggy door flap-flap-flapped as the cats flowed right on through to continue their pursuit. Buddikshasa’s eyes grew, widening until Billy saw nothing
but
those eyes, alien, and merciless, and though his body made not a sound, Billy’s mind screamed and wept as it tipped and fell into those utterly bottomless eyes.

“. . . And you didn’t see the man trying to scale the fence?” said Detective Shaun Gantry, breathing shallowly, and through his mouth; the smell in this house was enough to knock a man down. Beneath the table, he nudged a small, feline body away with one foot.

“No, Officer,” said the older woman with the shapeless brown dress and flyaway hair. The demotion stung, but he knew it was unintentional, and the woman had been through a lot. He let it go. “I was tied to the chair, like I told you.”

“Until Billy”—he checked his notes, the flipping pages attracting the paw-swinging attention of the kitten in the chair beside him—“Spavington, here, released you.” Gantry pointed his pen toward the large man sitting next to Agatha Harper, but the man didn’t react.

“Like I told you,” the woman repeated.

“And he’s your live-in helper and handyman, is that right?”

“Like I told you.”

Through the window behind them, Gantry could see the medical examiner’s team hoisting the body off the spikes along the top of the fence, three cats supervising from the grass. They’d identified the man as Valentine DuBois, and though he hadn’t known Valentine, the way he’d died made Gantry suppress a shudder.

“And you have no idea how the man wound up, uh, on your fence?”

“I told you, Officer, I was—”

“Tied to the chair,” he finished for her. “Yes. So you said.” Gantry eyed the man, who sat staring silently back. There was something . . . 
off
about William Spavington. He’d been here when the police arrived, but the woman had done all the talking. She’d explained that Mr. Spavington didn’t speak, and when Gantry had asked the man for some ID, Ms. Harper had helped him get it from his wallet. It looked to Gantry like the man had never even
seen
a wallet before.

And there was something else, Gantry realized. They had all sat down while Gantry did his incident interview, and while he had flipped pages in his notebook and jotted things down, and Ms. Harper had fidgeted about, fussily arranging and rearranging her dress, occasionally trying to smooth her wild hair, William Spavington had sat still as a statue, head erect, strange golden eyes open the entire time. And when he thought back on it—and he
was
thinking back on it now,
hard
—Gantry couldn’t recall the man even blinking, though it had been more than ten minutes.

A flash of gold at the man’s chest caught the detective’s attention, some kind of oval pendant peeking out from Billy’s open collar. There was an inscription of some kind, a single long word scrawled across the surface, but before Gantry could lean forward to try to make it out, the old woman spoke, drawing his eyes away.

“Is there anything more, Officer? I’m exhausted, and I’d like to go lie down, if you don’t mind.”

“Of course not, ma’am,” the detective said, rising. “If we need anything more, we’ll be in touch.” He held out a card. “And if you think of anything more, please, don’t hesitate to call me. I can see myself out.”

Agatha Harper took the card with an “I will, thank you,” and turned to make her way across the kitchen. Gantry looked down at Billy Spavington just in time to see the big man rise with sudden, sinuous grace, and without offering a handshake or a nod, turn to follow his mistress.

And though the cats scattered about the floor flocked to the old woman, writhing and twining about her legs as she walked, wherever the man with the golden eyes stalked, little bodies moved out of his way, slipping and rolling aside before him, only to flow closed behind him as he passed, as if responding to instinct, or some inaudible command.

MA LIANG’S CRAYONS

The house was filled with people.
Black suits, dark skirts, and solemn voices. People sipping from clear plastic cups, or carefully holding undersized paper plates to their chests, trying not to make a mess with the pasta salad, or let little deli meatballs roll off onto their shirts and ties. She didn’t even know half the people currently occupying her living room, and most of those she
did
know, she hadn’t seen in years. Especially not the
past
year, when she could most have used some help, or even just a shoulder to—

“When’s Daddy coming home?”

Julie looked down, surprised. Pearl stood in the kitchen doorway, looking strangely adult in her formal dress, a string of faux pearls around her tiny neck.
Pearls for the Pearl
, Connor had said, making the little girl laugh when he’d given them to her. He’d always been a hit with Pearl, always been the fun uncle. And that had helped: someone else to distract Pearl when Danny had gotten sick. Someone else to shore her up when Danny had taken a turn for the worse, and Julie had needed to focus on caring for her hus—

“Mommy?” The voice was small, but insistent. “When’s Daddy coming home?” Julie heard things in her daughter’s voice, things that shouldn’t
be
in the voice of a six-year-old. There was fear in that voice, and sadness, and confusion, and an impending sense of loss, but on top of it all was the tone—the over-careful enunciation—of a young woman trying to ignore all that, and act as if everything was fine, just spiffy, tip-top, business as usual.

As if a little girl burying her father could ever be
usual
.

Julie heard these things in her daughter’s voice, and knew that her heart should have broken to hear them—shattered like a wine glass assaulted by a high C. And it would have, had it not already
been
broken. She looked over Pearl’s head once again, to the people out in the living room, the strangers, and friends so recently in absentia, who had come to eat her food and celebrate the life of her husband, though not one of them had been willing to help him though its ending, the cancer consuming friendships as readily as it had consumed Danny himself, only faster.

She glanced back down at the little girl standing in the doorway, the woeful child demanding an answer. Pearl deserved an answer, Julie knew, but what was she to say? This was her daughter—
their
daughter—and she’d been through a lot, even more than she understood yet. Julie should be helping Pearl to understand what was happening, what had been happening for the past year—and more—and console the little girl in her grief. She knew she should do this. She
knew
.

But the words wouldn’t come from her dishrag heart, wrung out with saying goodbye to Danny after so long, and her head was filled with confusion about Connor, missing for the past ten months, and not even making it to his own brother’s funeral. And so her answer, poorly chosen for nothing but its honesty, came out flat, and matter-of-fact.

“Never, Pearl. Your daddy’s never coming home again.”

The words took a moment to register on the small face, but when they did, the oddly adult expression, the rigid mask Pearl wore to help hide her fear and uncertainty, crumbled like a house of cards tumbling down. Disbelief flashed across her daughter’s countenance, almost too fast to see, before her soft little features settled into an expression of sorrow so deep it almost frightened Julie. Sorrow, tinged with something Julie couldn’t quite recognize—at least until Pearl spun away, wailing as she pelted across the packed living room.

“I
hate
you!”

Shrill words degenerated into sobs as she ran, colliding blindly with some people, clumsily avoiding others, until she disappeared into the hallway. The slamming bedroom door cut off the sounds of her sorrow, leaving the crowded room filled with awkward looks and silence.

“You all should go now.” Julie’s voice was quiet, but none of her guests had difficulty hearing her, and her tone brooked no hesitation or rebuttal. A muted murmur rose as plates and cups found perches about the room, and coats were collected, but the voices never rose up into intrusiveness as the people, those she didn’t know and those she did, filed out without offering their goodbyes.

The package arrived two days later.

Julie had spent the intervening day trying to make up with her daughter, to patch the rift she had torn between them with her thoughtless words. She’d been a kind of automaton after sending everyone from her house after the funeral, numbly cleaning up in the wake of the reception. Putting away the food—and there was plenty left over—collecting and disposing of plates and cups, wiping everything down, even breaking out the vacuum cleaner; it all gave her something mindless to do that she, nonetheless, put her mind to. Focusing on making the house cleaner than it had ever been—this allowed her to push all of her terrible emotions into the background, and kept her from having to think about what had gone on that day. And the day before that. And the day before that . . .

She had woken the next morning with a kind of emotional hangover, pounded by her own grief and sorrow, but horrified at the way she had handled Pearl’s. The girl hadn’t spoken when Julie had gone in to put her to bed the night before, merely faced the wall, either asleep or shamming; Julie hadn’t cared which. The next morning, though, Pearl’s last words to her had rung through Julie’s head as she approached the bedroom door.

I hate you.

Pearl had woken unsmiling and remained that way through breakfast: peanut butter pancakes slathered with Cool Whip, and chocolate milk, her absolute, number one favorite. Julie had kept a light tone and a smile on her face, but it took an effort. They had spent the day on the couch together, watching Pearl’s movies (Julie was sick to death of
My Little Pony: The Movie
, and
The Care Bears Adventure in Wonderland
, but watched every scene as if rapt), eating Pearl’s favorite foods for lunch and dinner, and watching Pearl’s preferred nighttime TV. Julie had remained bright and smiling all day, though her heart shriveled, slowly but surely, as her daughter’s expression remained unswervingly grim.

She
has
been through a lot
, she’d thought, putting Pearl to bed that night—not perfunctorily this time, but with all the back-pats and cheek-kisses she could fit in.
And I wasn’t any help. If anything, I made it worse.
She’d paused at the doorway to look at Pearl, curled against the wall and offering her back to her mother once more, rather than making her usual pleas to stay up for just five more minutes.
But if I give her time, she’ll come around, right? I mean, I can’t
make
her forgive me. But, God, I do miss her smile
 . . .

The next morning the postman arrived with an express package for Pearl. Julie signed for it, then carried the cigar-box-sized, brown-paper-wrapped parcel back toward the kitchen, marveling at the sheer number of foreign postage and border stamps, most of them in illegible script and eastern characters, though she recognized the words Hong Kong, Cairo, and Mumbai.

“Hmm,” she muttered. “Express, by way of
everywhere
.”

She ground to a halt in the kitchen doorway as, seeing past the road grime and official ink, she took note of the handwritten address for the first time. Suddenly all the foreign border markings made sense.

Connor.

Ten months ago, just as Danny was starting what was to be his last downhill slide, his brother, Connor, had come charging into their house, fit to bursting.

“The brush,” he’d said. “It’s the answer. You get it? The brush—I can’t understand why I didn’t think of it before!”

Julie had tried to get the story out of him, but the man was nearly unintelligible in his excitement. As always when it was her uncle Connor, Pearl had gotten caught up in his emotion, dancing after him as he bounced about the house like a pinball, words spilling from him in a confusing flood. There was something about a brush, and a trip, and then he’d been holding Pearl by the hands and saying, “When I get back we can use it on your father, Pearl. Won’t that be great? The brush’ll make him just as good as new,” and that was when Julie’s heart fell.

Connor was a minor archaeologist who saw himself as Indiana Jones, traveling to the far corners of the world to find items thought lost—though he hadn’t actually found one yet. The problem wasn’t that he lacked smarts, or drive, in Julie’s opinion: he lacked sense. While his Hollywood hero, Indiana Jones, had been portrayed as a skeptic, locating things mentioned in ancient scholarly writings, her brother-in-law was a
believer
, who chased after things found only in legends and folktales.

The blade of the shovel Hercules used to clean the Augean stables—that turned out to be made in Taiwan. The wooden wheel from Thor’s goat cart—that actually started life attached to a milk wagon in Scotland. The Sword of Attila—somehow forged from 220 stainless steel, smelted right in good old Detroit. If Miss Cleo had been an historian too, instead of just a fraudulent psychic with a 1-800 number, she could have made a bundle off Connor.

And now here he’d been, running off on some wild goose chase after the Caduceus of Hermes, or Hippocrates’ stethoscope, maybe a tongue depressor made from a splinter of Christ’s cross, some kind of magical doodad from antiquity that was probably “handmade by monks” in a factory in Boston. They’d just gotten the word that Danny was in the home stretch—but not because he was cured and coming home. Medicine had failed: he was heading to a hospice, not home, and there would be no happily ever after. This was going to be the hardest part, for herself and for Pearl—and for Connor, too, she understood that—when they all should have been leaning on each other, helping each other get through this thing. But Connor had dashed about making promises to Pearl, promises the girl would take as gospel, Julie knew, but that he just wasn’t going to keep, and then run out the door.

“I’ll see you in a month,” he’d called over his shoulder. “Two, tops!”

And then he’d just dropped off the face of the earth. She’d sent a few letters, mainly outlining Danny’s decline, because she knew Con was having his mail forwarded, but she hadn’t known where it was forwarded to, and there had been no reply. Not for ten months.

Not until now.

Swallowing her anger at the man, knowing the almost worshipful way Pearl felt about her uncle, she held out the package to the small, slumped back sitting at the kitchen table. “Pearl, this is for you. Looks like an early birthday present from Uncle Connor.”

The effect was immediate, and all Julie could have hoped for. The little back straightened in surprise, and the face that turned her way bore a bright, broad grin.

“Really? Where? Can I have it?”

“Here,” Julie said. “Just be careful, we don’t know—”

But it was too late. Pearl was already sitting on the floor, tearing at the brown paper wrapping like it was Christmas morning. Which made sense, when Julie thought about it: after ten months, she wondered whether Pearl remembered her uncle at all, or if she merely thought of him as someone akin to Santa Claus, who showed up occasionally, bringing her cool presents from around the world. She had a shelf of them in her room, and knew where each of them had come from: the doll from Nicaragua, the top from Botswana, and a half-dozen others. Those things would now be joined by . . .

“Cool!”

It was a hinged wooden coffer, about the size of a cigar box. The light wood had a dark pattern inlaid in the lid, some kind of eastern characters Julie couldn’t read, and the whole thing was polished to an almost mirror-like sheen.

“Oh, that’s
beautiful
,” Julie murmured. “Honey, let me try—”

She was again too late: Pearl’s clever little fingers had found the simple catch, and she was levering the box open. As the lid rose, it pulled with it an internal layer, cleverly designed to unfold into an upright rack within the box, a rack containing—

“Crayons!” The girl rocked on her little bottom in excitement, though, to tell the truth, Julie was more impressed with the box than its contents.