Repairman Jack [09]-Infernal (33 page)

Vicky’s eyes remained averted. She spoke in a small voice.

“Jack’s place.”

An awful thought struck Gia. Her mouth went dry.

“Does it have anything to do with that floating thing?”

Vicky nodded, then started to cry. “I don’t know. It started right after I pushed in on its belly button and it floated into the air!”

“Oh, dear God!”

Gia leaped to her feet and rushed out into the hall.

“What’s the matter, Mom?” Vicky trailed behind her. “Are you mad?”

“Yes. I mean no. I—I’ve got to call Jack!”

She headed for the hall phone, but she skidded to a stop and froze when she saw someone moving on the staircase.

Terror lanced through her.

Then she realized it wasn’t a man. Not even human. And when she recognized it she almost wished for a real intruder.

The thing from Jack’s apartment… coming up the stairs.

She backed away as it floated over the banister and started down the hall… away from her… into Vicky’s room.

She followed it in and saw it float over the bed and come to a stop in a corner.

And there it stayed, hovering.

Gia repressed a scream and ran for the phone.

MONDAY

1

-70:56

“If anything happens to Vicky, Abe—
anything
—I’m going to kill him.”

Hell, something had already happened to Vicky. She had a foul-looking mark across her back. The thought of it made Jack sick.

He and Abe had assumed their customary fore and aft positions at the scarred counter in the rear of the Isher Sports Shop. He’d come here because he could no longer stand being in the same room, the same apartment, the same goddamn
block
as his brother.

“Such a remark I’d take with a grain of salt from anybody else. But seeing as it’s you…”

Jack closed his eyes at the memory of Gia’s frantic call, his headlong rush across town with Tom tagging along, and then the gut punch of seeing that mark on Vicky’s back and knowing—
knowing
—it was connected to the Lilitongue. How could anyone doubt that? Especially after the damned thing had appeared in Gia’s home and set up watch in Vicky’s bedroom.

He’d wanted to strangle Tom then and there. Still did.

Vicky had been terrified, thinking it had followed her because it was mad at her for touching it. She’d spent the night in her mother’s room. Jack had sent Tom home and had spent the night in a guest bedroom. Vicky had had a rough night but had finally dropped off to sleep. She was still asleep when he’d left this morning.

“I’m serious, Abe. He’s just this far from being enrolled in the Judge Crater club.”

“Another explanation for the mark is possible.”

“Yeah? Give me one.”

“I should give you what I don’t have? All I’m saying is that
post hoc ergo propter hoc
is not a reliable path to the truth.”

“In this case my gut tells me it is. There’s this thing floating in midair in Vicky’s bedroom. That’s not natural. Then there’s this big black mark that appears on Vicky’s back after she touched the thing and started it floating. That’s not natural either. Then it shows up in her bedroom.”

“Your
guderim
also tells you this mark is dangerous?”

Jack nodded. “Oh yeah.”

Exactly what danger, Jack didn’t know, but a black mark… on Vicky… from a thing a girl with a dog and a hole through her belly had warned against… no way he’d ever find anything good about that.

He pounded his fist on the counter, just once, but hard enough to send Abe’s pet parakeet fluttering toward the ceiling.

“He’s got to be one of the stupidest, most clueless assholes on the planet! I could—” He cut himself off. “Sorry. Just venting.”

“So vent already.”

Jack knew he was in a foul mood. Lack of sleep made it worse. He’d kept waking up during the night and stealing down the hall to Vicky’s bedroom to see if the Lilitongue had moved. The only movement he wanted from it was back into its chest so he could lock it up and find an upstate landfill for its final resting place. But it didn’t look like that was going to happen. Not unless it was forced back into its chest.

On one such foray he remembered talking to the damn thing:
What are you? What have you done to Vicky
? Then taking a swing at it.

His knuckles and wrist still ached from the impact.

“Tom and I spent the whole morning calling every place we could think of that might have heard of the Lilitongue of Gefreda. From the Museum of Natural History to antique dealers and antiquarian booksellers. Nothing.”

“The Museum of Natural History? You should check with Doctor Buhmann there.”

“Who’s he?”

“He was one of my professors at Columbia. Specializes in dead languages.”

“I’m not looking for a translation, I’m looking for somebody who knows about strange, ancient artifacts.”

“This Lilitongue is ancient?”

Jack shrugged. “I know it’s more than four hundred years old. The jerk says—”

“The jerk?”

“My brother.”

“A
shmegege
you should call him. That better fits how you describe him. A
shmegege
and a
gonif.
”

“I’ll have to trust you on that. Anyway, the
shmegege
says the few mentions he found about it hinted that it was really old—maybe B.C. in origin. So you see, I need an archaeology type. If he can lead me to some old book, then I may need your professor friend. But at the moment—”

Nu
, if this Lilitongue is one of a kind, you won’t find anyone who’s ever seen it, but someone may have read about it… especially if they specialize in translating texts of ancient languages.”

Hope wanted to spark but Jack wouldn’t let it. Still, Abe had suggested a direction he hadn’t considered.

“Okay, maybe after we’ve exhausted the other avenues, I’ll—”

His phone vibrated in his pocket. He pulled it out and hit the speak button. Had to be Gia.

“Jack?” Gia. Something in her tone…

“Something wrong?”

She sobbed. “The mark—it’s bigger!”

A lead weight dropped into the pit of Jack’s stomach.

“You’re sure?”

“Absolutely. Last night it was between her shoulder blades, now it’s touching them!” Another sob—the sound tore Jack’s heart. “Jack, what’s happening?”

He wished to hell he knew.

He spent a few moments trying to comfort her, assuring her that he was doing everything possible. When he hung up he relayed the latest to Abe.

“How do I get in touch with this language guy?”

“I’ll see if I can arrange a meeting.”

“Don’t see if—do.” He realized how he sounded. “Please.”

Abe nodded as he picked up the phone.

“He’ll remember you?”

Abe looked at him over the top of his reading glasses. “Oh, he’ll remember me.”

2

-69:48

“So how is Abraham doing these days?”

Peter Buhmann, Ph.D., associate conservator of languages in the division of anthropology at the American Museum of Natural History, professor emeritus at the Columbia University department of archaeology, was o-l-d. Figuring his age might require carbon dating. He looked frail, bent, pale, thin to the point of emaciation. Jack sensed something gnawing at his insides. Didn’t look like he had much time left.

“Very well,” Jack said.

Dr. Buhmann’s office was small and cramped. The overstuffed shelves, threatening to drown them in paper if the building shook, made it seem even more claustrophobic.

“I haven’t seen him since he graduated. One of my best students ever. A brilliant mind. I understand he sells sporting goods.”

“Yes.”

Jack figured the old guy would have a heart attack if he told him what Abe really sold.

He shook his head. “Such a waste of a good mind.”

“He said you might know about the Lilitongue of Gefreda.”

“Yes. He mentioned that on the phone. I haven’t heard the Lilitongue mentioned in decades. So I went through my papers and found an entry in one of my notebooks.” He opened a black ledgerlike book on his desk to a marked page. “I’m afraid it’s not much.”

“Anything you can tell me will be more than I’ve got.”

“Very well.” He put on his glasses and bent over the book. “These are notes I culled from various sources. The Lilitongue of Gefreda is mentioned as one of the Seven Infernals. I—”

“Which are?”

Infernal… Jack didn’t like the sound of that.

“Mythical devices created in ancient times, each for a specific purpose.”

“Such as?”

“Well, according to legend the Lilitongue was designed to”—he consulted his book here—”help someone ‘elude all enemies and leave them helpless.’ No name or purpose is known for any of the other six.”

Disappointed, Jack leaned back and rubbed his eyes. He already knew that. He’d squeezed it out of his
shmegege
brother right before Gia’s call.

“No mention of
how
it’s supposed to do that?”

Dr. Buhmann shook his head. “None that I’ve ever read.”

“Any picture of it anywhere?”

“None that I’ve ever seen.” He sighed. “You must understand, the history of the Seven Infernals is shrouded in mystery. Most of the few researchers who’ve heard of them doubt they ever existed.”

“Then why are they mentioned at all?”

A shrug. “Why are vampires mentioned? Why werewolves? Something inspired those myths, yes, but though the inspiration—say, the burial of a catatonic person in the former case, a severe manic-depressive disorder in the latter—might have been real, the folk tales that grew out of them are not.”

That wasn’t a folk tale floating in Vicky’s bedroom.

“If I had to guess,” Buhmann continued, “based on the escape fantasy offered by the Lilitongue of Gefreda, I’d say the myth was the result of wishful thinking by a persecuted culture.” He frowned. “But then again…”

“What?”

“The Church seems to play an important part in the story.”

The Jesuit Mendes… the map maker…

“The Catholic Church? The pope?”

“The Lilitongue was rumored to have been hidden away in the Vatican since the sixth century.”

“Doesn’t that tell you something?”

He laughed—a dry cackle. “So many strange and ‘forbidden’ things are rumored to be hidden in the Vatican vaults that the Church would need half of Rome to store them all!”

“Any rumor of it leaving the Vatican?”

Dr. Buhmann’s eyes widened. “As a matter of fact…” He turned back to his notebook. “Yes. Here. It was rumored to have been stolen during the papacy of Innocent IX—who died in 1591 after only two months as pope.” Another cackle. “Now, if I were a conspiracy theorist, I suppose I could make something of that.”

“No mention of it after that?”

He checked his book again. “Not that I ever saw.”

It all fit. The Lilitongue of Gefreda disappears from the Vatican in 1591… seven years later a Jesuit—at the request of the pope, if the inscription Tom had withheld could be believed—guided it to a watery grave. And it was never heard from since because it was buried in a Bermuda sand hole.

So what? He knew no more about the thing now than when he’d stepped into Dr. Buhmann’s office.

Shit.

“May I ask you a question?”

Jack was tempted to say, You just did, but held back.

“Shoot.”

“Why this interest in such an arcane legend? And believe me, the Lilitongue of Gefreda is
very
arcane.”

How to answer that without telling too much…

“Someone I know thinks he’s found it.”

Buhmann’s eyes twinkled. “Oh, I doubt that. But if your friend wishes to bring it here to the museum, I can have the objects curator take a look at it. No one knows what the Lilitongue looks like, so it will be impossible for him to identify it, but he should be able to carbon date it for you.”

Nothing Jack would like better, but…

“It… it can’t be moved right now.”

And Jack wasn’t about to self-destruct his life by becoming publicly involved with a thing that defied the laws of gravity. At least not yet.

But if everything led to dead ends, then that was what he’d do: bring the Lilitongue to the attention of the world and let the scientific community figure it out.