A Latent Dark (40 page)

“He used to be my dad,” she said, a shadow passing over her expression momentarily. “Now he’s just Axel.”

John cleared his throat. “Does Axel still look after you?”

Gil laughed. “I look after him now. Me and Mr. Henry.”

James gave him a concerned look and John looked back at the girl. “We’re looking for someone.”

“I know lots of people,” said Gil. “I know everyone in Talon and more.”

“I doubt you know the person we’re looking for.”

Next to him, James pocketed the ring after giving it a quick consideration.

“Oh, I’ll bet you another coin I do,” she said, grinning.

“We’re looking for a laboratory,” said John.

“You mean the Tinkerer’s Guild?”

He looked at James, who shrugged. “Is that where the sin engine is?” he asked Gil.

“Yeah,” said Gil. “That’s where people go to confessional. Why? Do you
wanna
sell?”

“No. We’re just looking for someone.”

She giggled. “You guys are funny. I bet you’d get a good price there. Have you done anything bad lately?”

“Bad?”

“Yeah,” she said. “You know…  something you feel terrible about?”

“Umm. Sure, I guess. Who hasn’t? Can you take us there?”

She giggled again, holding out her hand. James gave her another coin. “Oh, I can totally take you there,” she said and ran off.

“Hey!” yelled John, but the girl had already vanished into the mist.

James swore, but it wasn’t because of the girl. John spun around to find James frozen, a man at his back. The man stared from a curtain of long, straight, greasy hair and wore a larger version of Gil’s outfit. Judging from the resemblance, John guessed this was Axel.

He looked through John with small, dull eyes, more puppet-like than human. John felt pressure on his back and realized who Axel was looking at. Silent, greedy hands began to rifle through his pockets. Breath that smelled of rotten fish wafted past his nose, making John feel lightheaded.

“I’m a priest,” he said. “I don’t have much, but take what you need.”

James glared at John as Axel rummaged through his pockets, pulling off his satchel and emptying it on the ground. He took the rifle from James and held it awkwardly, upside down so that even folded, the barrel pointed menacingly at him. James held up his hands.

“What I’m going to do,” said the man behind John—he assumed this was Mr. Henry. “Is I’m going to take you to confessional. They’re paying a good price for faceless refugees at the engines these days.”

“We’re not ref—“ John began, but was cut off by the gun barrel drilling into his temple. The metal was much colder than he imagined it would be.

“Sorry Father,” said the man. “You might not have much on
ya
, but that doesn’t mean you
ain’t
worth money.” He whispered into John’s ear. “A priest like you, I bet you got all kind of sins to confess. Any little boys on your mind?”

“What?” John shrieked.

Mr. Henry began to back up, taking the priest with him, receding into the mist. James looked at Axel, who had begun keening the way a dog might whine at seeing its master leave. Axel looked back at James, then at the spot in the fog where Mr. Henry and the priest had been.

“You don’t even know how to use that gun do you?” James said to the man.

He stared at James, his mouth moving silently, as if trying to absorb the words. Then he said, with James’s exact inflection: “That gun do you.”

James blinked. The man blinked as well. James took two strides toward Axel and grabbed the gun from him, but Axel refused to let it go, keening with that same dog-whine as he clung to the weapon.

“Just give me my gun,” said James. “I don’t want to hurt you, but I will.”

“Hurt you but I will,” Axel mimicked. Then, as if he understood, his eyes went wide. He yanked the gun away from James, but not before the safety came loose in the struggle. The gun unfolded.

James had the sense to let go, knowing full well what would happen, but Axel wasn’t so lucky. He cried out and fell to the ground as a finger became entangled in the mechanism.

James let out a sigh. “I didn’t think you knew how to use it,” he said, reaching down to help. “Here…”

He flipped the catch and released the man who stared at him wide-eyed, his mouth slack. James studied the man, puzzled.
What happened to you?
he thought.

“Take me to them,” he said.

The man stood, visibly relieved. He turned and began walking in the same direction the priest and Mr. Henry had gone. James followed.

*

Gil watched Mr. Henry’s plan fall apart from behind a burlap sack that smelled of rotting cabbage. She watched
Axel’s
hand become mashed in the machinery of the bearded man’s gun. She managed to stifle a scream as she watched, reminded of her own hand, of the frightened man who used to be her father.

But he isn’t your father anymore,
she thought.
You knew that the moment they returned him to you.
He was an empty pitcher, a cipher. She had stayed with him out of sentiment, nothing more.

Her father had been a great man until he had stolen bread that day. The Cleric returned him “good as new” and handed her a script to read. Gil struggled with the words as Axel stood in the corner, staring, not a man anymore, not anything anymore. Eventually she gave up; the words were a mess of lines and dots that made no sense to her anyway. The Cleric had said that when she was old enough she could go to the engines also, if she ever did anything bad. Gil wasn’t about to let them take her too.

Mr. Henry lived next door and had a way with her once-father, making him listen and move with words of authority. He told Gil that if she wanted Axel back, if she wanted to see him move and eat and breathe, she would have to trust him. Now as she watched him lying on the ground, staring like an abandoned child at a world he couldn’t remember, she began to wonder if she never should have trusted Mr. Henry.

Axel was holding his hand now. The bearded man said something; her once-father turned and walked away into the mist. It was just like when Mr. Henry would tell him to do things. She bit her lower lip.

The rings she stole from the dead man jingled in her pocket and Gil took one out. She was still amazed at its size. Clutching it, she stepped out from hiding and prepared to follow them. A voice stopped her in her tracks.

“Gil.”

She looked around but saw nothing, completely alone in shadows and fog. She spun around and peered up. A spot of shadow looked down on her with tiny black eyes. Something shuffled with scratchy claws on stone and then stopped. Gil held her breath.

 The shadow moved again. “Nice ring,” it said in a scratchy voice that was more of a croak.

Chapter 30

Dale felt like a man trespassing in other people’s dreams as Melissa led him through caves, over crystal bridges, under the shadows of enormous castles, and across vast pine-laden hillsides. They were connected not so much by doorways but by physical boundaries that bled into one another. Sometimes Melissa would lead him along the border between two different realities, and at one point they walked with one foot in a desert and another in a swamp. There seemed to be no pattern between the worlds, only transition from one landscape to the next.

There were people in some of the worlds, who stopped what they were doing to watch the two travelers as they traipsed through giant chessboards and around Zen rock gardens. A few people scolded Melissa in a language that Dale couldn’t understand.

“What are they saying?” he had asked her at one point.

“They don’t like that I’ve brought you here,” she said, and left it at that.

Dale didn’t want to ask any more. He could feel their disapproving gaze.

The valley where Melissa lived was lined with houses of differing styles and sizes, with people working in a nearby garden. A central path paved in coral-colored stones ran down the center of the tiny village, splitting off and ending at each structure.

She stopped him at the edge of the village where it bordered a grey thicket. “Wait here,” she said before disappearing into a quaint cottage at the far end of the village.

The other residents were dressed in clothing as varied as the houses they lived in. While some worked in the garden, others ran through the nearby meadow, tossing a ball or a kind of flat disc to one another. They only looked at Dale for a moment before ignoring him completely. Dale even waved at a gorgeous woman with brilliant red hair and an orange sun dress, who gave him a polite but wary smile and then looked away.

When Melissa returned, a stout man followed her. He wore a ridiculous orange hat and a vest with tails that dragged just above the grass without touching. The rest of his suit was almost as outlandish—loud brass buttons, a striped vest, pants that appeared to be lederhosen. He carried a cane which was more for show than utility. He marched towards Dale at a brisk pace. Melissa trotted behind him excitedly.

“So this is Dale,” said Walter, giving him an appraising look.

Gray sideburns crept out from under the hat, then exploded down the sides of the man’s pink face. His smile was crooked but charming. He gave Dale a firm handshake.

“So this is Walter,” Dale said, trying to be funny, but feeling too awkward to pull it off.

“Melissa tells me you are joining her little adventure,” Walter said.

“I am?”

“We can’t stay here,” Melissa said. “Well I mean
you
can’t. I brought you here thinking we could talk, but we’ll have to just keep moving.”

“I don’t understand.”

Walter took his pipe out of his mouth and pointed over Dale’s shoulder. “You’ve got some baggage that would probably upset the residents here. They prefer to keep to themselves and I’m afraid you’ll be causing more of a disruption than they would like.”

Dale didn’t turn his head. He could feel it hovering over his shoulder; fat thorax with many limbs. Long teeth dripped saliva that killed the grass where it fell. Tiny hooks twitched and tickled his shoulder blades, brushing his skin with thick hairs.

“How do I get rid of it?” he asked.

He felt it slither behind his ear, excited, eager for attention. It hugged him from behind with invisible tentacles lined with coarse scales, like a rat’s tail.

“You don’t,” said Walter. “It is as much of you as your arm was when you were alive. The best you can hope for is to embrace it and channel it.”

Dale shuddered. “I don’t know if I can do that.”

“It takes practice… but first things first,” said Walter.

He walked behind Melissa and leaned down behind her. “I love this trick,” she said, smiling at Dale.

As he watched, Walter reached down toward Melissa’s ear as if he were about to pluck a flower from it. Dale expected a coin to appear, but what he didn’t expect to see was an entire pinwheel, a foot in diameter.  It bloomed from behind her ear like a flower, luminescent and blue. It pivoted from the end of a pair of vines that twisted around one another. Dale couldn’t see anything attaching the pinwheel to its base. It seemed to hover at the top of the handle.

“I want you to look at this while I talk to you, Dale. As long as you think about this and not what’s standing behind you, you’ll be fine.”

The swirling blue blossom spun faster and faster. It seemed to consume his entire world. All he could do was nod.