Tales of the Unquiet Gods (11 page)

"I'll- I'll just get the door," his mother offered in a suddenly quavering voice. The fear behind her words momentarily snapped Vincent back to the semblance of a normal frame of mind. With a shock, he realized he was looking down at her. His mother always seemed the giantess of his earliest hazy memories. Somehow, she'd turned into a rather short, slender woman in her late thirties when he wasn't paying attention.

The sound of the front door opening energized Vincent. He heard his mentor's deep voice raised in greeting, and knew he had to move. He just couldn't face Dr. Thomas. Not now. He knew he'd have to do it sometime, but now he just hurt too damn much.

Vincent grabbed his jacket and stuffed it in his army surplus, drab-green backpack and opened his bedroom window. As he ducked out onto the fire escape, he heard Dr. Thomas' voice, distant and muffled from the walls between then.

"Vincent. I know what you lost," the normally warm bass grated across Vincent's nerves, chilling the blood in his veins, "and I can give it back to you."

He scampered down the iron ladder as quickly as his rigid muscles would allow. Anything to get away from those words, spoken by familiar voices with an utterly alien tone.

Vincent felt better once he got onto the street and lost himself in the rhythms of the city. He rode the subway downtown and then just walked. Shoulders rubbed his, clad in everything from designer silk to stained, stinking canvas. His habits of movement took control, sliding him into gaps in the crowd as the uncounted urbanites surged and flowed in rush-hour foot traffic.

He didn't really know how long he wandered. This far north, sundown was hours off yet, even if the autumnal cool was enough for him to appreciate the jacket he'd snatched in his haste.

The phone in his pocket vibrated again, sending an unpleasant buzz up his arm nearly to the elbow. He'd nearly answered it the first time, just as he'd neared the shadowy entrance to the subway station nearest the apartment. He'd taken the time to compose an apology to his mother and Dr. Thomas for ditching out, and he'd be home after he'd done some thinking. They hadn't stopped calling.

That wasn't what set his hands to shaking in his pockets, though.

They'd sent text messages, too. Several each. Buried in them were bolded words that set Vincent's heart racing and turned his steps nearly into a stagger. I. Know. What. You. Lost. Vincent. He'd have dismissed them, but one was from a classmate who had no way to know.

He thought he'd just misheard his mother. He'd managed to convince himself that Dr. Thomas hadn't said the same thing. Until that horrifying message inside the messages. Now he thought he might be going crazy. Wasn't that one of those clinical symptoms: seeing patterns where none really existed?

Vincent heard the sound of a distant violin and his heart spasmed in his chest. The player was good, but not as good as he'd been. And never would be again. The sprightly music danced toward him from somewhere ahead. He knew he couldn't face the player, or even listen to the song anymore.

Vincent changed direction abruptly. A Sikh skipped backward, startling a woman in a long dress carrying a tiny puffball of an eye-searing pink. Which was apparently alive, as it set up a raucous yapping when she gasped. The street-goers swirled for a moment from the chaos of Vincent's motion, and a man in a rumpled suit cursed at him when Vincent stepped on his toes. Then he was into the street.

Playing dodge-em in rush hour traffic on the downtown streets didn't take much more than quick reflexes. He'd gotten lucky in his timing, and the closest light was still red as he slipped between the stationary vehicles. The biggest danger was the city's normal mob of taxis, but even they did no more than honk as he ran past.

Vincent skipped up onto the sidewalk on the far side, and lost himself in the press of humanity for long enough to get out of even the possibility of earshot of the unseen violinist. Several blocks later, when he slipped to the edge of the sidewalk near a streetlamp to pause for breath, he realized he'd somehow gotten all the way to Carnegie Hall.

Which was strange, as he'd have sworn he wasn't anywhere near it when he got off the subway at 23rd Street. He looked around, hunching his shoulders. He felt odd. Not just the unending agony in his soul that came from a shattered identity. He felt physically strange.

"I know what you've lost, Vincent."

The rough voice behind him made Vincent leap nearly out of his skin. He turned slightly to see a cab driver staring out of his taxi. Vincent's blood ran cold as the words registered. The cabbie stared at him with dead, black eyes that reminded Vincent of a shark he'd seen at the aquarium.

Vincent stood rooted to the spot, staring back at the driver - an otherwise unprepossessing man in worn clothing - mind blank with horror. A distant part of him saw the passenger in the back of the cab pounding on the plexiglass divider with one hand, while the vehicles behind the taxi set up a furious clamor.

"Why'd you run from your mother, Vincent?" The cabbie's face, lined from age and care stretched into an unnaturally wide grin that set Vincent's stomach to roiling. "And Dr. Thomas, who only wants to help you, Vincent. Why?"

A wave of despair and terror shrank Vincent's skin on his bones. He ached to run from the horrible thing in front of him, but he couldn't move. His muscled had seemingly turned to wax and wouldn't respond.

"I want to help you, too, Vincent."

The cabbie's face twitched, the horrid rictus-smile sliding off his pouchy features. His eyes blinked rapidly, and in a moment between blinks, changed from soulless pits into the eyes of a irritable, old man. One who took in Vincent, his angry fare and the even angrier drivers behind him and made an easy choice of targets.

"What're you staring at, punk?" The man's Brooklyn accent - along with the proffered middle digit - went ill at odds with the rest of the short exchange, doing nothing to ease Vincent's fear and growing paranoia. The cabbie finally responded to the press of traffic and sped off, and only then did Vincent's muscles unknot. He staggered back into crowd moving down the sidewalk, drawing irritated looks from those forced to accommodate his almost spastic progress.

Vincent's worn nerves were frayed nearly to breaking. First with his sudden inability to play, and now something seemed to be following him. Except it wasn't - couldn't be - human. It controlled people. Controlled his own mother! It made them say what it wanted them to, do what it wanted them to.

And it wanted him, for some reason.

Or, it was just a figment of his imagination, and he was somehow going certifiably insane. Somehow, the thought made him chuckle. Better that, than a horrible monstrous presence chasing him.

"That's-"

"Not-"

"A nice-"

"Thing-"

"To say-"

"Vincent."

Six different heads of six different passersby rotated to address him. Each in turn, though their feet never stopped. Each with shark-dead black pits of eyes. Six different heads shifted back, giving no indication that their owners had any idea what had just happened.

The bottom dropped out of Vincent's stomach, while his head felt as though it was a mile up in the air. The fact that he hadn't eaten anything all day impressed itself dimply on his tenuous awareness, and a surge of atavistic terror drowned the brief moment of dark humor.

Vincent ran.

Shouted curses followed as he bumped and collided with individual members of the crowd. Vincent didn't have enough self-consciousness left to apologize. His pulse surged. Breath rasped in his throat. Faces and storefronts blurred into a homogenous mess of color and matter. It didn't matter. None of it mattered, so long as he got away.

And over it all, he heard that damned voice.

"Vincent," it called in dozens of voices, but always with that same rough, rasping, mocking tone. "I know what you lost, Vincent," it sang. "I know what was taken from you."

Sweat, at once both hot from exertion and cold from his fear, ran into Vincent's eyes. He didn't notice the sting of the salt, didn't notice the burn in his legs from the unaccustomed exercise. Tight fisted hands flailed on the ends of his arms as he fled. His feet flapped against the hard sidewalk as he tried desperately to escape. If only he could fly.

An ungentle quiet hushed the normal sounds of the city. Vincent still heard car horns blaring, still heard the mutter of humanity, but only distantly. Even the wild thudding of his pulse and the coughing panting of his breath were no more than a sullen background thrum, mixed and woven through the heartbeat of crowded civilization.

"Vincent!"

Soulless ebon pits and a wolfish grin out of place in the familiar mahogany face of Dr. Thomas leapt into stark focus out of the exertion-blurred background of the street. A wave of bone-deep cold swept over Vincent, and his vision darkened. The air turned oven-hot, parching his open mouth. Vincent smelled the lifeless dust, and his heart shuddered. His mentor's features took on a bestial cast, his nose snout-like and his ears long and oddly squared off.

Vincent cried out, and threw up a hand as the ghastly form of his friend reached for him with claw-like fingers. The crowd around him turned slowly, so slowly, as though they moved through molasses. The thrumming of the city crescendoed, beating on his ears in oppressive waves of inchoate noise.

Vincent's foot slipped.

The shroud that had fallen over his world unaccountably brightened, taking on a gilt appearance. It felt to Vincent as though the pavement itself had moved out from under his sneaker. His sense of balance shifted, tilted, and was gone. He reeled sideways away from the monster Dr. Thomas had become, working just to keep his feet under him.

Vincent caromed off the pedestrians around him as he staggered. He felt each jarring impact as he thudded from person to person. He had just enough awareness of his surroundings to feel a delicate layer of purely mundane apprehension over the numbing terror as he noticed himself clip a policeman on his careening path around the corner of the block.

"Vincent!"

Dr. Thomas' voice was still the abrasive roar of whatever it was that chased him, but Vincent detected a note in it he hadn't heard before. Anger. The abomination of man and beast his mentor had become was angry, and Vincent realized he was somehow leaving it behind.

The world around Vincent snapped back into focus, the darkening shroud dropping away. The sounds of the metropolis rushed into blasting volume from the overbearing stillness that held reality momentarily at bay. Sour sumac and auto exhaust crowded into his nostrils, and the sheer, vibrant life of the city was enough to pull a cry of relief out of Vincent's abused throat.

Both his cry and the background noise cut off again as he fell headlong through an open doorway. One which snapped shut as he fell in a heap on the scarred, wooden floor. For a long, quiet moment, Vincent simply lay on the floor and shook. When cruel claws and savage teeth didn't close on his flesh, his heart began to slow from the brutal pace to which fear and action had driven it. Vincent sobbed quietly from reaction, his abused mind barely active.

"Not many are that desperate to get into my shop, youngster."

Vincent rolled to a sitting position, still panting, and looked up at what he presumed was the shopkeeper. And stared. The man who leaned on the polished countertop smiling down at him must have been nearly seven feet tall. He looked like a cartoon caricature. A feathering of raven-black hair that stuck out nearly around his shiny, bald crown. His lined skin was the yellow of aged ivory Vincent saw in the antiquities section of the museum, and looked to have the texture of fine vellum.

Vincent focused on his face and almost gasped. Air whistled into his nostrils as the muscles along his jaw bunched. The man's gazed at him with black eyes. A bare second later, Vincent castigated himself. The skeletal shopkeeper possessed heavy eyelids, and his smile gave the impression that he had little in the way of whites to those  watching eyes.

Besides, this man's eyes were full of life, bright with personality and interest. Not dead and soulless like whatever had been chasing him. They sat close to a nose that should have dwarfed every other feature the man owned, as it swept out and down from his eyebrows in a smooth curve. It fit, though Vincent wasn't certain how.

"Ah, I-" Vincent began, and realized he had no idea how to make what he'd experienced sound at all possible, let alone plausible. Not to mention sane.

"Mmmmm. There is licorice and mint tea in the carafe," he gestured with one long-fingered hand to a brushed steel pitcher on a small table that appeared to be made from a section of a fluted marble pillar, then cocked his head to one side and blinked. "Why don't you look around, young sir. Those who find their way here usually have a need to." With that odd pronouncement, he left the counter and disappeared back into the bookshelves that swallowed the little shop.

Vincent stared after him, as yet unable to make sense of the encounter. He sat on the floor, legs folded under him and leaning on one fist, for what felt like ages. With one still-trembling hand, he pulled his phone out of his pocket. He had the vague idea of letting his mother know where he was, but two things stopped him. He had no idea where he actually was, and more importantly, he didn't have service.

He slipped the phone back into his pocket, then rubbed the sweat off his face. Cool air flowed gently over his exposed skin, carrying with it a bewildering array of scents. There was the peculiar scent of old paper, but also leather and oil. Some kind of flowery perfume teased his nose, along with the odd, incongruous smell of rich loam.