Poison Sleep (7 page)

“All clear,” Nicolette said, and led the way. Gregor followed, and the elevator whispered shut behind them. “He’s quiet tonight.”

“As long as he isn’t dead,” Gregor said.

“Nah, he’ll live forever.” Nicolette seemed amused by the idea. “He told us so himself, right?” She pushed open the flimsy door at the end of the corridor with her foot. It squeaked on its hinges. Gregor winced. “Hey, laughing boy! Chow time!”

Gregor looked at her questioningly.

“He likes those oatmeal cookies,” Nicolette said, patting yet another pocket. “I got him a couple.”

“I didn’t realize you two were so close,” Gregor said.

“I had a dog for a while, when I was on the street. The Giggler reminds me of that dog—dumb, but kind of loyal, you know? My dog wasn’t as creepy, of course.”

“Of course.” Gregor inhaled from the handkerchief deeply, then stepped into the dark room to confront the Giggler. They’d tried locking him up, keeping him in cells or in bare white rooms where he couldn’t make a mess or a stink, but the measures always failed. The Giggler couldn’t be held. He had resources Gregor didn’t understand, capabilities beyond anything Gregor had studied. They would lock him away, only to find him outside the cell the next morning, drawing cartoon animals with his feces, using frothy spittle for the highlights, the door still locked behind him. Giggling, of course. Surveillance equipment malfunctioned when trained on him, and guards fell asleep when assigned his watch. Some strange power had touched the Giggler, and while that touch had damaged and twisted him, it had given him talents as well.

The Giggler
had
to live in the midst of mess and profusion. His previous owner had understood that, and after a time, Gregor had accepted it, too. The Giggler needed disorder for his fragile mental well-being, and more important, he needed it for his work. Where Gregor saw clutter, the Giggler saw the secret traceries of the universe.

Nicolette flipped a switch, and cold fluorescent light flooded the room. “He didn’t break this light yet, at least.” The Giggler’s living quarters were revealed, a pile of blankets, a jug of water, and a bag of salty pretzels beside the pillow. The Giggler himself was nowhere in evidence.

Gregor had inherited the Giggler from the city’s former chief sorcerer, Sauvage, although “stolen” might have been a more accurate word. But Sauvage had been past caring, and the Giggler didn’t care where he went, as long as he got pillows to sit on and food to eat and things to play with. Little animals to disembowel. Tea leaves to stir with his finger. Yarrow stalks. Ancient coins. Small bones, from the feet of children and the limbs of lizards. He even possessed a dirty, well-thumbed deck of Tarot cards, though he never laid them out in any pattern Gregor had heard of. He kept big sheets of posterboard to wipe his boogers on, and often propped the sheets against the wall and gestured to them when talking to Gregor, like a marketing executive noting pertinent points on a graph at a meeting. Gregor stood in the middle of the room, away from the moldering cat pelt nailed to the wall, away from the shelves with their algae-infested aquariums, away from the wooden boxes full of different kinds of mushrooms, some of which the Giggler ingested, some of which he studied for omens.

The frayed black drape at the back of the room fluttered and parted, and the Giggler emerged, pulling his stained corduroy pants up. He wore a surprisingly clean white undershirt with round eyes drawn all over it with a black laundry marker. He tugged the drawstring in his pants tight and smirked at his visitors. His black hair was greasy as always, and his clogged pores looked big enough to drive trucks through. Wiping his perpetually runny nose with one hand, he waved shyly at Nicolette with the other. “Feed me.”

Nicolette tossed him a cookie, and the Giggler caught it one-handed, still rubbing away at his nose. He tore the plastic wrapper open with his teeth and ate the cookie in two bites. He smiled, belched, and sank to the floor, sitting cross-legged.

Then he tittered, an eerie high-pitched sound, like a schoolgirl’s ghost might make.

“What have you divined this day, oh Seer?” Gregor asked formally.

The Giggler touched the eyes on his undershirt, caressing them and the skin beneath. He reached for a plastic bag and dumped out a pile of bottle-caps and pop-tabs from aluminum cans, fingering them. “There’s a man in black,” the Giggler said, staring at the bits of metal. “He’ll help you, for a price.”

“You mean Zealand?” Gregor asked, frowning. The assassin had been wearing black, this last time.

“No, no, not an assassin. This man is mean. He has a mushroom head. White like a snake belly, skin like something growing under an old log.”

“You’re one to talk,” Nicolette said. Gregor glared at her, and Nicolette shrugged.

“Not the assassin, then. Someone else.”

“The enemy of your friend is your enemy, yes?” the Seer said.

Gregor digested that. “Possibly.”

“You’ve got another enemy, then, if you make the mushroom man in black your friend. His enemy.”

“Do you think he’d be less obscure if we shot him in the kneecap?” Gregor mused.

“Pain is a great clarifier,” Nicolette said.

The Giggler just giggled. “Do you ever dream when you’re awake?”

“I barely dream when I’m asleep,” Gregor said. Once upon a time that had been true, though it wasn’t anymore, not lately.

The Giggler nodded. “The woman who saved my life is still your downfall,” he said. “Many things have changed, but not that.”

The Giggler meant Marla. Once upon a time, she’d held the Giggler’s life in her hands, and she’d chosen to spare it. He always spoke of her in faintly awestruck tones, which annoyed Gregor. Marla had stumbled into a position far above her proper place. She was qualified to be muscle, absolutely, perhaps even a minister of war, but running the city? It didn’t suit her. Not that Gregor wanted the job, either. It was thankless, and the advantages wouldn’t outweigh the inconveniences. “But she can only hurt me if I go outside,” Gregor prompted. “I’m safe from Marla as long as I stay here, inside the building, correct?”

“I want a puppy,” the Giggler said, smiling, showing mossy teeth.

“That hasn’t changed, has it, in light of these other developments?” Gregor insisted. “You said if I stayed out of the weather, I’d be fine, that she couldn’t kill me. That if I didn’t go into the elements, I’d weather the storm.” He took a step forward, no longer bothering with the handkerchief, intent on the Giggler.

“Sometimes it snows in her dreams,” the Giggler said. “Or the wind blows, or it rains. Those are always the bad ones, when the weather starts.”

“Who? When who dreams?”

“The enemy of the friend you haven’t met. The man in black’s enemy,” the Giggler said. “The woman who dreams and weaves the world around her. The woman in yellow with violet eyes.
Her
.”

“This is different,” Nicolette said. “The last few times it’s been the same, once you strained out the craziness. This is new, though.”

“Bring me a puppy,” the Giggler said. “A stupid, loyal one.” He grinned at Nicolette and cut an enormous fart. Nicolette flinched, startled by the noise or by the echo of her earlier statement, Gregor wasn’t sure which.

“One last question, and you can have anything you want,” Gregor said. “When will I meet this man, my new friend?”

“Why? You planning on going somewhere?” The Giggler laughed again, throwing his head back and wrapping his arms around his belly. Bouts of humor like that usually lasted half the night with him.

Gregor walked away, Nicolette following. “Should I watch the door for surprise visitors, boss?”

“I don’t know,” Gregor said, getting into the elevator. “I don’t know if I even believe him.”

“He’s never been wrong before,” Nicolette said. “Confusing, sure, but we’ve always made sense of it eventually.”

“Maybe those oatmeal cookies are interfering with his vision.”

They returned to his office. Someone stood in front of the windows, hands clasped behind his back, looking out at the freezing rain and the city lights below. Nicolette whipped a chain of paperclips out of her pocket, a miniature scourge with a diamond-tipped pin wired onto the end, but Gregor put a hand on her forearm before she could ripple any nasty magic across the room. The person at the window wore a black coat made of vinyl or plastic, bunched tight at the waist and flaring out around his legs. His bald head was albino-white and looked soft as an uncooked biscuit. Or a mushroom. He turned and nodded to Gregor. His eyes were the yellow of jaundiced skin. “Hello,” he said. “My name is Reave.”

“I’ve been expecting you,” Gregor said. “I think we’re meant to be friends.”

M
arla almost knocked on the door to her own office, but thought better of it at the last moment, and just barged in. She wasn’t sure what to expect—Ted slumped behind her desk with a needle in his arm, or asleep on the beat-up old couch, or practicing forging her signature in the checkbook. Instead she found…much less than she was expecting. “What happened to my mountains of crap?”

Ted turned from a row of filing cabinets along one wall. “I filed them.”

Marla mulled that. “Those file cabinets were filled with old carpet samples and comic strips cut out of fifty-year-old newspapers.”

He nodded. “I put those away in some banker’s boxes Mr. Rondeau found for me. I wasn’t sure if you wanted to keep them or not, but—”

She waved her hand. “No, no, they were left by the woman who used to run this club, I just hadn’t gotten around to cleaning them.” Marla had to admit she’d found the clutter and detritus somewhat comfortable. While she wasn’t the sort of magician who directly thrived on chaos, clutter, and rubbish—that was more Ernesto’s specialty, or that girl who ran with Gregor—she did prefer unpredictable, messy environments from a purely aesthetic standpoint. But having a wrecked office was ultimately more annoying than comforting, and if she wanted the soothing comforts of junk and decay, she could always just go home to her apartment.

“I’ll toss them out in the Dumpster, then,” Ted said. “I hope you don’t mind, I cleared off the rolltop desk in the corner there, and hooked up a spare phone, so I’d have a place to work.”

Marla crossed the room and looked at the desk. “Huh. There was a desk under all that, uh…what used to be here?”

“Fabric remnants, mostly,” Ted said. “I put them—”

“In banker’s boxes, right.” She looked around. The office wasn’t exactly spotless—the shelves were still crowded with hunks of exotic rock, tinted glass bottles, hand-bound books, and the traditional mummified alligator, though hers wore a little straw hat emblazoned with the word “Orlando.” Most of it looked suitably occultish, though it was all left over from Juliana’s tenure as owner of the club. But the dust was cleared, the piles were organized, and the top of her desk was actually visible. “This is good, Ted. You might work out. Do you drive?”

“I—of course.”

“Good to hear it. Top drawer, there’s a set of keys. I need you to drive me across town. I’ve had enough of tromping through the goddamn snow today. And grab that shoebox.”

Ted retrieved the keys and picked up the shoebox containing Genevieve Kelley’s worldly possessions. “I talked to Mr. Rondeau,” Ted said. “He let me take a shower in his apartment upstairs, which was wonderful. But when I asked him about my wages, and benefits, and hours, and…he wasn’t very helpful. He said he was on call 24 hours a day, and that the last time you let him take a vacation he was nearly killed.”

“That wasn’t a vacation. It was a business trip. Come on, we’ll talk on the way. Oh, wait.” She knelt by the small safe behind her desk, spun the dial a few times for the look of the thing, and then subvocalized the
real
command that opened the lock. She reached into the safe for a banded wad of cash, turned, and tossed it to Ted, who managed to catch it with minimal fumbling even with the keys and shoebox in his hands. “You’re a consultant, so we don’t do any of that tax withholding crap. You’re responsible for reporting your own income to the government. Or not. Though I’m sort of a government myself, and I encourage people to be community-minded and pay up.”

“You’re…a government?” Ted said, still staring at the wad of cash in his hands. It was probably a lot of money, Marla supposed, though it was just the take from one slow evening at one betting parlor down by the bay. Marla ran a lot of rackets.

“It’s complex, Ted,” she said, shutting the safe. “Stick the money in your pocket or something and let’s go.” She led him through the club, pausing briefly to smile at the sound of Rondeau cursing in the bathroom. “Rondeau!” she shouted. “Ted’s driving me to Langford’s, so I can talk to him about that thing!”

“How nice for you!” Rondeau said. “I’ll just be here wrestling the Skatouioannis!”

“I trust you mean that metaphorically?”

“Go away! I need some alone time!”

“Skatouioannis?” Ted said as they got on the freight elevator.

“Greek word. Means ‘Shitty John.’ It’s like a demon made out of crap.” Marla stabbed the button for the parking garage, a real subterranean bat cave sort of place, with a tunnel that came out of a garage a few blocks away. “I’ve never actually
encountered
one, don’t even know if they exist, but Rondeau read a story about one once, and now he’s convinced that’s the reason the toilets are always backing up.”

Ted quirked an eyebrow. “This is a very odd workplace.”

The elevator doors opened, and the silver Bentley gleamed before them, sleek and seemingly long as a yacht. Even after a morning’s hard drive over salted roads, it was spotless—just a little enchantment laid on the car by its former owner. It was probably the world’s only all-terrain Bentley. Marla wasn’t particularly into cars, but she could appreciate fine workmanship, and this car was an unsurpassed blend of engineering and magic. It couldn’t actually fly, but riding in it, you got the feeling it
wanted
to. “Yeah, it’s a weird place to work,” Marla said. “But there are perks. For instance, you get to drive a car like
that
.”

Ted drove safely and sedately out of the city center, which pleased Marla, even though she was in a hurry. The Bentley was nigh indestructible, but she was glad to see him treat it with care. “Do you mind if I ask where we’re going?” Ted said.