Histories of the Void Garden, Book 1: Pyre of Dreams (7 page)

Charlene looked
at the liver spots on her hands, then she looked at West and she
felt a deep sense of melancholy and loneliness, “Promise you’ll
come back tomorrow?”

West nodded and
leaned forward, “I promise I will return.” He touched a hand gently
to her cheek and stood, walking to the apartment door. He paused as
he reached the door and turned, “Do you have plenty of food in?” he
asked. Charlene turned to face him, “I do. Why do you ask?”

West shrugged,
“You will probably need to eat a little more today than you usually
would.”

David wasn’t good with
tools. He was good at fixing things, identifying problems, but he
was bad with tools. He resented when people called him clumsy, and
it especially hurt when it came from Stephanie, a human who was
basically capable of hurting herself before she’d even climbed out
of bed. There was blood on his shirt which had poured quite
abundantly from a wound that went almost clean through the palm of
his right hand. He had almost passed out when the Phillips-head
slipped its target, and when he grabbed the chain of the swing to
prevent himself from falling, he’d managed to wrap the plated iron
links around two of his fingers, nearly breaking them in the
process.

He was in
agony, he was nauseous, and suddenly exhausted. Tentatively, he sat
on the swing seat, not entirely confident that the job was done. He
could see Hannah and Stephanie through the sliding glass doors of
the den, the pair of them hunched over an old tablet computer. When
his wife Carol had died, there hadn’t really been much discussion
about moving in with Hannah, she just became a whirlwind of
affection, and action, and she hadn’t stopped until David and
Stephanie were completely settled. The house was owned outright by
their mother, but that didn’t seem to matter anymore. She wasn’t
missing, she still wrote them occasionally, and called once a year,
but when Carol had died, it became quite apparent that Valerie
Beach didn’t want anything more to do with the unmitigated disaster
that had become her family life.

Avoiding
thinking about his mother, he started to back track, searching for
what it was that had brought him out to the yard in the first
place. His chest suddenly burned with acid reflux, like a five kilo
weight had been dropped on his diaphragm. Tiernan, of course. How
silly he’d been to think he could escape that mental anguish for
five minutes.

He’d gone
through it all a thousand times, and he still couldn’t figure out
what exactly he’d done. There had been no direct accusations yet,
that much was true, but the phone call, that one ember of doubt
they kept coming back to seemed poised now to catch, and engulf his
entire world. It was unfair. That’s what was eating him up. He
didn’t have the first clue as to why the phone call mattered so
much, but they, the royal they, were going to ruin him over it.

David sucked
his bleeding palm and eased himself up from the swing, suddenly
aware of how much the chains were digging into his under-exercised
hips. He walked through the grass towards the sliding doors and
mashed his face against the glass, puffing his cheeks out for
Stephanie’s amusement. Stephanie ran up to the door, grinning from
ear to ear as she unlocked it. “Dad, I’ve got over fifty
sphincters,” she exclaimed gleefully.

“That explains
a lot honey.” He smiled as he bent down to hug her, but Hannah had
already leapt up from the floor and grabbed Stephanie from behind,
“No, you can’t have her, she’s all mine.” She ran towards the couch
and threw Stephanie onto the cushions, in a bundle of giggling
limbs and hair. Hannah faced David now, her arms spread wide, palms
facing backwards so she could grab Stephanie if she attempted to
get by, “I’ve captured Captain Spiff, and she will not be released
until the human cooks eggs. I demand lots of eggs, and hot
sauce.”

Stephanie
wrapped her arms around her aunt’s neck, “No, I want soldiers.
Demand soldiers.”

Holding onto
Stephanie’s wrists, Hannah stood up, “We have revised our demands
human. Bring us soldiers, and eggs, and the eggs shall be of the
kind in which we can dip the soldier’s heads, and bite them off at
our pleasure.” Then she stopped abruptly, gasping a little as she
saw the blood on her brother’s shirt.

“Holy sh …” she
caught herself, “… Shish kebab David, you seem to have sprung a
leak.” Although her words were light calm, for Stephanie’s sake,
her eyes were wide, serious with concern. “Do we need to take you
to be repaired?”

David looked at
his hand, the skin ragged and painful around the wound, “No, I’ll
be fine, we’ll just wrap some gauze, throw some rubbing alcohol on
it.”

Stephanie
laughed and then whispered in her aunt’s ear, “You were going to
say shit.”

Hannah’s eyes
widened further, and she sucked her lip to prevent herself from
laughing, but she decided to say nothing, just this once.

Opening the cupboard
under the granite topped island, David pulled out a heavy bottomed
pan, and took it to the sink. He set the water running, but when
the weight of the water caused his hand to spasm, he realized he
was going to have to attend to his wound before cooking. Stephanie
had already taken her place at the island, pulling herself up onto
one of the tall stools, and he could see the anticipation etched
across her face. He asked Hannah if she would mind taking over the
cooking duties while he fixed himself up, and she grumbled her
consent, “What is the point of hostage demands if we have to carry
them out ourselves?”

By the time
he’d cleaned the wound, applied antiseptic, and taped up the gauze,
he returned to the kitchen to the sight of steam rising from the
pot of boiling water, and the sound of some unrecognizable girl
band streaming from the ceiling mounted speakers.

“How long have
they been in?”

Hannah pointed
at the old fashioned egg timer on the counter, which looked about
half done, “Maybe a minute and a half? Maybe seventy thousand
grains of sand? Maybe Spiff forgot to turn it over when the eggs
went in, so maybe the soldiers are going in dry,”

Hannah was a
little disappointed that the euphemism didn’t get much of a rise
out of David, but she knew he must still be stressing, so she tried
again, “Spiff, how do you like your soldiers?”

“Almost black.”
Stephanie answered innocently, but that was enough to set Hannah
off, laughing at her own set up, “Me too hon. But you know what
they say …”

David almost
choked on his laughter, “Don’t you dare Hannah!”

Hannah feigned
offense, glaring at her brother, “They say that burnt toast is
carcinogenic.”

Stephanie spun
round to look at her aunt, “Really?”

Hannah wrinkled
her nose in sympathy with Stephanie’s shock, “They sure do.”

“I’ll settle
for soft and white then.” Stephanie responded, then watched in
confusion as her aunt ran out of the kitchen.

“What’s wrong
with aunt Han?”

David laughed,
and started towards the bread bin when the phone rang. David
ignored it. The phone rang off, then immediately started ringing
again. David made towards it, but it clicked off again. When it
started ringing a third time, Stephanie ran and picked up the phone
from its base unit on the side table.

“This is the
Beach residence, Stephanie speaking, how can I help you?”

A voice on the
other end of the line asked condescendingly if her Daddy was home
and on autopilot, Stephanie responded, “No, my Dad is out at the
grocery store, can I take a message?” The line clicked dead and
Stephanie hung up the phone.

David felt
himself welling up with emotion. There were so many reasons he
loved his daughter.

West leaned against
the window, one arm on the glass, his head resting against his
forearm. He could see a burning car in the street, but whoever had
set the fire had already moved on to other acts of mindless
vandalism. He understood that people were angry; the whole world
was in turmoil, but it distressed him when people vented their
frustrations in such misdirected and futile acts.

The political
landscape had never much interested him, because it nearly always
played out as expected. The onward march of the great dream,
Somnium Mirificum, that endless self-fulfilling prophecy. Except it
wasn’t endless, which was part of the problem. He couldn’t pretend
he saw the assassination coming. It wasn’t surprising, but it
certainly wasn’t written in the stars. It had heightened his
awareness of the fact that he’d been out of touch with most of the
key players for far too long. The few people he knew how to contact
were on the wrong side of the fence. He was starting to feel
uncomfortable with himself, cringing at his cowardice every time he
saw his own reflection. As much as he understood, even after
looking at this thing for a few weeks, there were still things
about the Tiernan incident that made no sense.

David Beach had been
his first stumbling block. From what West could tell, Beach was an
almost depressingly mundane member of Tiernan’s staff. His father,
an author of little note, had died when David was young. West was
unable to find a copy of Doctor Julien Beach’s only published work,
but he had found a couple of mentions of him in the digital
archives of academic reviews, and both of these suggested that the
doctor had been widely regarded as a laughing stock by the time he
died, completely shunned by academia. His book
The Kings
Mosaic
was described in one article as a rambling mess, focused
loosely on the supposed links between modern day politicians,
various royal families and their ancestors. There was something to
that of course, but without a copy of the book, West could make
little more of it. If David had followed his father’s work, it
would go some way towards helping to explain his fascination with
conspiracy theories, which was all well and good, but it didn’t
help West with the issue at hand.

He’d tried to
look at it from the FBI’s perspective, but West just couldn’t
understand why Beach had become a target. The reports of one agent
McMahon described his concerns that Mr Beach had been snooping into
files relating to Arctum Industries immediately prior to the events
of March 10th. That could only be a bad thing, but on its own, it
didn’t seem particularly damning. McMahon’s report also didn’t
actually evidence this, so as far as West was concerned, McMahon
was tiptoeing into the realms of hearsay. Beach had been
interviewed by McMahon a couple of times, and prior to that, he’d
also spoken at great length to an agent Carmichael. Going by the
transcripts, these interviews were almost singularly focused on a
phone call which occurred on March 6th. The FBI appeared to be
fumbling in the dark on this one, and they had apparently stumbled
out of that particular closet, clutching onto the fact that the
phone call hadn’t come from the Undersecretary of Defense for
Intelligence. There was no audio transcript of the call, which was
probably the most miraculous discovery West had made so far.
Someone must have lost their job over that one …

A large solid
mahogany pedestal desk stood several feet from the Eastern wall of
the living room. There was sufficient space to access both sides of
the desk, which was often necessary as it boasted nine drawers to
the front, and three drawers and two cupboards to the rear. The
desk was ornate, but not obscenely so, and West treasured it almost
as much as his bed.

He walked over
to the desk and seated himself facing the eastern wall, unlocking
the large central drawer and removing the tablet that was nestled
away there. West refused to rule out the possibility that the FBI
really weren’t interested in finding anything genuine on Beach. Why
bother, if they could simply cut and paste him into a fiction?
There were things, obvious things about Beach, which weren’t
mentioned anywhere in their files. Notably, David Beach was a
frequent visitor of on-line conspiracy newsgroups, and reddit
subs.

West had been
following a comment thread for several days now, and he couldn’t
help but chuckle when he read Beach’s latest entry,

[–]Shadowcab73
 2 points 21 minutes
ago 

My sister
thinks I’m the next LHO. Yeah, I laughed too. I’m probably going to
get down-voted to shit for this, but I feel like March 10th was one
big grassy knoll. Look at my history. No one can say I have been a
supporter of such theories as those surrounding the assassination
of President Kennedy. God knows, in my position, I could not
consider myself to be fit for purpose or sufficiently patriotic if
I fostered such beliefs. In light of this, it pains me to say that
my current treatment at the hands of the authorities is unbecoming,
and furthermore, I believe that their behavior is highly suggestive
of the possibility that, in the absence of a true suspect in the
case of the assassination of President Tiernan, the powers that be
are trying to scapegoat me. If anything happens to me, you read it
here first - I would never knowingly participate in any act that
would endanger the lives of any other human, let alone a member of
the presidency under which I have served as a dedicated and loyal
member of staff.

West logged in and
replied to Beach’s post,

I would like to
offer my assistance, and I can only hope that you are not too
stubborn to accept it. I’m well versed in the circumstances
surrounding your case.

West sat
staring at the message, wondering if he should say more.
Eventually, his finger tapped the save button on screen, and he
felt immediately dissatisfied with his decision. He should do more.
He knew he should try to call the Beach’s house again at least.
Looking at the time stamp on Beach’s comment, it was obvious that
his daughter had been lying to him on the phone. She sounded young.
West was impressed. The girl obviously had a natural talent for
subterfuge, but he was pretty sure he could figure out a way past
the masterful call screening.