The Serpent Mage (6 page)

He left an unmoving and slowly fading decoy of himself by the curb. Anybody watching would soon lose interest and turn away; and if they didn't turn away, then the image would smoothly disappear among the shadows of the trees, and they would be none the wiser.

Michael approached the front porch with pry bar in hand. Best to begin at the beginning.

In four minutes, he had the door open. The house radiated something unpleasant; it was more than just unkempt, it was distasteful, as if the part of the world it occupied had been ill-used and now brooded resentfully. Michael didn't like the sensation at all, and his dislike went beyond mere association with the last time he had entered Clarkham's house.

He
switched on his flashlight and closed the door to a crack behind him. The hallway before the living room was dusty and quiet; the living room itself was empty and drained and faintly melancholy, the back wall illuminated by square samples of the streetlight across the way.

Despite the unpleasant sensations, there was nothing magical or supernatural about the place. Michael could feel no hidden power or lurking residue. He advanced down the hall and checked the ground floor rooms sequentially, shining his flashlight into each, seeing only dusty floors and emptiness. He returned to the middle hallway and played the beam up the flight of stairs to the second floor. The carpeted steps exuded thin puffs of dust at each footfall.

At the head of the stairs, a hallway led past the three second-floor rooms, ending at the bathroom door. Clarkham's house in the pleasure dome had been laid out in just such a fashion; no surprise. Michael peered into the first bedroom. Nothing. The second bedroom was broad and empty, its windows draped with sun-tattered expanses of old cloth slung over bent curtain rods. Cupboards and drawers covered the far wall, reminding Michael of a morgue. "Nothing here," he said in a soft whisper. He was not afraid, he was not even particularly wary, but he knew that the preternatural sensibilities instilled in him by the Crane Women had brought him here for a reason and not just to satisfy old curiosities.

The final bedroom's floor was covered with a thin layer of dust, dulling the dark wood. So far, he had only taken two steps into the room. He played the beam back and forth across the dust.

Footprints interrupted the grayness in the middle of the floor. The prints led to the hallway and passed beneath his feet, where they were erased by his own shuffling. He knelt down and examined them more carefully. The dust around the footprints was undisturbed. Only one pair of feet — wearing moccasins or sandals, since the prints were unbroken by an arch — had made the prints, and the owner had moved without hesitation, beginning his journey (his because the pattern of the feet was large and broad) in the middle of the room

Michael knelt down and touched the nearest complete print. There was something odd about the amount of dust disturbed. He walked beside the prints, noticing that near the center of the room, where they began, they were quite clear. Toward the end of the trail, they became less distinct, disturbing the dust only slightly, as if the person had weighed much less.

He pointed the beam at the air above the floor where the prints began and saw nothing unusual. Felt nothing unusual. The house was otherwise undisturbed and normal. The sensation of earthly reality was seamless.

Still, Michael knew beyond any doubt that Clarkham's house had once again become a gate.

The Tippett Residential Hotel appeared regal and desolate and out-of-place against the ragtag architecture of the Strip. Its sad, sooted, broken windows and the trash chute attached to its face gave it a painful air, as if it were a victim of patchwork surgery, of half-hearted and ill-guided attempts to bring it back to life.

Through the chain link, Michael saw that the main entrance had been securely boarded off with big sheets of blue-painted plywood. Yet the former owner — if that was what the raggedy man was — had hinted that a few people still managed to get into the building, however foolishly. There had to be other entrances.

He had looped the short pry bar onto his belt, hanging it down inside his pants. A palm-sized flashlight rested in his jacket pocket.

On the building's west side, a broad patio and swimming pool were visible through the trees and shrubs pressing against the fence. Steps rose from the patio level to a terrace on the south side, overlooking the city. All this was dimly illuminated by streetlights along Sunset, and the general sky-glow reflected from the broken cumulus clouds above the city.

Michael glanced over his right shoulder at the lighted windows in the Hyatt across and down the street. Two instances of breaking and entering in one night. Superstitiously, he thought that might make things twice as bad as they had been after the night of his first passage through Clarkham's house…

He couldn't enter from the front without risking discovery. He strolled east on Sunset until he reached a side street and then walked downhill and doubled back to approach from the rear.

An open-air asphalt parking area, still accessible from the street behind, abutted a blank concrete wall on the hotel's east side. Michael saw there was no easy entrance from that direction.

On the west side, a garage in the lower depths of the building offered spaces for forty or fifty tenants. The entrance was blocked by a run of chain-link and a securely padlocked swinging gate. The iron-barred gate that had once rolled along a track on rubber wheels was no longer in place. Within, one space was still occupied by an old rusted-out Buick.

The rear doors and service entrances were covered over by sheets of blue plywood. He looked up to the top of the building. More broken-out windows.

With a sigh, he stood in the darkness, hands thrust into the pockets of his jacket, and closed his eyes.

How to get in… without noise, without drawing any attention…

No inner answers presented themselves. The mental silence of Earth prevailed; no Death's Radio, no supernatural clues, simply Michael Perrin, on his own.

He felt around the boards covering the rear doors. The pry bar would make a horrible racket pulling out these nails — would anyone notice?

"I thought you'd be back."

He tensed and immediately probed the aura of the speaker. Rotten vegetables — a supermarket full of dead produce, ancient thoughts, old dreams: the ex-owner. Michael could barely see him in the darkness; he stood inside the fence, at the south end of the footpath to the pool, little more than a gray smudge against the bushes beyond.

"I didn't think you were a reporter. You must have known them… the two women. But what would a young kid like you have been doing with them? I figure one was a circus fat lady, the other… Who knows?"

"I'm just curious about the building," Michael said.

"It gets to you, doesn't it? So pretty. Like a pretty woman, and you're all optimistic, and you find out she's a real whore. Well, she's not a whore, but she's not what you'd expect. She was built well. She still meets earthquake standards. Work of craftsmanship and art. You want to get in?"

"Yes."

"Just look around?"

"Right."

"You seem okay. Not the kind to set fires or worse. Why don't you follow me. I…" The blur rummaged through a pocket with an arm. "… have a key. Old key. Maintenance entrance. Go back around to the lot"— he pointed east—"and jump that short wall, then crawl along the fence until you meet me here."

"You're not afraid to go in?" Michael asked.

"No. You're not afraid to go in with me, are you? I'm maybe not harmless, but I'm clean. Took the bus to my sister's in Venice, showered, cleaned my grubbies out, and not with Woolite, either." He chuckled dryly.

Michael did as he was instructed and soon faced the man on the path. There was no menace in him, only a crazy kind of hope, but hope for what, Michael couldn't tell. Old dreams. Rotten produce stacked yards deep. Dead ideas.

"Journalism used to be an interest of mine, writing, all that. My name's Hopkins. Ronald Hopkins. Yours?"

"Michael."

"No last name, huh?"

Michael shook his head; no last name.

Hopkins held up the key, barely visible as a gleam in the dim light, and motioned for Michael to follow him around the south corner.

The maintenance entrance was a wide, heavy double door on the west side of the building, set flush against the wall. Michael hadn't even noticed it in passing. Hopkins inserted the key and opened one door, pushing it against a runnel of mud. "No power," he said. Michael held up the flashlight and switched it on.

"What do you expect to find?" Hopkins asked, his voice a low croak in the darkness.

"I don't know," Michael said. He shined the light against cinderblock walls, water and sewage pipes on the ceiling, a flight of stairs at the end of the hallway. Through an open door on the right, he saw a huge hot water tank suspended high above a trash-littered floor.

"You looking for ghosts? A psychic investigator?"

Michael shook his head. While he was grateful for Hopkins's services, he much preferred acting alone in the darkness without having to take another's safety into account. (And did he think there would be something dangerous here? More red lights?)

"I should be quiet, right?" Hopkins asked. Michael turned the light on him.

"Right,"' he said. "Thanks for letting me in."

"Nothing to it. You going above the lobby level?"

"I think so," Michael said.

"I'll go that far. No farther."

"Okay." They climbed the stairs.

"Cops found the women on the eleventh floor," Hopkins said behind him. "But I still won't go above the lobby."

Michael tried the handle on the door at the top of the stairs. It was unlocked. They stepped out onto the darkened lobby. Hopkins eased the door softly shut behind them.

The air was heavy with decay. Mildew, dust, rotting carpet, stagnant puddles of water. Michael stepped over a pile of lumber and fractured sheetrock and played the light around the lobby. A long upholstered counter ran along one wall, its faded red leatherette ripped and scuffed and stained. The countertop — probably marble at one time — was gone, no doubt salvaged. The walls around the elevator and near the entrance had also been stripped, leaving mottled plaster and gaping holes for electrical connections.

Just beyond the elevator, a grand-ballroom flight of stairs led up to the second floor. The once cardinal-red carpet on the stairs was now dirty brown and black, water-stained and torn, coyly revealing concrete floor and rotten padding. Hopkins stood behind Michael, sadly surveying the ruin. "Brought it on herself," he murmured.

The elevator doors, half-open, showed a dark and empty shaft beyond. The polished aluminum door panels were gouged and marred and reflected Michael's light back with funhouse glee.

He sensed nothing beyond the melancholy and careless decay. There was nothing supernatural about such destruction. It was characteristically human; that which is not viable and protected is soon eroded by the passage of the desperate and irresponsible, the opportunists and the destructively curious. Humans had passed through here like water in a channel, wearing and grinding. Still, he felt a need for caution.

The Sidhe, Michael thought, would never engage in idle destruction for its own sake. However evil the Sidhe might become, they were never petty, never so
unstylish
as to vandalize.

"I'm going upstairs now," he said to Hopkins. "Will I need any more keys?"

"Nope," Hopkins answered.

Michael took the grand staircase, remembering Lamia at the top of her stairs, a huge bag of flesh, in Clarkham's first house in the Realm…

Which did he prefer — humanity in its idle and destructive carelessness, or the exquisite cruelty of the Sidhe, who could condemn a dancer and lover of ballet to become an obese monster?

"Be careful," Hopkins admonished.

The second-floor hallways stretched in three directions from the landing at the top of the stairs. Michael's light traveled only so far in the muddy darkness; he could not see the ends of the long hallways running east and west, but the south hall was short, with only one door on each side.

The water-stained walls were covered with markings, graffiti and scrawled names, and random gouges and scratches. A smaller stairway opposite the elevator door led from one side of the landing to the next floor. Michael climbed again; there was no sense inspecting every room.

On the fifth floor, he walked from end to end in each hall and found a broken, leaning door to one apartment on the east side. He kicked it open and grimaced at the destruction beyond. Anonymous green trash had drifted into the corners of the living room. The carpets had been shredded as if by iceskaters wearing razors for blades. Michael looked down at his feet and saw an ancient pile of feces. Nearby, yellow stains dribbled down one wall.

All of this
, he thought,
from the descendants of those who struggled back to humanity
—
or something like it
—
across sixty million years
. The story was noble — yet as one of its end products, a human being had once defecated on this floor and urinated on this wall.

With a sudden flush of anger, Michael wondered to what extent human depravity could be blamed on the misguiding of the Sidhe acting in their capacity as gods — Tonn, who became Adonna in the Realm, portraying Baal and Yahweh, and how many other deities?

There was a puzzle here. He knew instinctively it was useless to blame others entirely for one's own failings — or to blame the Sidhe for the failings of his own kind. But surely there was some culpability. He had little doubt that the Sidhe had mimicked gods to restrain humans, to open a little more space for their own kind on the Earth they had abandoned thousands of millennia before.

He shook his head and backed away from the feces. Such profound thoughts from such miserable evidence.

And you, Michael? Withdrawing into cold intellectual splendor, knowing you are superior because of your knowledge, knowing
you
would never be so unstylish as to crap on the floor of a deserted building… So you're superior to your own kind, more stylish; does that mean you have something of the Sidhe in you, then
?