A Latent Dark (20 page)

What am I doing wrong?
she thought.
Why can’t I see anything anymore?

But she could see shadows still. She saw Marley’s while she was talking to him, huge and patient and powerful, blotched with shame and secrecy.

I have a home and new friends now, why do I feel so lonely?

The room faded to gray as she stared at a knot in the ceiling, letting the hard bed soften and engulf her. She saw herself standing on a distant shore, a throng of people staring back, their bodies blending with the pantry in The Hungry Skunk. She felt the sand under her feet, saw the countless faces as they stared back. Behind them stood a mountainous building, dotted with dingy windows and chipping paint. In front of the building loomed gates so high she couldn’t see the top.

A raven soared overhead, a smudge in the swirling sky. She cried out, reaching for Orrin, but she realized then that she was already asleep.

Chapter 14

John rolled the wad of cigarettes and handkerchief in his pocket with nervous fingers. He knocked on the hotel door and waited. He was nearly ready to leave when the door swung open, the Reverend Lyle Summers glaring at him from the threshold. For a moment it seemed as though Lyle didn’t even recognize him, then his face softened and cracked a smile that didn’t quite reach his eyes.

 “Father Thomas,” he said. “Please come in.”

“I hope I didn’t catch you at a bad time,” John said.

“No. No,” Lyle said, shaking his head. “I was between meetings.”

“You’ve been busy.”

“Indeed,” Lyle said, gesturing to a chair. “What can I do for you?”

As the door widened a gust of hot, humid air hit him. He felt his brow sweat almost immediately. The room was a glowing sauna of lamps illuminating every corner and producing enough heat that John was surprised there hadn’t been a fire.

John stepped into the room and hesitated. This wasn’t a hotel room. This was an art gallery of the insane. Gaudy golden picture frames hung nailed to the wall filled with crude, alien images.

One of the paintings he recognized as The Last Supper, only all of the participants were sideshow acts. There were extra limbs and eyes. Faces seemed misshapen, one of them screaming. Something in the back of his mind told him to run. Another part of his brain was rapt with curiosity.

“I didn’t know the hotel rooms provided such lavish decorations,” he said, looking at another painting that might have been the crucifixion, if Jesus had five arms… or was that part of the cross? He felt his skin crawl.

“Oh,” Lyle said. “You like them?”

“I’ve honestly never seen anything like them in my life.” It was an understatement. Bollingbrook had a fine gallery of renaissance artwork as well as recovered paintings and sculptures from the Lost Centuries. He had made it a point to see them when he had first arrived in the city. But this…

Lyle led him across the room and around a monolithic chest that stood in the center of the floor, lit on all sides by light.

Lyle saw him looking at the lamps and said simply, “They’re chemical.”

John took a seat in a wooden chair near the desk at the far end of the room. A portrait of Job stared at him with black, sunken eyes that seemed to bleed tentacles.

“Painting’s always been a passion of mine,” said Lyle. “Second to preaching The Word, of course.” He took a cigarette out of the case on the desk and placed it between his lips, lighting it. He shot John a cool, casual glance.

“I’ve always felt,” said The Reverend Summers, taking a puff on the cigarette, “that art is humbling. It reminds us that we are but simple tools of the Lord. Do you agree?”

John nodded, speechless. Lyle grinned and followed his gaze to a painting of the Beast from Revelations with its many crowned heads and forked tongues. One head was eating a screaming woman up to her pale waist, an eye growing from her navel. It seemed normal by comparison to the rest.

“Now that one.” He pointed the smoldering cigarette to a different canvas. “I did that one in the Great Utah Territory, just a mile from the Battle of Weeping Rock, in the courtyard of the Mission Santa Maria as a tribute to the good men who fought and died there.”

The painting in question could have been Lot’s wife at Sodom and Gomorrah. John knew better than to try and guess out loud. The faces in the painting stretched grotesquely. Walking sticks of soft taffy.

“Yes,” John agreed. “I think I can see that.”

“I’m amazed I find the time at all anymore,” Lyle said. “But every now and then, I get the itch.”  The Reverend Summers drew an unconscious hand to his chest and scratched.

“Do you sell many of them?”

“Oh,” Lyle said, stretching. “I suppose I sell a few here and there. Usually church members back home. One is in New Amsterdam, sitting in the home of Judah Merchant.”

John knew that he was supposed to react to the name-dropping, but he could only nod absently.
How long before he asks me to buy one?

“You should sell some around here,” John said. “You’re certainly popular enough.” He winced inwardly.
Why would I ask that?
It felt as though the paintings were performing their own interrogation on him now.

“These are my private collection,” Lyle said. “But I can put you in touch with a dealer if you think your cathedral could use some sprucing up.”

The Reverend Lyle Summers grinned, and John found himself looking at the door. Lyle scratched his chest again and John thought he saw a lump underneath the fabric.

“Bollingbrook is full of good people,” Lyle said. “Hardworking God-fearing people. Things go well enough, I may just donate a painting to the local charity.”

“I’m sure people would love that,” John said. “I’ve noticed that several of the factories have begun production again. I’m guessing you had something to do with that.”

Lyle took another drag from his cigarette before he squashed the butt in a tray, then leaned in toward John.

“This town looked like it could use a shot in the arm,” he said. “Police force here is embarrassingly underfunded. Factories have lost about fifty percent of their workers. Your upper class was even starting to feel the pinch. I saw an investment.”

“I noticed that a lot of the production seems to be military,” John said.

Lyle looked at him for a stretch of time—his face was expressionless. Then he turned to the desk and grabbed a scrolled map, handing it to John. “See anything odd about that map?”

John studied it, trying to ignore that Lyle was studying him.

“It’s an old rail map between here and Rhinewall,” John said, handing it back. “The railway hasn’t functioned for decades though.”

“Anything missing?” Lyle asked.

He looked at it again, his eyes following the line of the river—

“There’s no Lassimir,” he said, finally.

“And why is that?” asked Lyle, taking the map back from him. “You’ve got a clear map of the river”—he traced a finger down the image— “and where it dumps out into the ocean. But the city that people associate with the river is gone.”

“Well,” said John, “it’s not even a real city for one. Most people stay away from it. I hear it is completely mobile, more of a camping site than a city.”

Lyle placed the map back on the desk with care. He turned back to John but did not look at him. Lyle’s eyes drifted across the paintings on the wall lovingly.

“The mind,” he said. “It’s an interesting thing, Father Thomas. It sees what it wants to see and it ignores everything else. Even if the soul sees something, the mind can turn a blind eye. It is the mind that is the bastion of sin. That’s what’s been happening to this town, Father.

“You’ve had a cancer under your noses for a decade and nothing has been done about it. It took the Vatican to send someone with my training to weed that corruption and evil out of your midst. If I hadn’t shown up, your Industrial Wedge would have become a coven.”

Lyle crushed a thumb onto the blank area on the map where Lassimir would be. “And now the same thing is sitting between your two fine city-states like a kidney stone. Sometimes they pass. Painfully. This one has been particularly burdensome. And yet you folks have done nothing.”

“Wait,” John said. “Are you suggesting that Lassimir—”

“I am suggesting, Father, that Lassimir and that witch house may as well be the same thing.”

John laughed. “Reverend, I’m sorry, but Lassimir is just a collection of outcasts and vagrants whose probation ran out. It’s a settlement of outlaws, at worst, but to suggest that… well you are practically calling it the cradle of Satan himself. I’m sorry, but I just think you are making a bit of a leap.”

The look on Lyle’s face squelched John’s laughter instantly.

“Besides,” John said. “The police have raided Lassimir more than once. It isn’t like we aren’t capable.”

“Your military hasn’t performed a raid in over a decade,” Lyle said. “I’ve seen the records. They said it was too costly, yes I know. I’ve been told about The Flux, as some of you call it.”

“So see?” John said. “People have been there, you know. It isn’t like the place is crawling with—”

“Whores? Sinners? Sodomites?” Lyle sneered. “Go ahead, John, say it: Lyle Summers came out here from his poor, podunk towns in the south and is worried about a city of homeless people, because he tends to adhere to the teachings a little more strictly than you do.”

“Lyle,” John said. “That’s besides the point. They haven’t hurt anyone. We’ve sent missionaries and they simply turn them away. They haven’t attacked us, in fact they pretty much leave the surrounding cities alone.”

“The same way a tick leaves a dog alone, eh?” Lyle crossed his legs. “Sure you get one or two, just inside the ear. You can’t see ‘
em
, and the dog doesn’t complain. The flap of skin hides them away. Out of sight out of mind. But they invite their friends. One day you look under the ear and there’s a few more, then before you know it, the dog begins to look sick. You pull up the ear and now it’s covered in ticks. There’s so many you can’t even tell what’s dog and what’s parasite. All you can do then is put a bullet in the poor dog’s head.” He leaned in toward John, who did his best not to recoil. Lyle continued, his eyes blazing cold fire.

“They carry disease, parasites and yet, the host sometimes never even knows it’s infected. This city has been sick for a long time, Father. Your citizens are just too fatigued and drained to know what’s eating them alive.”

“I told you,” John said. “Raids have been tried. You might be able to get a few dozen men through, but in the end, they’ll just disappear into the forest. In a year they’ll be right back at it again. You’ll just have meaningless deaths. It won’t solve anything.”

“Meaningless?” Lyle’s face was a sudden mask of disgust. “
Meaningless
… you’d call
Christ’s sacrifice
meaningless? You’d call the
Crusades
meaningless? I’d like you to go down to the barracks and talk to one of the
soldiers
”—he was standing out of his chair—“Go on. Talk to one of those soldiers who fought for Jesus and The Church—The Church that you supposedly serve—in the
Maka-Sichu
Crusades. Talk to the
families
who
prayed
for the safety of men who never came home. You go tell
them
that it was meaningless! You tell them”—he slapped a palm on the top of the desk. John jumped— “that their
fathers
and
brothers
and
sons
all died a meaningless death!”

John had gone pale. He stared slack-jawed at the man in white standing over him, sweating. A vein stood out on Lyle’s forehead. For a moment, John could see the man on a stage, selling miracle cures and dandelion water.