The Dark Remains (23 page)

“We’re full,” he said.

Deirdre eyed the empty hallway behind him. It was all black except for the floor, which was painted a scuffed yellow. The shimmering sounds of electronic dance music pulsed from beyond.

Deirdre matched his grin. “I don’t think so.”

“Oh, yes, we’re not taking anyone else tonight,” the doorman said. “You’ll have to come back tomorrow.”

“How much?” Deirdre said with a sigh. “Five pounds? Ten?”

The doorman only shook his head.

Deirdre leaned on the podium. “Listen—this is important. I’m looking for someone I met earlier today. Her name is Glinda. I need to know if she’s here. She gave me this.”

Deirdre set the drink token on the podium. As she did, the doorman’s eyes widened.

“Ash and blood! Why didn’t you tell me you were looking for Glinda?” He snatched the coin up, tucked it into a pocket, and hopped down from his stool. “This way.” He grabbed the hem of her coat and tugged. “Come on—this way.”

The hallway was longer than Deirdre would have guessed. The painted black walls were disorienting, receding into darkness so that the glowing yellow floor seemed a path leading across a lightless plain. Then the dull throbbing expanded into a rhythmic storm of sound. Fractured shards of a rainbow alighted on her skin, then flitted past, like fireflies whirling through the smoke-heavy air.

“There she is.”

The doorman pointed to a murky corner, past the
glowing dance floor where a dozen spindly figures clad in sequins, feathers, and bright plastic undulated. Deirdre caught a flash of orange hair and the glint of haunted violet eyes.

The doorman turned and disappeared back down the hallway. Deirdre made her way across the club. Tinsel dangled from the invisible ceiling, and television screens hovered at odd angles, flashing images in jewel-like colors. Figures lounged in foggy alcoves and dim corners: some small and stout like the doorman, others long and slender, draped languorously on shabby chaises. She felt curious gazes touch upon her before slipping past.

Glinda was curled up on a ratty purple sofa shaped like a half moon. Her willow-switch arms were folded on the back of the sofa, her mop of orange hair resting upon them. Violet eyes stared at the flickering lights, as empty as the small plastic bottle lying upended on the sofa cushion beside her.

Deirdre swore softly. She picked up the bottle and sat on the sofa. “How many, Glinda? How many did you take?”

Deirdre pressed a hand to her forehead, then squeezed her shoulder and shook her. Glinda’s flesh was cold and stiff as clay beneath the creaking black vinyl. In small amounts, Electria could induce euphoria and a sense of well-being. In large doses it could depress the heart rate, lower the core body temperature, until coma and death resulted.

“Glinda, you’ve got to tell me how—”

She halted. The other’s eyes gazed at her, hazed with a fog like that drifting over the dance floor, yet somehow piercing all the same. Deep purple lips parted in a smile.

“You came.” Glinda’s voice was a soft croak. “Moon and stars, you came. But you’re too late, sweetie. You’re too late.”

Deirdre smoothed tangled orange hair back from her
face. “It’s not too late, Glinda. Just tell me how many pills you took. I’ll get you to the hospital.”

Glinda sat up straight. “No,” she spat. “Needle-stabbers. Blood-lickers. No, you won’t take me there. They’re all the same. Poke and prod, turn you inside out. What makes you tick, sweetie? What runs in your veins, sweetie? Spread yourself and give us another look inside, will you?” A shudder wracked her too-thin body. “Leo took me there once. I won’t go again.”

Deirdre cursed herself; she couldn’t save Glinda by driving her away. She took the other’s hands, folded them together, and pressed them between her own; they were cold as sticks.

“All right, I won’t take you there. Promise. And I won’t let Leo take you, either.”

At this Glinda laughed, a sound like a broken silver bell. “He can’t take me, sweetie.”

“What do you mean?”

“Leo’s dead. He thought he could bargain with them, that he could get a good price for me. Stupid Leo. I told him they take whatever they want, only he never listened. He hurt me sometimes, and he used me. But he didn’t deserve that. No one deserves that.”

Deirdre tightened her grip on Glinda’s hands, but somehow she felt the other slipping away. “Who, Glinda? Who was Leo trying to bargain with? Why do they want you? I have … friends who can help us.”

Slowly, as if with terrible sorrow, Glinda shook her head. “No, sweetie. I told you, it’s too late. They don’t need me anymore. They don’t need … us.”

Carefully, she disentangled her fingers from Deirdre’s, then pressed them against her belly. Only then did Deirdre notice the faintest swelling in the center of her willowy body.

Glinda sighed. “Arion told me tonight.”

“Arion?”

“The doorman. Everyone’s whispering about it. No
one knows how, but they’ve gotten themselves a pure-blood. They don’t need any of us now.”

Deirdre tried to comprehend the other’s words. “I don’t understand, Glinda. Please, help me.”

But Glinda wasn’t looking at her anymore. Instead she gazed up at something over Deirdre’s head. A dreaminess stole across her face, like the peace just before sleep.

“She’s so beautiful,” Glinda murmured. “So beautiful, and so pure. If only I could have been more like her.”

Deirdre turned, craning her neck, and finally she understood.
Of course—Surrender Dorothy. Where else could she have taken her name?

On a nearby television screen, a scene played out in vivid Technicolor: reds, greens, yellows, and blues all as lush and juicy as they had been the better part of a century ago when first revealed to a drab, black-and-white world. Dorothy Gale stood before a fallen farmhouse surrounded by Munchkins as a bright bubble of light danced toward her, shimmering and expanding until it became a woman clad all in gauzy, glittering white.

Deirdre turned back toward Glinda. “It’s not too late. You can come with me … with us. Whoever it is who wanted you, if they don’t need you anymore, they’ll let you go.”

“You’re wrong, sweetie. They don’t let anything go.”

A calmness filled Glinda’s eyes, and it sickened Deirdre. They couldn’t give up without a fight. She opened her mouth, but Glinda shook her head, and suddenly Deirdre found that words had fled her. She worked her tongue, but she could make no sound.

“Hush, sweetie. It’s all right.” Glinda’s voice was like cool water. “You came for me, and that’s all that matters. Sometimes just by wanting to save someone, you do.”

Deirdre shook her head and felt the warm wetness of tears against her cheeks.

“Here, sweetie.” Glinda pulled a silver ring from a slender finger, then pressed it into Deirdre’s hand. “This
came from my mother. I won’t … I won’t be able to give it to my daughter. You keep it instead, so that we live on. At least a little bit.”

No
, Deirdre tried to say.
I don’t want it
. But she closed her hand around the ring. Glinda leaned forward and pressed her purple lips to Deirdre’s, kissing her deeply, lingeringly.

Deirdre’s eyes went wide, for in that moment the murky nightclub around her vanished. Instead, she and Glinda sat on a flat, moss-covered stone in the middle of a misty forest glade where moonbeams stole between silver trees like ghosts. The only music there was the chiming of water tumbling over polished stones. All around her, like bits of gossamer, tiny beings with ugly faces floated on the air with butterfly wings.

Deirdre pulled away from Glinda’s kiss.

“Where—?”

But at that moment the forest vanished, replaced again by the nightclub and the throbbing pulse of electronic music.

Glinda curled up on the couch, drawing her long limbs inward until she was small as a girl. Deirdre began to reach for her, but a stubby hand on her arm stopped her.

“They’re coming,” Arion said. “You have to go.”

She shook her head, beyond words now.

The doorman pulled her arm. “Sticks and stones, come on! If they find you here, they’ll spill your blood. They have no love in their hearts for your kind—if they even have hearts at all.”

Deirdre stumbled to her feet. The doorman pulled her toward the back of the nightclub. Deirdre glanced over her shoulder, but the sofa was empty, save for a single twig bearing two silver-green leaves resting on one cushion.

Arion tugged again, and she stumbled through an opening. The pulsing music ceased with the sound of a shutting door. One by one, the night sounds of London
drifted to her ears: laughter, footsteps, the distant wail of a siren. She stood on the edge of an empty lane, beneath the flickering orange haze of a lone streetlamp. At last she turned around, and she was only slightly surprised to see a blank brick wall behind her.

Dr. Rohan Chandra, third-year resident at Denver Memorial Hospital, specialist in cranial neurology, and at thirty-four years old already the author of five scientific papers discussing the cause, consequence, and reversal of long-term comatose states, had forgotten something.

He stood before his open locker in the residents’ lounge, quite frozen, overcoat pulled halfway onto his slender, well-shaped frame, caught in the act of thought. Several times a day his coworkers at the hospital found him in similar poses: a pen and chart forgotten in his hands, or cafeteria food suspended on a fork between plate and mouth, his brown eyes distant, his lips open and contemplative, his body as still and articulated as a many-limbed statue of Krishna.

At home, his wife Devi had grown accustomed to this habit. Theirs was an arranged marriage, crafted with care and attention by their parents living in India, although both Rohan and Devi had come to the United States for university. Because their union was arranged, they had worked to discover love, and when they did find it, like a yellow flower they had never noticed unfurling between them, it was all the more mysterious, powerful, and sweet.

Devi was an electrical engineer at a computer chip manufacturing firm—although these last months she had remained home to care for their infant son, Mahesh—and
so she placed everything in terms of circuits and transistors.

“You’re preemptively multitasking,” she told him one day. This was after she found him in the bathroom, clad only in his boxers, toothbrush jutting from his mouth, staring into space while toothpaste quietly foamed and bubbled down his chin. After he woke from his spell—she knew never to disturb him until he did—he had frantically scribbled down an idea that had led to a paper published in the
Journal of the American Medical Association
.

She had nodded. “It makes sense. You’re giving fewer processor clock cycles to nonessential tasks like tooth brushing in order to divert power to the execution of more critical, computationally intensive calculations.”

“I love you as well, dearest,” he had said. Then he had kissed her foamily, deeply, and he had quickened even as she let her simple house wrap slip to the floor. Exactly forty weeks later—Devi prided herself on her ability for accuracy—Mahesh was born: brown, squirming, and perfect.

Chandra’s eyes fluttered shut, then open again, and he knew what it was he had forgotten. He shrugged off his coat and placed it back in the locker. Devi was expecting him, and he longed to play with Mahesh, to bounce that compact little bundle of life on his stomach, toss him in the air, and bring him down to kiss like a living jewel. But there was a good chance the unidentified patient in Room CA-423 was a candidate for his new study, and Chandra had wanted to observe the comatose man again today, only he had been too busy until now.

He shut the locker. Devi would forgive his lateness. As long as he stopped for mango ice cream on the way home.

With soft, swift steps Chandra made his way through the corridors of Denver Memorial. As a child smaller than most other children, he had gained the habit of moving without attracting notice. As a man smaller than most, it
was a habit he unconsciously maintained. Sometimes Devi would look all over the house for him, only to find him sitting, absorbed in a medical book, in the very room she had begun her search.

As he turned the corner into the C wing corridor, his eyes caught motion ahead. A door opened, and a man wearing a black overcoat stepped out. The man shut the door behind him; even this far away, it seemed a quiet action. In a single glance, Chandra counted the doors between his position and the man, then added the number to that engraved on the door plaque to his left. The final result: CA-423.

The man started to move away down the corridor, quickly, silently.

“Hello?” Chandra called out.

The man hesitated but did not look back. Chandra walked toward him. Since his arrival at the hospital, the identity of the patient in CA-423 remained unknown. Did the other know him? Or was it merely a janitor, on his way home for the evening, remembering he had left something in the room as he had cleaned it?

“Hello there,” Chandra called again. “Do stop for a moment, please.”

The man hesitated, then continued walking away down the corridor. Chandra started after him—

—then halted.

In the space between two moments, the other disappeared from sight. It was as if he had moved around a corner. Except that wasn’t a possibility, for the corridor was long and without bend. Rather, it was as if the white air had quivered and folded, concealing the man from view.

For long seconds Chandra stared motionless, body forgotten, his brain devoted to thought, searching for an explanation. Then he saw the dark place in the hallway. One long segment of fluorescent lighting was burnt out, casting a ten-foot length of the hallway into shadow.
Beyond there was an opening that led to an intersecting corridor. Clad as he was in black, the man might easily have seemed to vanish into the relative dimness, only to pass through the opening before Chandra’s eyes could adjust to the stark difference in contrast. He started into motion again and stepped through the door of room CA-423.

The gentle whir of machines filled the clean, antiseptic air. It had been several days since Chandra had last come to observe the patient. The changes were subtle but immediate.