The Mysteries of Holly Diem (Unknown Kadath Estates Book 2) (9 page)

If Holly is to be believed – a tall order – then
Snowball has his grubby little paws in just about every pie in the Nameless
City. Unsanitary expression intended.

“Dunwich is pretty smart,” I remarked. “He from
Ulthar?”

Yael nodded.

“Yes.” She bent to stroke his coat. “Lord Snowball
placed him under my care not long after my arrival in the Nameless City. He is
young, but valiant – the youngest, in fact, to become a
Hunter-Beneath-the-Moon.”

That shut me up.

“It’s an order, among the Cats of Ulthar,” Yael
explained, taking pity on me. “Think of it as special forces, perhaps, or a
sort of knight errant.”

“I see.” I kept my distaste out of my voice and facial
expression, but it took effort. “You’re a believer in the whole “Kingdom of
Talking Cats” thing, then? I suppose that Holly told you about Ulthar?”

Yael shook her head and gave me a condescending look.

“Do cats refuse to speak with you, Preston?”

“Well, ah...actually, I can’t say that.” I felt the
ghost of a headache-past, remembering the drugged evening when I had
encountered the reputed Lord of Ulthar, Snowball, somewhere on the streets of
the Nameless City. “There was this one time...”

Yael waited for me to continue. It was perhaps the
first time I had truly caught her interest, but I wasn’t in a sharing mood.

“It’s hard to put much credence in it,” I said,
shaking my head to dispel bad memories. “I was on drugs.”

“Oh.” Yael looked disappointed. “That’s a bad habit,
Mr. Tauschen.”

“There you go again,” I complained, making the right turn
on Providence Avenue that would take us to the chimneys and foundries of
Sarnath. Already, the air smelled of burnt sulfur and coal smoke. “Why won’t
you just call me Preston?”

“I hoped it might serve as a reminder not to tell me
any stories. I know what you are.”

I fought down the temptation to drag her down one of
the narrow alleys we passed, and provide her with a thorough education on
exactly what I was. The cuts around my eye tingled, and I felt pin and needle
chills that presage a fever.

“Not likely.” I produced a contemptuous laugh. “If it
makes you feel better to think that, though...”

Yael reached up to adjust her hair, and her sweater
lifted to reveal the canisters of the gasmask hanging from her belt. According
to April, she carried it with her everywhere. I got the feeling I wasn’t the
only one who came prepared for the worst. In another context, I might have
liked Yael Kaufman.

“You aren’t as mysterious as you think.” Yael trotted
along cheerfully beside me, kicking a crushed can along the sidewalk ahead of
us. From the way she manipulated the crude aluminum disc, I got the feeling she
had played some soccer. “The Cats of Ulthar see nearly everything that happens in
the Nameless City, and beyond. Your arrival was noted, as was my own. The Cats
of Ulthar watch everyone, and I am their friend and ally. Dunwich whispers
secrets across my pillow every night, as I fall asleep.”

“Is that so?” My tone and body language were intended
to convey doubt, and an adult sort of superiority to these notions. “What
secrets have they told you about me?”

Yael met my gaze, her eyes confident and inexplicably
sad.

“Let me think.” I expected evasion, or a bluff. She
put a finger to her glossy lips in thought. “You were a doctor, once, weren’t
you?”

I bit the inside of my cheek, tasted copper and raw
meat.

“Not true.”

“Could be. I heard you were a doctor, though – and not
just
any
doctor. Rumor is you were April’s doctor, back at some weird
institution, a secure medical facility.”

“Not
an
institution,” I said, with a shake of
my head. “
The
Institute. I wasn’t a doctor, but I worked there.”

“Different job, hmm?” Yael shrugged. “Same reason for
leaving, though, I’d imagine.”

My hands twitched in my pockets.

“What’s that?”

Against all expectation, she blushed, looking down at
the toes of her patterned plastic rain boots.

“You had an inappropriate relationship with a
patient.” Yael frowned. “I guess that’s actually ongoing, now that I think
about it.”

“That’s just so...look, Yael – April and I aren’t like
that.”

“Oh, I know. She told me.”

“I...see. Good.”

“That’s not
all
she told me.”

I sighed and ran my hands through my hair. It was
greasy, because I had run out of shampoo the day before, and since forgot to
buy a new bottle.

“No one can keep their mouth shut, can they?” I
intended my smile to be intimidating. “What else have you heard about me,
Yael?”

“I think I’ll keep the rest to myself, if it’s all the
same to you.”

It wasn’t. I nodded anyway.

“One thing I will say,” Yael continued, subtly judging
the distance between us. “You’re armed, all of the time. It’s in your right
pocket now, but you switch that sometimes. Are you ambidextrous, Preston?”

The sound of my footsteps in my ears was painfully
loud. My mouth opened and closed soundlessly, like a goldfish.

“Doesn’t matter.” Yael shrugged and smiled at Dunwich,
who ran along the retaining wall beside us. “As long as you know that I know.”

I’m careful. April tailored my pants to allow for improved
concealment. No one ever noticed, not even back at the Institute, when I first
swiped one off a tray, during exploratory surgery on one of the growths littering
April’s frontal lobe. I carried it through security checkpoints and searches,
for weeks, without none the wiser.

“How?”

The question itself was a sort of admission, but that
was unavoidable. Yael had me at seemingly permanent disadvantage.

“I have some tricks of my own, Preston.”

A few drops of rain came tumbling out of the
soap-white sky, beading on the impermeable surface of Yael’s windbreaker, and
on the olive skin of her nose and brow. The streets weren’t crowded, but we got
curious and uncomfortable glances from the other pedestrians. Dunwich leapt
down from the wall, to take a position between us.

“Do we understand each other?”

Fearless hazel eyes met my empty gaze. I do not
remember who was first to look away.

“Sure.” I gave her a big, dumb smile, and extended my
left hand. “Truce?”

She looked at my hand as if it were something of which
she had heard, but had no personal familiarity. Her grip firm through her
cat-patterned mittens.

“For as long as it lasts, Mr. Tauschen.”

“Preston.”

“Of course.” She might have smiled. “Whatever you
say.”

***

We returned to the Estates briefly. I left Yael chatting with Holly while
I went up to consult with the closest thing we had to an oracle at the Kadath
Estates – my upstairs neighbor, Josh, who does some interesting things with
data modeling and has a frightening attitude toward privacy. Like Professor Dawes,
he was a ghoul. Unlike the Professor, pretty much nobody liked him, which why
was Yael skipped the visit.

I had to pound on his door for a while before he
finally opened up.

“Preston.” My name came off his blue lips all filthy.
“What do you want?”

I pushed past him into his apartment, and immediately
regretted that action.

Ghouls don’t need to breathe. The Professor is quite
fastidious, when it comes to hygiene, but Josh is of the opposite mindset. His
home smelled of mildew and body odor and rotting meat, comingled. I wanted to
retch as soon as I stepped inside. He must have seen it on my face, and judging
from the amusement on his ghastly pale face, Josh found it amusing.

“I need to find someone with no fixed address,” I
said, forcing myself to choke down the thick air. “No family, no job, no ID.”

“Oh. Well, that should be easy, then.” Josh retreated
to his repugnant kitchen, to avail himself of one of the prescription bottles
stacked there. “Do I look like a miracle worker, Preston?”

“Not even close. I don’t need you to find her, Josh. I
just need to know where I should be looking.”

“Her?” His jaundiced eyes widened as he dry-swallowed
a handful of blue pills. “Oh, shit! I know who you’re talking about, now.
That’s bad trouble, Preston – and you’ve been warned.”

“Yeah, I know. I also know that somebody hurt Sumire.
Someone who hates all of us, here at the Estates.”

I let him do the heavy lifting from there, trying not
to inhale too deeply. The windows were plastered with newsprint, giving the dim
light inside a yellow hue. There was too much furniture in the living room, all
of it mummified in plastic and then covered in stacks of papers and old
technical manuals. A large colony of flies had taken residence, and buzzed
about the room happily. The sink was full of black water, from which dirty
dishes protruded like rocks from the ocean. Two enormous monitors sat side by
side on a desk shoved in one corner, dormant and immaculate, in total contrast
to the rest of the room.

“You think she…?”

I nodded.

“Could be. Worth checking.”

He hesitated, scratching his stubbly chin and watching
me with glassy eyes.

“It’s for Sumire, man,” I reminded him gently. “Come
on.”

Josh nodded slowly. Sumire has that sort of effect on
people, even carrion-eating shut-ins.

“I won’t be able to give you an address, because she
moves around. I don’t even know all of the places to look. But I can give you a
list,” he explained, sitting down at the desk. “It’ll give you a place to
start.”

“That’s all I need,” I said gratefully. “Thanks,
Josh.”

Five more minutes of holding my breath and I was back
out into the afternoon, which had warmed somewhat. The air tasted sweet and my
eyes watered. Lovecraft passed me on the stairs, making his way slowly up to
the garden on arthritic legs. I paused long enough to scratch the peak of his
back, and then hurried down to the courtyard.

Yael joined me at the silver gate, with a nod. Holly
had disappeared.

“Did you get what you needed?”

“Maybe,” I said. “With any luck. We’ll start with the
river, first.”

The Skai is the most obvious casualty of the Nameless
City’s lassie-faire attitude toward urban planning and industrial regulation. It
wasn’t so much a river as a semi-mobile collection of refuse.

Holly claimed that the river had once been of significance,
before it was confined to a concrete channel and burdened with the effluence of
the city. The Skai typically carried enough water to soak me perhaps to the
knee at its deepest point – not that anyone would have wanted to touch the
frigid, discolored water, bordered by a thin scum of discolored ice. Engorged
by rain, there was enough water in the channel to drown in, beneath the
garbage. There are no birds in the Nameless City, but if there were, it was
hard to imagine them making use of the river.

Yael bestowed nearly two hours of silence upon me, and
I made good use of it, leading us on a grand tour of Sarnath’s outbuildings and
abandonments, the various decrepit hotels and bars that the underclass of the
city frequented, alongside the underpaid laborers of the ubiquitous factories. The
afternoon warmed a degree or two, while the rain was intermittent. Weeks of precipitation
emptied out the various homeless encampments and outdoor campsites, so we focused
on the squats scattered throughout the vast industrial district. We made it part
way through the list I got from Josh by noon, but Yael looked as exhausted as I
felt.

I glanced around at the streets around us, and experienced
a providential recall.

“Hey, Yael. Are you hungry?”

She had to think it over, though hours of walking left
me ravenous. I wondered what sort of diet Yael followed, and why she bothered.
She was already too skinny.

“Maybe a little.”

I was not that easily thwarted.

“Good enough. Come this way.”

She tagged along behind me, the silvery hood of her
windbreaker up to ward off the rain. Not far from the canal that marked the
beginning of Yian, in Sarnath’s relatively quiet fringe, we turned off the main
drag onto an unmarked narrow street. It was an older area, filled with squat
stone buildings; restaurants or bars on the lower floors, and shady apartments
above. The streets were closed to vehicles and filthy with pedestrians, mainly
workers from the nearby factories and the tanning yards, forced to brave the
rain. They were a grumpy and harried lot, blackened with soot or covered in
fine metallic dust and powdered lead, wrapped in layers of stale wool and poorly-cured
leather. The public nature of their appreciation for Yael unnerved her to the
point that she practically stepped on my heels, subjected to lingering glances
and shouted invitations I found wholly unmerited.