The Divinity Student (14 page)

Desden pokes his head out of the meat locker with wide eyes. He comes up fast, still in his apron with a holster of knives.

“Two cars came while you were gone.” He makes an aborted gesture at the shop. “ . . . I managed to get rid of the body before . . . ”

“What about Albert and Chan?”

“Safe in their jars. I packed everything up after they left.”

“Did you get a look at them?”

“Windows were tinted.”

“Are you all packed?”

“Not much to pack.”

“Wait here.” The Divinity Student stalks out into the street, stepping over some beams that used to be in the ceiling. His throat’s gone tight like a slow vise clenching down on him. The city has an undersea look to it—he goes down to the pay phone on the corner.

“It’s me, I need a new place, the cars got Teo’s shop.”

Fasvergil says nothing for a long time. Eventually, he disappears behind the receiver, comes back in a few minutes with an address.

“Itemize the damages. I’ll expect a report on this.”

Dial tone.

Food-smell and people-buzz and then the rubble again, Desden standing alone in the shop with a bitter look on his face.

“This is very bad, very bad,” he says.

High weeds around the house bristle like a frightened cat and surge against the fence. As with the rest of the place, its paint flaked away, long ago exposing old, gray, seamed, desiccated wood fresh only for new splinters. The porch is fifteen feet off the ground, with broken wicker screens between the supporting beams, and behind, the foundation settles into the slope of a low mound, brackened with wiry impenetrable desert brush and short oaks. The Divinity Student carries a bag that sloshes and chimes occasionally with a rich tone of ringing glass. He’s following the banister up to the porch, which is also banistered. The entire front of the house is railed with banisters like rows of bones stripped bare and fossilized. Teo passes him and holds the door open, biting his lips, and inside, the core of the house—a vast central shaft with tiny rooms radiating out on all three floors, and separate stairways along the walls with direct access to each floor—more banisters, and ribcage shadows along every wall.

The Divinity Student is a little relieved to get out of the sun; he’s been feeling it more lately. A sick, disinterested uneasiness in direct sunlight, making him screw his eyes up and walk stiffly along the street, like an old man. With care he selects his staircase and carries Albert and Chan up to the third-floor room where they’ll be working together. Teo goes back out to the cart and brings in another knife rack for the kitchen, then sets about installing the last refrigerator unit.

The two spend the evening pacing the porch and kicking dust and dead leaves down into the weeds. Across the street is a somnolent congregation of desultory houses and yawning warehouses. The wind blows warm brown air baked all day in desert earth and grazed by the monitors. Desden absently flicks one of his knives at a spider—he follows the blade with his eyes, then cocks his head, and the Divinity Student looks.

The point had bitten deep into the wood-rusk, the polished steel handle still humming, but the spider is not there. Nor was it ever there. Teo shrugs and retrieves his knife.

Later, Miss Woodwind comes to visit. Teo opens the door for her. In the vacant expanse of the house’s heart, she is pushed by invisible currents from one staircase to another, finally caught and pulled upward by a conveyor-belt of banisters. She holds her arms against herself, but her eyes shine like venom, and she is not afraid.

The Divinity Student’s room is directly under the roof. He’s there, at work in his shirtsleeves building a divining machine out of an umbrella. She walks in and pauses a moment; there’s a great suspender “y” sprawling across his back, darker against his fading black shirt with its bleached silver sheen, frayed cuffs, and worn through at the right elbow, which is cool white and hard, like a water-smoothed stone.

She says hello. He’s predictable; he’s forgetting about the agency, and Miss Woodwind has taken it upon herself to remind him. He looks sheepish and surprised to see her in the house, digs out one of his notebooks. As she sits on his cot to read the new entries (none of them from the Catalog) he goes back to his invention, impatient. The shaft of the umbrella, sawed off close to the support beams, is attached to a variable set of gears and a single lever with a numerical dial. The spokes are cut to diminish in length according to random intervals within a preset range, between three quarters and one half the length of the previous spoke, and each is tipped with a small tin reservoir atop a fountain pen nib and a spigot. The Divinity Student is currently stringing clear plastic fishing line from each spigot down the length of its spoke, and tying them to the central gear.

She finishes reading and leans back. The cot sags almost to the floor in the middle. One blanket, no pillow. Yellow chemical stains on the sheets. She sits up again, watching him work. Presently she comes over with his notes.

“More sleepwalking?”

He nods. Her fragrance envelopes him.

“This will be acceptable for now, but . . . I have a bad feeling.” She wrinkles her brow a little. “You’re . . . ”

She slaps him across the forehead, and startled he jerks back. “You’re getting a bit remote,” calm voice, “wherever you go, you must always come back to me.” After giving him a significant look, she turns her attention to the desk. “What does this do?”

“Nothing. It’s a divining machine, but it’s not finished.”

“How does it work?”

“You set it in a circle of paper, fill the spigots with different pigments, and turn the crank without looking at it. The configuration of the gear engagement is random, some unpredetermined gears act to wind this spring,” and he points to a copper coil in the midst of the cogs, “others rotate the entire apparatus to a starting position, while others open the spigots. Then you flip the starting lever, and the machine begins to rotate as the spring uncoils, clockwise or counterclockwise, starting and stopping, fast or slow, all randomly.”

“And meanwhile the pigment is dripping down onto the paper from these arms.” She points.

He spreads his hands. “When it’s all finished, you take the paper out and examine the pattern.”

She smirks, pouting her lips a little. “How do you read the pattern?”

“You look at it.”

“What a hobby!” she laughs.

Why take this from her? There’s no choice. He opens his mouth, and something flickers across his features, just a flaring on the rims of his spectacles and the briefest instant of momentary sadness, or sympathy. His eyebrows draw together slanting upward, sending curled ripples across his forehead, his eyes widen and seize at the corners, his mouth pulls open downwards, his throat strains against his collar, all for a moment, then his features melt in confusion—Miss Woodwind has him by the shoulders.

“What’s the matter? What are you doing?”

He shakes his head, slumping to the floor half-conscious trying to point.

She turns her head, her eyes probe the attic’s darkness and then turn forcefully back to him.

“You’re being ridiculous. What did you see?”

A light had gone by very fast. He shakes his hand in front of his face. Everything had looked different in here, for a moment. The Divinity Student had seen someone staring at him from the dark.

“I don’t see anything. Would you stand up!” She shakes him hard.

“ . . . I don’t know.”

“Well?”

He saw only part of the face, only eyes and an open inky mouth, no one he knew.

She throws up her hands. “You’re making all of this up, it’s clear you’re not up to getting anything done today.” She heads for the door.

The Divinity Student follows her and pulls her back, muttering, “Making things up I’ll show you who’s making things up,” and, clasping her belt, he drags her out the door and along the top-floor landing. She leans away but does not protest, mumbling distracted to herself, always curious.

The only door on the other side of the landing bears a heavy latch and an eyepiece, set slanting down—someone on the other side of the door could presumably use it to stare down the staircase. Still holding Miss Woodwind about the waist, the Divinity Student throws the latch and pushes the door open, then thrusts her inside.

He tells her to “look!”

The chamber is vast, reaching its two wings to claim almost all of the upper floor. It is infested with crawlways. Just enough floorspace remains to allow the door to swing open into the room, the rest is heaped with overlapping tunnels, coiling about the room on the floor and hanging from the ceiling, sometimes angular, sometimes curved like a hose, punctuated by small doors and landings, portholes, chutes, and in one case a miniature spiral staircase. At their feet is a terminus, with a wooden door and a small white porcelain knob, just large enough for an adult to creep through on all fours.

“No one knows what this is for. It was built into the walls. Now listen!”

They stand listening for a moment.

From deep within the room comes the muffled sound of someone crawling.

Miss Woodwind is silent.

That night, she goes with them to find Niffruch and Dreyfic. The city morgue is a squat octagonal building situated near the Orpheum, with a green copper dome and thick marble walls. It’s windy tonight, sending showers of dead leaves eddying by streetcorners and rattling empty branches, the vault of the sky is swept clean, so clear that the moon, though new, is still dimly visible as a ball of shade floating above the horizon. The street is quiet save for the hissing of the breeze. Silent, they, three now, fan out and submerge in the shadows flanking the morgue, searching for an entrance.

Miss Woodwind signals, she had walked directly to an open door set deep into the eastern wall.

The Divinity Student gives her a nod.“I knew
you’d
find the door.”

Inside, a narrow passage plumbs into the building like a mineshaft, the ceiling merely inches over their heads. Its walls are yellow, the floor padded with dark green carpet sponging up their footsteps. At regular intervals, pallid, anemic lamps link wall and ceiling, but cast almost no light. They walk for a long time, and the corridor slopes gently downward and begins to curve in on itself, until abruptly they turn a corner and stumble out into the main holding area.

Under girders and swinging lightbulbs are rows and rows of vast cabinets, fifty feet high and white as bone, milky gloss of porcelain doors hinged in tile facing and chrome handles. Once in a while something creaks or whines off in the distance, as if the whole place were adrift on the ocean. The Divinity Student rushes forward, and begins looking for the Ns, while Teo and Miss Woodwind search out the Ds. Labels penned in the same meticulous handwriting spell a legion of names, up and down the ladders and through the aisles, stirring long-stagnant air redolent of rubbing alcohol and boiled metal. Then the Divinity Student calls them. His voice is quiet, but his whispers are carried by the vastness of the unstirred space.

They find him before the special cases, drawing a broad drawer open. Niffruch and Dreyfic lie there together, hand in hand, rigid faces upright at attention. Shreds of tenuous white mist flutter about them or plunge feathering to the floor. The Divinity Student draws a deep breath of stale ice-musk through flared nostrils, then he pounces, trying with all his might to tear their clasped hands apart. Frozen solid. They don’t move.

Desden says, “We can’t carry them both—we’ve only got one bag.”

The Divinity Student scowls. He turns and fixes his gaze on Miss Woodwind, stabbing a finger at the spiderweb of catwalks overhead.

“You keep watch.”

She stands off, watching, smiling back at them from time to time, lips moving, voice droning silently.

The Divinity Student turns back to the bodies. For a moment his eyes flick from one seamed marble face to another. Then with speed prompted of pure bile he seizes Dreyfic’s head and wrenches it viciously to one side, snapping his neck. He exhales and throws Desden a look.

“Now cut it off,” his voice is low.

Desden decapitates Dreyfic with three simple strokes, the cold flesh cuts with a sound like tearing cloth. A watery trickle of thin purple blood drips from the neck wound, but the butcher is careful, and spills nothing getting the head into the bag. The Divinity Student is already dragging Niffruch out of the frost, the ice whines and crackles on the dead man’s suit. Teo comes over to help, and when Niffruch stops short, his hand caught in his partner’s grasp, down comes the cleaver to hack off the hand, and Niffruch slides into the bag.

In the passage again, Desden stumbles, the bag clonks against a wall leaving a broad smear of carmine blood reeking like rotting fish. The Divinity Student is against leaving evidence—the pieces in the drawer would go unnoticed for weeks, months probably, but blood on the walls will bring inquiry the next day. With care he nicks his left eye with a sharp fingernail, and squeezes out a small pearl of clear fluid. As Miss Woodwind and the butcher stare, he seals the wound with one hand while flicking the liquid at the stain. Where it hits, the blood goes clear and begins to run, and this spreads until all is innocent water coursing in small droplets toward the floor. In the cool dry air it will sublimate away, no stain, no trace. With a look of warning to Teo, he squeezes by them and heads back to the street.

Divination machines are not the Divinity Student’s only project. He’s devised a new method, more effective than drinking the preservative fluid. By adding a special reagent to the formaldehyde, he can cause the fermented memory-infusion to rise to the surface without requiring agitation. Strain the liquid off the top, that’s the next step, and collect it on a small metal plate, under a glass dome, with hoses attached through a tube at the dome’s apex. Electric current runs through the metal plate, vaporizes the fluid, which condenses on the interior surface of the dome and is channeled up through the tube, which ends in a breathing mask.

Now he’s shut in the room. Miss Woodwind is still in the house, on the next landing down, wondering out loud to herself at the light under his door. It’s late; he’s rigging up two assemblies—he plans to read Niffruch and Dreyfic together. She’s anxious, could have left hours ago, but there’s something irresistible happening. Eavesdropping earlier, she had heard the Divinity Student reporting to someone on the telephone, someone who didn’t want him to take Niffruch and Dreyfic at the same time. The Divinity Student had agreed not to, then went ahead with his plans anyway. What happens next?