The grimmer, p.4
The Grimmer, page 4
Vish looked up the staircase, which had a rumpled plaid shirt on the top two stairs that Agastya might have slipped on. A framed Conan the Barbarian poster leaned against the wall of the landing. And as Vish’s gaze tried to make its way around the corner, into where the staircase opened into a room, something appeared, just for a second. A foot, a calf, a knee. The foot was bare, its skin the light brown of coffee that had been spoiled by an overpour of milk. But the part of leg that Vish saw was more fur than skin — not just hairy, but black-pelted, with little traceries of visible skin showing through.
Gisela stepped between Vish and the stairwell. She reached in and pulled the door shut.
“Who else is up there?” Vish asked.
“No one. Just me and the cat live up there,” Agastya said. “Look, we’re going to tell you whatever you want to know. You deserve that for staying calm in here, being patient with us. Before I forget, and before we have a discussion, I should ring you out. How’s 30 percent off sound? For watching the store?”
“It’s fine,” Vish said. “I mean, thanks.” He kept staring at the closed door. Gisela lightly tapped a knuckle against it and smiled at him.
Agastya grabbed Vish’s two books from the shelf where they’d been set down and walked, holding his right hip. Vish followed him to the register.
“I don’t want to see you hung over every time I come here,” Gisela said from behind Vish. Vish resisted the urge to turn. Agastya didn’t say anything back to her, just rang in the numbers and asked Vish for $8.89.
“You’re not going to answer me?” Gisela said. Vish thought her accent definitely sounded German now, but also understood that he only knew that accent from television and movies, and didn’t want to ask her where she was from, not yet. He was sick enough of people asking him where he was from, and he didn’t think she’d appreciate it.
“Sure, I’ll answer,” said Agastya. “It’s just that I’m wondering why I should be comfortable talking about something you clearly think I should be ashamed of in front of our new friend, when you’re clearly not comfortable talking to him about our recent visit from Mr. Farris.” Agastya walked out from around the counter to unlock the front door of the store. The cat was hiding behind the blue recycling bin just by the entrance. Gisela came over to heft him in her arms.
“You stay here, Moby,” she said to the cat.
Agastya opened the door and poked his head into the street, looking down the sidewalk both ways before letting the door drift shut.
“That guy said he was going to murder you, and it didn’t sound like he was joking,” Vish said. “I want to know who Mr. Farris is, and why you were talking about hurting him, and why I shouldn’t talk to the police about it. Or my Mom,” Vish added, directing this last bit to Gisela.
“He’s seen quite a bit and I think it’s pretty likely he’s going to see more, Gisela. There’s no point in secrets right now,” said Agastya.
Gisela lowered Moby to the floor, ignoring everything Vish and Agastya had said.
“Why don’t you keep the cat down here?” Gisela asked.
“I don’t know,” Agastya said. “People have allergies.”
“Bookstores are supposed to have cats. Isla even named the place after him. Let Moby roam,” Gisela said.
“Who’s Isla?” Vish asked.
“Isla was my wife,” Agastya said, pushing the paper that the old till had slowly spit up down onto a green and brass receipt spike on the counter. “You probably saw her in here a couple times.”
“Any other questions?” asked Gisela.
“I already told you! That Mr. Farris guy bruised your hand and you spat a hole into his face, and I want to know what’s going on,” Vish said. He sounded whiny, and he knew it. Stooping to pet the cat, he lowered his face to hide his expression and was thankful that he couldn’t blush visibly unless he was straight-up humiliated, not just a bit embarrassed.
Gisela poked the cat’s rump with the tip of an enormous Doc Marten lace-up boot, then lowered her recently injured hand into Vish’s field of vision. The skin that had the thumbprint seared into it was pristine, just as it was when she silenced Mr. Farris with it. The only marks on her palm were the ones that were supposed to tell her future. Vish took her hand to look at it more closely, to make sure that there was nothing left of the raised red mark Farris had left, and only realized what he was doing when Gisela laughed. Vish dropped the hand.
“No need to get mad, Vish,” Agastya said. “Gisela’s used to keeping secrets because it’s what we’ve been doing for a very long time. And we had to make sure that you really wanted to know. Because it wouldn’t be fair for me to invite you into this unless it was your decision.”
“What happened to being on a deadline?” Gisela asked. “I would think the time for polite invitations was over.”
“Is this deadline the fortnight thing Farris was saying? The two weeks?” Vish asked. Gisela glanced at him and away without answering, which made Vish feel quite small.
“Yeah. The two weeks, Vish. Being on a schedule doesn’t mean we’re going to be forcing anyone to do anything, Gisela,” Agastya said, but he didn’t look at her when he said it. He nodded at Vish, trying to reassure.
A set of footsteps clicked by just above their heads, and Vish looked up. The sound stopped. It didn’t sound like a cat, unless it was one with paws that were mostly claw. Moby brushed by Vish’s calves and he leaned down to pet him for a second.
“Let’s go for a chat,” Agastya said.
Chapter 5
Agastya locked up the store again, this time with the three of them on the outside. Moby watched them through the glass door, posting indifferent guard while Agastya fooled with the keys.
“That cat’s got almost as much white as grey in his fur,” Vish said, then pointed at the store’s sign.
“So we should call the store ‘Greyandwhitepatchescat Books’? They teach marketing in junior high now?” Agastya said.
“I’m in high school. Well, I will be this year. The place I went to on the Island was a weird academy thing that taught all the grades.”
“Vish was just making an observation. A correct one,” Gisela said.
“Isla picked the name,” Agastya said, finally getting the door locked.
“Aren’t you worried that guy is still right here? Waiting for you?” Vish asked.
“He can’t touch me,” Agastya said. “Literally. Farris and everything he’s carrying around would minus himself from existence if he tried anything more than his fingerprinting trick on Gisela or me, or so I think. So he thinks too, and he isn’t going to risk seeing if it’s bull.”
“What do you mean, ‘everything he’s carrying around’?”
“We’ll get to that, Vish. Come on, let’s get ice cream and go to that park off Clement.”
“You’re too old for ice cream,” Gisela said.
“You look too young to be judging me, but that does hurt my feelings,” Agastya answered. Vish was legitimately no longer sure if the shared story these two were caught up in — death threats, spitting holes in people — was a coded explanation of some sort of crime ring, or if they were both just crazy. They seemed to banter like friends, not master criminals. In fact, they spoke to each other the way Vish wanted to speak to friends he didn’t have yet. And since he’d seen a gap in reality open up in that creepy man’s face in Greycat Books, he already had something in common with these two, even if it was just a loosening grip on sanity.
There was a miraculous break in the lineup traffic at Old Single’s, the ice cream shop. Vish ordered chocolate chip cookie dough. Gisela got coffee and Agastya took vanilla, paying for it all. He also asked for a clear plastic cup, a big one, if they had it. The kid doing the scooping nodded and called the request to two older teenagers who were talking near the soda machine.
“I wouldn’t be telling you anything if you’d ordered black cherry or tiger stripe or something like that,” Agastya said. “Cookie dough is borderline.”
“Too many flavours at once,” Gisela said.
“It’s not,” Vish said. “Cookie dough is one flavour.”
“Anything with chocolate chips in it is another flavour plus chocolate. Two, and two is too many,” Gisela said. Vish didn’t recognize the kid who had scooped their flavours, but the girl at the register, in her paper hat and apron, was Melissa Lyall, whose father had always tried to get Dr. Maurya to join the country club before the rumours started. Melissa had beaten him in the MathCounts local competition at the end of sixth grade, which was also the last year that Vish was better at math than he was at English. Melissa wasn’t looking at Vish, but he had seen her notice him, recognize that this was someone she knew two years ago. He knew she was listening to him talk to Gisela. He imagined she was impressed.
“Did you know that girl?” Gisela asked outside.
“Kind of,” Vish said. He did a perimeter lick of his cone with his tongue to seal off drips, then started pulling out chunks of cookie dough from the scoop with his teeth. Old Single’s used high-quality stuff, and Vish could taste the bitterness of the dark chocolate before he dispelled it with a bite of dough. It really was two flavours, he had to admit.
“She was spying on you, clearly. Were you trying to show off that you had cool new friends?” Agastya said, striding in front of them toward the tiny park that wasn’t far from KSS, the high school where Vish would be immured for the next three years. Vish knew that Agastya was making the kind of joke people make as friendly small talk — he’d seen it a thousand times on TV — but he was still embarrassed. Gisela had the kindness not to turn to face Vish as his body and face superheated to the point he was sure that not just the ice cream but the waffle cone was going to dissolve in his hand.
“Nah, she wasn’t spying. Everyone here knows each other, so there is no privacy. That’s how it works. And even if I’m cool and new, you’re neither, especially in the ice cream place, Agastya,” Gisela said. She had to put on an American accent for nah to sound right, and she did.
Agastya led them past a senior living building, a tall complex that had ads on television full of elderly white people having “the time of their lives” in pastel rooms full of pastel food. Their smiles did look authentic, and Vish’s mom used to tell him that she wouldn’t mind living there when it was time for him to abandon her. Dr. Maurya hadn’t figured into Anji’s conversations about the future, not in the last year or so that Vish was at home.
Agastya pointed to a small wooden bridge that went over a creek — the opening to the bridge was barely visible through an overgrown hedge, but the clear grassland was visible on the other side. Agastya stooped and they followed him.
“Here I thought you just wanted a prettier setting for storytime,” Gisela said. She pushed a branch aside, letting it go as she passed. It whipped back and flicked Vish’s ear. He winced, and Gisela turned and whispered an apology.
“Running water,” Agastya said. “Any time you see Mr. Farris, that instinct you have to wash your hands is a good one to follow through on. And you want to go further than that. Unpleasant little beings like him hate crossing streams.”
When they got across the bridge, Agastya walked down to the banks of the creek and filled the large plastic cup he’d gotten with water. He held it up to the sunlight, smiled, then showed it to Gisela. She didn’t smile back.
“I’ve told you at least fifty times. That’s a folk superstition,” Gisela said. “Farris can’t get into the lake, but that’s different. There’s logic to it.”
“Isla liked the folk tale stuff. Said anything that wasn’t disproven couldn’t hurt when it comes to warding off a nachzehrer keeper,” Agastya said.
“What?” Vish said. On that one strange word, Agastya had sounded more German than Gisela.
“Nach-zeh-rer. Sorry, you have to put on the accent for it to sound like anything at all. You’re about to find out.”
“This creek might protect us from Farris for another reason, anyway,” Gisela said. “You should have seen his skin, Agastya. He probably can’t even take a bath anymore, or stand in a hard wind. That shell is falling apart.”
“Nachzehrer,” Vish said. “Is Farris a nachzehrer?”
Agastya and Gisela turned to look at him.
“Good pronunciation for a first try,” Gisela said. “No. Farris collects and, sort of, holds nachzehrers. Stores them.”
Vish took an assertive lick of his ice cream and Agastya laughed. Vish hadn’t meant to be funny, but felt the little thrill that comes from making an adult laugh. They walked farther into the little park, which was empty, save for some empty Capri Sun drink pouches and a few beer cans. Gisela tsked and started kicking all the trash together into a little pile, encouraging it closer to the garbage can in the centre of the circular patch of grass. Vish, not quite running, came up to her and picked the stuff up to throw it in the metal basket, holding the last of his ice cream cone well away from the dirty work. He walked over to the water fountain to rinse off his left hand.
“Heartwarming,” said Agastya, eating the tip of his waffle cone. He set the plastic cup full of creek water carefully down on a flat part of the grass. “I knew you were a dutiful type, Vish. I remember when you started coming into the store. I’ve been waiting for you to come back for a while, you know. Did you feel a real urge to come this morning? Gisela and I have been hoping you’d pop up for all of last week.”
“Not just hoping,” Gisela said. “If you hadn’t come in today, one of us would have had to come and get you.”
Vish, still facing the trash can, kept looking into it as he thought about what he’d just heard. He wondered if he’d made an incredibly stupid decision walking to this park with these people, these near-strangers. In an episode of Oprah he’d seen with his mom a few years ago, a cop or FBI guy talking about the dangers lurking everywhere outside your house had said at least eight times that you never “go to the second location” with a kidnapper, that you do everything to stay put and scream and be heard. This park was beginning to feel a lot like the second location, even if it was technically less private than the locked bookstore had been.
“The kid’s body language really screams,” Agastya said. “Coiled terror, in this case.”
“Shut up,” Gisela said. She had walked the perimeter of the park and was now standing on the other side of the garbage can, a few feet away from Vish. “Hey. Look at me. No one’s going to hurt you. You’re fine. We just need help, from someone, and that someone could be you.”
“Okay,” Vish said. Turning, he saw that Agastya was looking up at the sun, shading his eyes. The jokey tone in his voice hadn’t made it onto his face. The older man looked miserable and lost.
“Let’s sit,” Gisela said.
They all did, in a spaced-out triangle, cross-legged. Vish checked his Casio: he had an hour left before he had to meet his father. Agastya spoke.
“I was waiting for you because I knew you were going to be a part of this, Vish, from the moment I saw you. I knew that moment would come in the store, where Farris was going to encounter you and ask if you were my family. And I knew that no matter what you said, he was going to think we were related, and that is exactly what I need him to believe. My wife — Isla — she told me something like this would happen, that the brown kid who came into the store would return and be important, but she just couldn’t see the exact shape of it,” Agastya said. The sadness on his face had dissolved now that he was speaking with purpose, but there was some dried vanilla ice cream in the stubble to the left of his mouth.
There wasn’t much cover from the sun in the park, and the heat was magnified by Vish’s nervousness. Agastya was sweating, beads of it visible at his collarbones. Gisela brushed some of the glisten off her upper lip with the back of her hand. The back of Vish’s shirt was completely soaked. He felt like he was inside one of the mossy terrariums Mrs. Schuyler had gotten them to make in the sixth grade, under an invisible dome that sharpened the light and raised the temperature.
“So you think the occult is bull, but you believe running water kills creepy men and that you and your wife are psychic,” Vish said, grabbing a handful of grass and rolling it back and forth between his fingers. He couldn’t say anything remotely tough while making eye contact and doing nothing with his hands; he knew this about himself.
“I said that occult books are bull. What is real is that we’re at a place and time that is packed with more magical potential of the bad kind than any place or time for the past eight hundred years. If you hadn’t come back from that fancy private school, you might have missed it.”
“That might have been okay with me.”
“This valley, this lake, in this dry and hot summer, is the place that Mr. Farris has been searching for since he did his first apprentice magic, a long time ago, when he was all human. It’s what he promised every dying person that he collected over —”
“One thousand eight hundred and forty-three years,” Gisela said, not too loudly, but very precisely. Vish ignored the number so he could keep concentrating on what Agastya was saying without his brain boiling over.
“Mr. Farris has been following my wife’s trail, and since she died, my trail, for years. Isla knew he was getting close, to her and to what Farris knew she was guarding. But with her gone, the magic she put in place to keep what Farris was looking for obscured — it’s gone.”
“And I wasn’t strong enough, or fast enough, to build those defences again,” Gisela said, leaning into the circle.
Vish decided to put aside the disbelief portion of his reaction in order to continue the conversation.
“What is it that Farris is looking for?”
“Gisela?” Agastya said. “You want to take this one?”
