Napier's Bones (12 page)

The bum limped
over to another person who was standing directly beneath one light, but instead
of watching the interaction between the two of them Dom turned his gaze
upwards, watched as the light flickered again, then went dark.

“Well, I’ll be,”
said Billy.

“No shit,” said
Dom. “He’s got something all right. Should we find out what it is?”

Billy nodded his
head for him, and he turned to Jenna. “See that bum over there?” He pointed
across the street. She nodded. “He’s numerate, but probably doesn’t know it.
He’s also really fucked up, so we’ll have to be careful when we approach him.”

“Approach him?”
He heard Jenna running to catch up, since he’d already headed off to the
corner. The street was too busy to jaywalk; he could use numbers to help, but
there was no trusting that drunken frat boys might be out and a little slower
to react to numeracy, and he also didn’t think it was a good idea to advertise
his presence to the person who was likely still on his tail, at least not until
he knew he was prepared, and certainly not for something as minor as crossing
the street.

The light
changed and they crossed with the crowd, Dom keeping his chin up and watching
for stray numbers from the bum. He could see by the guy’s wake that he’d gone
further up the street away from them; another light had flickered out. This was
a huge leak, and if he didn’t take advantage of it now, someone else would be
there to try and beat him to it.

Jenna stepped in
front and turned to face him, walking backwards but making him slow his pace.
“What are we doing?” Dom put his hand on her shoulder and spun her around,
pointed up to the light directly above them. “See that?”

She looked up
and nodded. “It’s burned out.”

“Not
necessarily. There are some people who will make streetlights go out whenever
they get close to them. They have a pretty strong in-built numeracy, but
usually they don’t know it.” He took her hand and kept them walking, watching
the bum’s progress; they were catching up, but slowly.

“That’s happened
to me before,” said Jenna. “Maybe five, six times a year, I’ll be driving by a
light and watch it as it goes out. Always the same light, on the way to my
apartment from work.”

Dom nodded.
“There’s a lot to figure out about you, like how the numbers don’t come into
your body, but how you’re still able to have spillage like that.”

“Dom, you’re
leaving me dry here. What the heck is spillage?”

They were closer
now. The bum seemed to have decided he wanted nothing else to do with crowds,
and had headed down an alley. Dom picked up his pace, dragging Jenna along with
him. “Spillage is just that, a big leak of numbers. If someone is numerate but doesn’t
know it, they lose their more powerful numbers, sometimes in a steady flow,
sometimes in big splashes that happen in cycles. The big splashes will
sometimes affect electrical things. Streetlights are prone to splashes, and
usually it’s the same light, like it’s the one in the chain that is no longer
immune, a sacrifice so that the others can continue to function.”

“This
fellow,” said Billy, “seems to have shut down three lights just while we were
watching him.” He pointed to a third that had gone out just at the entrance to
the alley. “That’s an enormous spillage.”

They reached the
alley, and Dom stopped, looked for any numbers floating around that were
waiting as traps, but there was nothing. He could get the sense of the big
splashes that had come from the bum, but they’d raced up and away faster than
he would have expected, and strangely enough he was left with almost no
numerical residue from the bum himself. It was almost as if he could cover
himself up and hold it all inside, but then would have to let go frequent
bursts of numbers. “Jesus,” he said. “Do you think it’s something he’s eaten?
It’s like he’s farting, for God’s sake!”

“Swallowed the
mojo?” Billy sounded sceptical. “It’s big enough to think it’s something he’s
carrying, not just his latent ability, but I don’t know.”

Dom shrugged his
shoulders. “Sounds stupid, yeah. But how the hell is he shutting down every
light like that? No one leaks like that.”

They entered the
alleyway, the only light spillover coming from shops and traffic out on the
street. There were no more street lights now that they were here, so they
couldn’t track his path that way, and there was still no numerical trail
otherwise; Dom had never seen anything like this before.

Jenna clenched
his arm now, pulled herself close to him. It was Billy who reached across and
patted her hand, but neither of them said anything to her, or even looked in
her direction. All of Dom’s concentration was going outwards, trying to figure
out where this guy and his mojo had gone, since he sure as hell didn’t want a
repeat of Utah.

“Hey!” The voice
came from practically right beside Dom’s ear, and at the same time cold air
blew up Dom’s pants legs. Jenna screeched and dug her nails into Dom’s arm, and
between his own fright and Billy’s reaction, Dom was sure his heart was about
to stop. He spun around, prepared to throw numbers in the guy’s face and run
like hell.

There was no one
there.

Someone shoved
his back, hard enough to snap his head back, and again he turned, slipping on
what felt like ice instead of stumbling on what should have been pavement.
Still nobody there, and where the hell was this ice coming from? “What the fuck
is happening?” He yelled this, scared and exasperated in equal measure. Jenna
still clung to his arm, and when he yelled she hissed and squeezed even
tighter.

“You have a
ghost following you,” said the voice. Again he was hit from behind, this time
dropping to his knees. “Hold still so I can check it away!” He was slammed
again, his face pushed down and what really did feel like ice.

Right
,
though Dom.
No fucking mojo on me, but I’m not taking this shit anymore.
He stood back up, as quickly as possible reaching up into the sky with his
mind, and pulled down an avalanche of numbers. It didn’t matter what the
numbers were, where they’d come from, or how much attention they brought to
him. He just knew he had to stop this now.

Incomplete sets,
broken-down theorems, strings and individual numbers, primes and wholes and
even some imaginary numbers, all crashed into the alley with a clatter and
banging loud enough to wake the numerate dead, although it wouldn’t be more
that a whisper of a breeze to the non-numerates out on the sidewalks and
streets.

The numbers
continued to pile up, some of them hitting with enough force to push him and
Jenna around, others hopefully doing the same to his invisible attacker.

He wasn’t being
harassed anymore, so he waved a hand and stopped the flow, let the numbers
begin their journey back up and into the numerical ecology. Some sprang into
the air with great energy, others were more sluggish, skittering or even just
crawling along the pavement of the alley before finally finding enough juice to
push themselves back into the air. There was a small cloud developing overhead,
about roof height, where the weaker numbers congealed together as they searched
for strength from each other.

But some numbers
remained on the ground, and many of these danced and bounced in a ball around a
huddled figure that was scrunched up close to a rusted out Toyota pickup. Dom
pulled Jenna over to a wall well clear of the guy—he could see through the
numbers that this was the bum—then half-slid, half-walked across the ice and
pushed the remaining numbers away.

The guy looked
up into Dom’s eyes, and he was shocked to note that the bum wasn’t much older
than him. “What the fuck was that all about?” yelled Dom.

The bum squinted
up at Dom, then raised a shaking hand and pointed to him. “There’s a ghost
following you. I was trying to check it out of you.”

“Check it out of
me? What the hell does that mean?”

The bum reached
into a pocket and slowly pulled out a greasy, slightly torn and heavily
wrinkled paper bag. Dom’s breath caught. Whatever was in the bag, as soon as it
had come out of the bum’s pocket he could see the strength of the numbers
spilling out of as well as back into it. Around them the ice melted away,
fading from a solid to a vapour without bothering to make its normal middle
stop as water. This was some serious mojo.

Dom crouched
down, held up both hands and smiled, hoping to show that he was friendly. “The
ghost is a friend of mine,” he said. “His name is Billy. Say hi, Billy.”

“Hello,” said
Billy. Dom felt his smile stretch even wider. “What’s your name?”

The bum’s eyes
were as big as saucers. “Martin,” he said, voice barely a whisper.

“I’m a friend,
Martin,” said Billy. “I’m not the bad type of ghost that makes trouble for
people. Dom here,” Dom smiled and raised his eyebrows, “is my friend, and I try
to help him.”

“Who’s that?”
Martin gestured over to the wall across the alley.

“That’s Jenna,”
replied Dom. He turned and waved her over. She crossed to them cautiously,
looking up to the numbers that still circled overhead, most of them a little
higher and flying a bit stronger now.

“Jenna, this is
Martin,” said Dom.

“Um. Hi,
Martin.” She gave Dom a funny look, then turned back to the bum. “Martin, can
we buy you supper some place?”

Martin was on
his feet in a second, right hand still clenched around the paper bag and
whatever it held. “I’m sorry about trying to check you away, Billy,” he said.
“Where are we going to eat?”

Dom scratched
his chin, smiling. “Well, we’ve already eaten, Martin, so we’ll just follow
along. Your choice.”

“Big Mac, fries,
large Coke.” He headed down the alley, Dom and Billy and Jenna hurrying to keep
up.

More lights shut
down as they walked, but whenever he turned to look back Dom could see them all
slowly flickering back to life. Now that he could watch more closely, he saw
that the spillage was indeed coming from Martin, and that whatever was in the
bag was somehow focusing it; numbers would leak from the bum’s body, swirl
around the paper bag like they were caught in a whirlpool, then get sucked into
its folds. Then, every dozen paces or so, a congealed mass of them would streak
up and out of the bag, ricochet off the light post overhead, enough scraping
off from the impact to temporarily darken the light.

“You ever seen
anything like that?” he whispered to Billy.

Billy shook
Dom’s head. “Never. One likes to imagine that one has heard of all the mojo
that has been out there, even if only in rumours, but of course that would
involve a splash of hubris, would it not?”

“Are you being a
wiseass with me?” asked Dom.

Now his head
shook. “If so, then it was also directed at me,” said Billy. “I, too, have
carried the belief that I knew everything I could possibly need to know, even
if I didn’t know how to find it.”

They entered the
McDonald’s, and Jenna took a table while Dom and Martin went to the counter to
order. When the food came they joined Jenna, and for several minutes they just
let Martin eat, the mojo in the bag sitting on the bench beside him.

Finally, Dom
said, “I want to ask you again, Martin, what you meant when you said you wanted
to check Billy out of me.”

Martin wiped
some ketchup from his chin with his sleeve, then dipped another handful of
fries in the ketchup and plunged it into his mouth. He chewed for a few
seconds, swallowed, then said, “Push it out. Away.”

“Where did the
word come from? Why
check
?”

“The puck.”

“The what?” This
was Billy, his voice full of confusion.

“The puck,”
repeated Martin. He pulled the ratty bag up onto the table and slid its
contents out onto the tray, where it sat beside his Coke.

Dom reached his
hand half forward, caught himself, looked at Martin and asked, “May I look at
it?”

Martin waved his
permission, took a drink of his pop and then grabbed up another handful of
fries.

Dom picked it
up, turned it over in his hands, feeling the strength ooze from the hard
rubber. It was a hockey puck, NHL for sure, but looked like it was quite a few
years old. He was pretty sure he knew exactly what it was, but thought he’d ask
anyway. “Where’d you get this, Martin?”

“From my dad.”
Martin ate the last bite of his burger, chewing open-mouthed as he leaned back
on the bench. “I stoled it from him when I left home, back in high school.
Bastard stoled it himself, so I figured it was okay. Besides, the thing was
always talking to me anyways, every day trying to tell me stuff.”

“Do you know
where this puck originally came from?” Dom knew, was sure, but he needed at
least a vocal provenance, if only for his own ease of mind.

“Dad told me it
was from Bill Barylko’s last goal.”

Sonofabitch
.
He could see it now, could feel the conjunction of numbers and freak events
that had led to the creation of this specific piece of mojo, could see the
events in his mind, even though they had taken place before he had been born.
This was one serious punch of mojo, this puck.

“Martin, do
things drift in front of your eyes, always bugging you?”

Martin cocked an
eyebrow at him. “No. Not always, anyways. Sometimes, I s’pose.”

Dom hefted the
puck. “This is the reason it happens,” he said. “What if I told you I could
help you get rid of those things?”

Now Martin
leaned forward. “How?”

Dom leaned
forward, too, trying to make it look like he was sharing Martin in something
special. “I can take the puck and make it so it doesn’t bother you again. When
you get it back, it’ll just be a regular puck. Still the one shot by Bill
Barylko, but no longer one that makes all this stuff get under your skin and in
your eyes all the time.”