The iron gate twenty pal.., p.22
The Iron Gate: Twenty Palaces, page 22
“Prove it.”
He took another swig of his beer. “I gave you your memories back.”
The urge to punch him in the face was powerful. “But you took them first, right? I used to be a thief, so take it from me when I say that no motherfucker in this world or any other is grateful when a thief returns something they stole. Not even the ones who act like it. So, if you’re expecting me to thank you—”
“I’m not, I promise.”
“Who are you, really? Because no cop would say that.”
“You’re right. I’m not a cop, just like you’re not a handyman. I was a county assessor. I’m Michael Galloway.”
He held out his hand for me to shake. After a count of maybe twenty, he realized I wasn’t going to speak or move until he put his hand back in his lap. He did.
But I was convinced of one thing: he was just as real as I was. He didn’t have a role that erased his actual memories. He was just a guy in a uniform, limping around town. “Mike Senior,” I said.
“Before I get to that, several times now you’ve mentioned something about a level game. You said We’re in a level game or something similar. I couldn’t quite make it out.”
“Are you listening to everything I say?”
“Ray.”
“I think I said that this place looks like a level in a video game.”
Mike Senior nodded and took another swig. “I don’t know what that is.”
“Maybe the Show has eaten some of your memory.”
“I don’t think so,” Senior said. He took something from his pocket and set it on the bar beside the gun. Then he opened it up. “This is a telephone, isn’t it? Like a Captain Kirk sort of communicator? You know who Captain Kirk is?”
“Of course.”
He shrugged, seemingly surprised.
“My uncle was a cop. He had a telephone in his car, but the battery was so big that it had to be bolted to the bottom of the trunk. And when you first brought this here, the date showing on the screen was April of 2012.”
I thought about it. Los Angeles and Las Vegas were the summer of 2011. We’d hit Vegas during a cross-country drive out of SoCal, and kept going all the way to Atlanta. Then a surprise trip to Europe to see the inside of the society headquarters and to face down yet another predator.
Had I come back to the US? Yes. Definitely. Annalise had been on the trail of one of the three original spell books, and she’d dragged my ass to Portland to sit around and do nothing while investigators searched for the flimsiest of leads.
Which brought us to the mountains, actually. We’d been checking out the sites of various disasters—chemical spills and that sort of thing—that forced Uncle Sam to cordon off large patches of land. I didn’t pay a lot of attention to the story—we’d already been to eight different towns.
But we’d come to this odd little abandoned place—little more than a wide spot in the narrow mountain roads—called Meadow Corners, where a whole town had been killed, supposedly, by the carbon dioxide venting out of holes in the ground. The place had been sealed off for decades, but I’d never cared about invading other people’s property and neither had Annalise.
We came up the road, parked so we could investigate on foot, and…
Actually, I didn’t know what the hell happened after that. I ended up here somehow. Annalise didn’t.
Lou brought whiskeys and another chicken, along with a string of four brick-red sausages. Senior took a hefty swallow, emptying the glass. “Leave the bottle.” Lou did.
Was I lying in a hospital somewhere, imagining this? Was there some kind of predator digging into my brain, forcing me to dream this place up, where no one can die? Maybe Annalise was lying on a slab right beside me, stuck inside a completely different version of this stupid Show.
“Do I have a worm in my brain?”
Senior looked startled. “You mean, like, a parasite? I’m not sure what you mean.”
“All this shit here that we’re seeing. The Show. It’s some kind of worm, isn’t it? Or something that attaches to the back of my neck, like a leech, and pumps LSD into my skull.”
My voice was growing tight and my skin was prickling as I spoke. It took all my willpower to not reach for the nape of my neck and check for something slimy. What would I have done if I found it, yanked it out?
“No, no,” Senior said. “It’s nothing like that. Take a drink. It’ll settle your nerves.” He filled his glass and emptied it again. I left mine on the bar. This motherfucker didn’t get to tell me what to do.
“Okay. Before I say that, I’m going to say this.” Senior picked up the bottle, then set it back down. He was pacing himself. “When my sister had kids, the loneliness of it drove her around the bend. Have you heard of this? She lived in a nice house outside Portland, with a yard and a TV and three kids, and she confided in me one time that she was miserable. Not that she didn’t love her kids! She was a good person. But she was desperate for adult conversations, and she couldn’t get them with her husband, not after he’d put in a long day of work.”
“So, she would call you.”
“And we’d talk. She’d talk, really, and I’d watch TV, which made her cry sometimes, but women can be like that. It was the same with my ex-wife.”
He picked up the bottle again, but this time he filled the glass without drinking. “And now it’s the same with me. Talking to these people… it can feel like talking to children. It’s a kind of loneliness that would have broken my kid sister. Sometimes it’s almost unbearable. But we’re both here now. We can talk like men, and I’ll pay extra attention so I can keep control the way Steve McQueen would. But obviously, if I do start talking too much… well, I just won’t.”
He rotated the glass on the bar, staring at it. I stared at him, wondering what the hell I was going to make of him.
“Now, the Show, as you call it, is not like a worm in your brain. I picture it more like a balloon. There’s an opening to our world somewhere out there, and if someone get too close, they fall in. The more people, the bigger the balloon.”
“That’s what happened to me, isn’t it? I got sucked in. You blocked my memories. Turned me into Carl. Hung this thing around my neck.” I stripped off my tie and tossed it onto the floor. “Made me playact for your kid. Right? Mike Junior? That’s what happened to me.”
“I’m not going to apologize.”
I grabbed up the gun again.
Then I set it back down. I didn’t want to sit here a second time and watch him magic away all that stupid soot like it was nothing. There’d be no satisfaction in that. Instead, I started eating one of the links.
“Is it true?” Senior asked, lifting my phone. “I brought it here to show you. To find out if it’s a prank or a toy or… I don’t know, some kind of sabotage. It hasn’t really been that long, has it?”
I took the phone from him. The society had provided this one to me, which meant it was secure as hell and not even a little bit fun. No games. No nothing. Just an old-fashioned flip phone. I pressed the power button. Nothing. Probably it had been left on when I first dropped into this place. This balloon. But had it been dead for two weeks or two months?
“Let’s get this charged up. The cable was in my pocket, so you have it, right? We can just plug it in.”
I looked around for an outlet. Senior said, “There’s no electricity here. That’s not how the lights work. Nothing works that way. Besides, I tried to use it when you first arrived. The little screen said there was no signal.”
“Try not to act surprised when I tell you that I’m not taking your word for it. On anything.”
Now Mike Senior sighed as though I was the one wasting his time. Good. I wanted him pissed off. For the moment, it was the only thing I could do to him.
He took a long swallow of beer, nearly emptying the glass. Then he swirled his whiskey. “Look, I invited you over here so we could clear the air. Get me? I have questions. I know you do, too. You can keep being a jerk and learn nothing, or you can talk to me. If you want to be a jerk, we can wander around this place, getting lonelier and lonelier until you can’t stop yourself from talking to me. Or I can see to it that you never get another scrap of meat. No more healing, just pain piled on top of pain, endlessly.”
I hated to be threatened. “If I feel pain, you feel pain.”
“I don’t want either of us to feel pain. How about a deal? You answer my question about this futuristic device, and I’ll tell you about the ‘Show’ and how we got here. Sound fair?”
It did, but I wasn’t going to admit that. Or give in to it. “Futuristic? When did you summon this Show?”
Senior looked at me warily. “It was Christmas day, 1971. On that day, I looked just like this.”
Shit. I couldn’t afford to be snotty to this asshole. I needed to figure out what was going on, or I might be here for a thousand years. If a thousand years hadn’t passed already.
“Yeah,” I said, unable to keep the reluctance out of my voice. “Yeah, it was 2012 when I dropped in here.”
“You were the first new arrival in a long time, but I didn’t think it could have been that long.”
“What are the odds you know how long has passed since then?”
He turned his palms to the ceiling. “Before you showed up, if someone had slapped a five-spot on the bar and told me it was all mine if I could guess the year, I would have said 1980. Maybe 1981. Dammit.”
He said that last word as though it was the worst swear he knew.
I’d done my part. I pulled the chicken toward me, popped the tiny chef hats off the drumsticks, and tossed them onto the floor. If Lou made a stink, I’d wake him up. The real Lou was a pussycat.
“Tell me,” I said. “And don’t leave out the book you used to do all this.” I began to eat and prepared myself to hold my temper while Senior made his excuses.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
Senior cleared his throat to begin. “Do you have kids?”
Oh, shit. This was going to be bad.
I shook my head.
“Then all of this is going to sound cliche to you and I can’t help that. Hmm. Okay. Let me start over. This place—this thing that we’re in—isn’t really called The Show. Maybe that’s obvious, since it’s a name we sort of accidentally created together, but you wanted to know about the book, and I think that’s the place to start.
“The real name—the one from the book—is the Theater of Sleep. I guess this place is supposed to be a dream come true? Anyway, the book explicitly calls this place a haven for spurned lovers.”
“Gross,” I said around a mouthful of half-chewed meat.
“I guess,” Senior said resentfully. “I sort of see the romance of it. A young person loves someone so much that they’re willing to die with them? Drink poison together, like Romeo and wassername. That’s classic doomed-romance stuff. The spell book even says that the Theater will provide the poison or knife or whatever. I mean, people commit murder-suicides all the time for love, but this place is better than a gun because at least you get to spend time with her—the good version of her, not the one who tried to dump you—before you die.” He noticed my expression then, and said, “Something you want to say?”
You’re fucked in the head was the first thing that came to mind, but then I remembered Penny dropping all those files, and Sally laughing like a brain-damaged donkey, and every other woman in this place playacting the role of klutz, schoolmarm, or moron. I might as well try to insult a box of rat poison. “You summoned a predator and killed a bunch of people, Mike Senior. If you’re going to get antsy every time I curl my lip, we’ll be drinking here at the bar for a hundred years.”
Senior shrugged, conceding the point. Then he said, “We might be here for a hundred years anyway.”
“Tell me about the book,” I said, cutting off whatever bullshit digression he was about to make. “Name. What it looked like. How you got it. Who else knows about it. Where you hid it. The whole deal.”
“Well… Okay. It was called the Book of Oceans, by someone named Cantero. No first name, like Liberace, I guess. It was all handwritten in a leather-bound book, although I think it had been taken apart at some point and bound together again. The pages felt really old. I—well, I have to confess that I stole it from my neighbor. I’d seen it on her shelf and looked at it once or twice. She said it had been passed down to her husband from an uncle in Sardinia. It came in a big brown paper package, asking them to keep it in a safe place until he came for it.”
He looked away, caught Lou’s attention, then tapped the top of his beer glass. After, he didn’t look at me. “But he didn’t. No one did,” I prompted.
“The husband died shortly before the package arrived. The two things weren’t related, I don’t think. Heart attack with a hooker while he was on a business trip. My neighbor didn’t even open the package for a month. When she did, she saw it contained a book and, not knowing or caring what value it had, put it on a shelf. She didn’t know how to contact that uncle. It wasn’t her side of the family. And that shelf is where the book sat for eight years.”
I had forgotten my pain, and I’d forgotten to keep eating. “You got that”—I pointed at the spot on his thigh where the iron gate had been cast—“from a book that was sitting on a shelf in someone’s living room?”
“Maybe her husband would have recognized its value, but it was beyond her.” He wiped his hand across his mouth and looked at me as if he was worried about my reaction to his story. “Anyway, I was returning a casserole dish to her, the good Corning Ware with the flowers? You know what I mean? And I found her dead in her home. I called the ambulance and, while I was waiting for them, I saw the book there and I just… took it. All her things were donated to First Baptist down in Patterson, and it would have been sold off at a church social or something. Assuming some little old church volunteer didn’t burn it.”
My chicken was half-finished, and my beer was gone. Lou brought two more beers and a whiskey for Senior. I waited for Lou to walk away and for Senior to finish his first swallow before I spoke. “If you keep lying to me, I’m going to start breaking your fingers.”
“What? I’m… How could you tell?”
“Because you suck at it. Let me guess. You noticed the book on her shelf and looked it over. You didn’t understand it but you knew what it was. I’d guess you offered her a few bucks for it and were insulted when she turned you down. I’ll bet she didn’t like you very much, even though you thought of yourself as a helpful guy looking after an elderly neighbor. Then something happened that made you want an out. Gambling debts, maybe. Or your wife got sick of your shit and— No, you asked me if I have kids, so something happened to your kid, right?”
Whatever embarrassment he was showing when I caught him at his lie evaporated at the mention of his kid. “That’s right.”
“So, you killed your neighbor and stole the book. That Corning Ware, whatever that is, was your excuse for entering the house and discovering the body. It was something to tell the cops, right? But you needed that book for something bad that happened, right?”
“The something bad that happened to my kid was cancer,” Senior said, sounding persecuted. “Once the doctors admitted the chemotherapy wasn’t working, I was desperate to find another solution. And Agatha wouldn’t even consider selling me that book. You know, I mowed her lawn once a month after her husband died and fixed the glazing on her window one time. My wife used to help her with her groceries. But when Mike Junior got sick, she wouldn’t lift a finger to help us. She said she wouldn’t summon a demon and damn his immortal soul for any reason, not even to save his life. Irrational bitch.”
He took another drink, then set his glass down on the bar a little too hard. “Yes, I killed her. Yes, I stole the spell book off her shelf. And I’d do it again, if I had to. I’d do anything to protect my family.”
I had a lot I wanted to say, but I tore the last chicken breast free and took a big bite to shut myself up. I had sort of liked Senior when he’d been playacting as the chief—maybe it was because he didn’t act like a real cop—but the more I got to know the guy, the more I hated him.
And it was a miracle that a spell book—any spell book—would just sit on someone’s bookshelf untouched for years. I’ve met a few wealthy, ruthless assholes who would have hired a team of psychopaths in black tactical gear to shoot the place up and burn it to the ground. Maybe that sort of research and investigation was extra difficult back in the pre-Internet age. I wouldn’t know.
“Your family,” I prompted.
He drained his glass and set it down again, but gently this time. When he gestured for Lou’s attention and tapped his empty glass with his index finger, he moved with exaggerated carefulness. We might not be able to die or get laid in the Show, but apparently we could get shit-faced.
“My family is everything to me. Mikey Junior was everything. When he collapsed on the ball field, my heart practically stopped. You don’t have kids. You can’t understand. Before I had my son, I didn’t understand either. You see movies with parents trying to rescue their kids and they look desperate and all, and it looks like a bunch of tired old bull puckey. Same old story, right? Cheap emotional manipulation straight from the Hollywood machine. Then you hold your own newborn son and it suddenly makes sense. I wish you had one of your own. If you did, you’d know that you could do anything for them. Anything.”
“Even if it kills a bunch of innocent people?”
He stared at me with watery eyes. “Anything.”
CHAPTER FORTY
“Tell me about the spell.”
Lou came over, saw that I’d reduced the chicken to its bones, and took the carcass away. He didn’t look at either of us. I got to work on the beer. If I had to listen to this motherfucker talk, I needed a little buzz.
“It wasn’t ideal. You know? It wasn’t what I was looking for. First of all, it was written in Spanish. I had to call a college buddy of mine to drag a translation out of him. We were on the phone for six hours, and really, there wasn’t that much text, if you know what I mean.
