IGMS Issue 44 (14 page)

Mab stooped, holding her hand a few inches above the ash sprout I had let grow up beyond the grass. She stood like that for a while, the rain tracing the arch of her back, but nothing seemed to happen to the tree.

"The first son became a soldier, though whether he would have anyway I could not tell you. He would see Death on the fields, flashing through the battle, towering over the carnage, harsh and serene. Sometimes she would be there at his side, her face set. The soldier loved her, though as close as he came she always held her distance. He would whisper to her over the rattling breath of the dying, lift his bloodied hands to her silent form, but she said nothing."

I did not know if, watching her naked form move across the lawn, I should feel something. I would say she was like a dancer, but she did not move quite like any human. And then I would say like a sculpture, but she had not been birthed from any human mind.

I was fearful more than anything.

Mab stopped suddenly and looked at me. "You will find my things?"

The change in tone and topic was so abrupt that I just stared. The crow shifted uneasily on the top of the clothesline pole.

"Your things?"

"My things and my people." She tilted her head like a child. "My museum. They all went away, but I think they can come back now. You will find them for me?"

"If I can. I don't know where to look."

"They will probably find you, mostly." She started ticking off names on her fingers. "There is the Red Hand, Christopher 57, all of the gripe water, Thirteen Shades and his lovers, and Janie Wringer."

"That's all?"

She shrugged and held up her hand, five fingers outstretched. "All on this hand."

"Why me?"

She shook her head, coming closer, moving like a snag of cloth caught in a breeze. The closer she got the harder she was to see, until she was whispering right in my face. I smelled dirt and dry leaves on her lips. "Then you would understand too much," she was saying. "Then you would know the whole story."

I took a step backward.

"They will mostly find you," she repeated, and then she was gone.

I wrote the names down on a piece of paper and put it on the refrigerator so I would not forget them, and then I promptly forgot them. This was difficult to do because I still had a bird that spoke, and he would perch on the top of the fridge and crane his neck to look down at the list.

"Good list!" he said. "Good things!" His vocal range seemed to have decreased again now that he had explained what he needed to about Dresden and the museum.

"Sure." I mixed equal parts orange juice and cranberry juice against a coming cold.

"Find them!" He cocked his head so I knew it was a question, and I shrugged in response.

"She told me they'd find me."

I was taking Carla to a movie that evening. She was still engaged, and I still had not met her fiancé. The stories about him always seemed to change. Now it appeared he was working on an offshore drilling rig. I did not want to meet him when he came home, if he even existed.

Nor did I want to see Mab again.

I did not get either wish.

"Thirteen Shades lives in the Blur," the god of the garage told me.

"I don't care."

"You should."

The god of the garage -- I could not get him to explain if he was the god of
all
garages or simply the god of my own -- had pulled himself together from a gasoline can, some rags, an old sheet, and gardening tools that still had caked dirt from the summer before. When he spoke, some of the dirt fell from his lips. He smelled of gasoline and mowed grass.

"Why should I care?"

I had stepped into the garage to find something -- the air gauge for my bicycle tires, I think.

The god ticked items off on a hand formed from a bent metal rake.

"People -- and I use the term here loosely -- are using you. The Blur is beginning to leak. Thirteen Shades can help you find the rest of the lost items."

I shook my head. "Mab said they would find me."

The god sighed. He climbed up to an old metal shelf and sat on it like it was a throne. Perhaps it was. One of his eyes was a broken piece of an old bottle; the other was the metal lid of the gasoline can.

"They'll find you
if you're in the right place.
Anything will, really."

"Okay." I shrugged. "Okay. What is the Blur?"

"It's a sort of place."

"What kind of place?"

"It was a big place once. Big and important. Now it's settled down beside this place, tucked into corners where things are lost."

I waited, but it was clear that was the only explanation I would get. "Where is it?"

He pointed in a direction I could not see.

"But you can't get to it that way. You've got to slip through where it comes close." He paused, considering. "What's today's date?

I told him.

He muttered something, then nodded. "Good, good. There will be a gathering tonight in a garage two blocks over. You'll find it easily enough. Go late, when the dancing is nearly done and the alcohol consumed. There will be a girl there. The Blur is behind her eyes."

I stared up at him. "That's it?"

Oily rags shifted as he shrugged.

"That's the closest it will be for a while, though your neighbor's dog goes there every night in its dreams. You can't get in that way though."

I recognized some of the music coming from the garage two blocks away. It had been a party, spilling out into the alley and the houses beside. Kids my age and a bit younger were still coming and going, though mostly going by this time. I caught a few drunken stares, but no one said anything. Inside the garage (carpeted and with furniture) there was a couple on a couch making out disinterestedly. A few bodies were sleeping or passed out on other chairs. I found Carla in a corner, curled up by a turntable.

"You didn't even ask me to come along," I muttered as I bent and lifted her. She was even lighter than she looked, as though she had wilted in sleep. Her breath was heavy with beer and something sharper.

As we left the garage she mumbled a question.

Back at my place I put her on the sofa. She began snoring before I even had a blanket over her. I stood there for a moment, looking closely at her eyelids. They were lovely but seemed to hide nothing out of the ordinary.

That night I dreamed of stormy blue spaces, and Thirteen Shades rode up and down the plains on his demon horses. His lovers were the winds, and they whipped around him and screamed like harpies. I told him it was time to come home and he stopped and turned all his faces towards me.

"The doors," they said. "The doors are not opened."

I asked him what he meant.

"There is no entry without the gate and no gate without the doors and we all went forth and we all were lost and the doors were closed."

When I woke up, my head felt as though it was stuffed with sand. I lay in bed for several minutes wondering what I was hearing, what river was rushing behind my eyes and ears, before I realized the shower was running. Carla was singing, though I could make out no words. I moaned and buried my head in the pillow.

When I finally rose, strangely unsteady and with a pounding behind both temples, she was in the kitchen, scrambling eggs in my skillet and wearing a pair of my pajama pants and sweatshirt.

"I had the most amazing dreams last night," she said by way of greeting. I grunted and fell into one of the chairs.

Nothing seemed right. She should be hung-over, not me. Yet whatever chemicals should have been clogging her head this morning had apparently been poured into my own. I could hardly move.

"I was a cloud. Or a bird. Whatever it was, I could fly."

"Could you make statues come to life?" I asked. The sand slid from my head to my mouth.

She shook her head.

"How was the party?"

She paused in stirring the eggs, as though she had forgotten for a moment the events of the night before. Then she shrugged.

"Fine, I guess. Some of Dan's friends were back in town and they wanted to get together."

The supposed fiancé. I still had not met him and was becoming more and more doubtful of his existence. She had slept on my couch, after all, hadn't she? She was making breakfast in my damn pajamas, in my kitchen.

He could not exist. Fate could not be so cruel.

Carla opened the window, and Hamilton dropped onto the sill.

"I'm supposed to be collecting pieces from a museum," I said, "but I think I have to unlock the doors before I can put the pieces together."

Carla sat down opposite me and pushed across a plate of eggs. "Sounds fairly simple."

"It's not. It doesn't make any sense."

"To you," she corrected. "It doesn't make any sense to you."

I looked at the eggs. Their mangled edges made me think about the weird blue and grey clouds that tore across the skies in my dream. Those clouds did not stop at the horizon; they marched down and beat against the ground like surf.

"Apparently there were pieces of a museum here. Someone's museum." I had been about to say Mab's, but Hamilton shot me a warning look. "Someone had collected things or built things, and then they all scattered. I think this was before we were here. I think they left when we came."

"The French Heritage museum just opened up in the Stone Barn downtown. I've been meaning to make it over there."

"I think this was before the French."

I trailed off, watching her eat. It was hypnotic. She took small, precise bites. There was something that sparked at the ends of the strands of dark hair that fell over her face as she ate, something that caught the light of the silver fork.

"How is it that you brought those statues to life?"

"Which ones?"

"Which ones?" My eggs were untouched, but the pounding in my head was beginning to recede. I sipped the orange juice she had poured. "The lions in front of the library. That cow creamer I had. Those porcelain birds that had been my grandmother's."

Her eyes lowered for a moment. "I hoped you hadn't noticed those. I felt bad."

I waited.

"Does this have something to do with your museum?"

"I don't know. Does it? A god in my garage told me where to find you last night." I was suddenly angry. "Nothing like this has happened to me before, and I'm fairly certain none of it is normal. But you seem normal enough. But then you do this thing where you bring statues to life."