Orpheus and the Pearl & Nevermore (12 page)

He moved after her at a runner’s pace, but
he felt like he was slogging through mud. Maybe he was relying too
much on his orientation on the physical plane, maybe he could
travel at the speed of thought if he only knew how, but he didn’t.
So he chased Bonnie’s car and when it accelerated from sight, he
followed the streets he used to walk when he was alive.

He saw Bonnie’s car, parked and empty, and
slowed as he approached the entrance to Leo’s building. It had been
weeks since he’d seen Leo, heard his voice, or even read his words.
And Leo would never see him again. So, then. No awkward overtures,
not even a last shouting match. The matter was finished. Malcolm
didn’t know how to feel about that. He wasn’t sure that the living
could have arranged a more satisfying resolution.

He went in. Leo’s place was on the first
floor, last door on the right. It was closed. Malcolm passed
through.

Same old place. Same magazines piled on the
couch cushion nearest the door, same big blue candle sitting unlit
on the kitchen counter. He tried to imagine that familiar old smell
and found he couldn’t.

Voices from the
back.
Malcolm went down the
hall.

Bonnie was in Leo’s room.
She was in his face, screaming as he stood against a half-tilted
desk chair, as if he’d been roused from work by her screaming.
“What happened?
TELL
ME!
”

“
I don’t know what you’re
talking about! Calm the hell down!”

“
He told
me!” Bonnie’s voice was ragged. She was crying again. “He
told
me! Now you can be
a friend, and talk to me, or I can take you in and you can fucking
talk to them!”

She grabbed Leo’s wrist. He jerked away. His
ankle caught the leg of the chair and he fell against the wall.
Pages from a wall calendar tore away under his shoulder. “Bonnie! I
can’t talk to you until you talk to me! What happened to Ray? Is
Malcolm all right?”

“
I don’t know where
Malcolm is,” she snapped. “Maybe you do.”

Malcolm was almost between
them now, trying to think of something, anything, to let them
know:
I’m here!

“
I don’t
know
anything!
”
He wormed along the wall as she grabbed handfuls of his sweater.
“You’re crazy,” he breathed.

“
What?”
She reached into her jacket.
Leo tried to shove past her. She knocked him back, into the window
blinds, with a crash. His face flushed, and his hand closed into a
fist. For a second, Bonnie’s eyes widened.

The cadaver’s arms plowed
through the blinds with a shriek of glass, wrapping around Leo’s
chest, jerking him back into—
through
—the window. Glass crunched
and spilled onto the carpet as the blinds were warped out of shape.
The dead man’s head pushed through, blood dribbling from its
lipless mouth. Bonnie stood frozen as she watched Leo being pulled
out in a tangle of vinyl and flesh.

Light and sound surrounded Malcolm, and he
lost sight of Leo’s sneakers as they kicked in the air. He felt
like he was being swept away by a funeral dirge. Vaguely, he picked
out the front door banging open. Voices, again, this time Bonnie
and someone else.

Saul!

Malcolm focused in and saw the man cradling
Bonnie, turning her away from the window. “It took him?” Saul
barked. “It took him? Alive?”

“
I don’t know!” Bonnie
sobbed.

“
It’s all right.” He held
her against his chest.

“
How did you know?” Her
sobbing was muffled now. Malcolm stared into Saul’s eyes, and Saul
stared back.

“
I followed him,” Saul
said. “He killed Jean last night. And Ray.”

“
Was it…”

“
It was Malcolm,” Saul
said, still looking at the ghost.

What are you doing?
Malcolm cried.

“
Malcolm? It looked like
him. A little. But why?”

“
It
would be best if I took it from here,” Saul said. His gaze held
nothing but contempt. It seemed to say to Malcolm,
Why do you still believe in
people?

Malcolm, it seemed, had overlooked the
obvious yet again.

He watched without feeling as his murderer
ushered Bonnie from the room. “I’m going with you,” she was saying.
“Whatever’s going on, whatever you’re going to do, I’m going with
you. Ray spoke to me.”

She sounded just like poor Jean—so hopeful,
so excited to finally have had a haunting of her very own. As if
there were really any answers, any comfort in the knowledge of
spirits. It only meant that miserable existence didn’t end with
death.

Malcolm cast himself after them. Saul was
glancing over his shoulder as he took Bonnie to the front door. “We
should go alone,” he said, eyes fixed on Malcolm. “Very bad things
could happen if we didn’t.”

Malcolm stopped.
Who is he threatening? Is he going to hurt her?
Leo, his lover?

“
Good,” Saul said, and he
and Bonnie left.

Who had Saul followed—Malcolm or the cadaver? He’d
shadowed the ghost, most likely; would have been far safer, and
both inevitably ended up in the same place anyway. Malcolm had
taken the thing off autopilot again when he returned to
consciousness that morning, and had led it to Leo, bringing his
worst fears to fruition. Only now it was so much worse.

He turned from the front
door and went back to the bedroom window. There was a small lawn in
the back of the building. Beyond a chain-link fence, the lawn
sloped downward into what looked like a drainage ditch. Beyond
that, a dense spread of trees. Malcolm passed through the wall and
went to the fence. The ditch had a small river of rainwater in it,
flowing into a large concrete pipe with an iron grate. There were
holes in the fence. The cadaver could have gone down there to
feed
.

Malcolm went through the
fence and to the edge of the water. No sign of the cadaver or Leo.
Again he looked at the big pipe. From this angle he could see that
the iron grate was actually partially loose, pried away from the
opening. He moved into the water, for just a second he expected to
splash down and encounter icy resistance. There was none, and he
cast himself forth. The rushing water caught the ectoplasm, and he
was wrenched violently forward.
Jesus!
The ectoplasm broke apart,
and he was in the middle of the ditch, barely atop the
water.
Okay. Careful now. Don’t cast too
far.
He didn’t want to be sucked right
past them, if they were in the pipe.

Into the darkness. Sound cascading off the
concrete walls. Malcolm focused himself forward. He didn’t see
them, not yet. He wondered what Saul’s intentions were. It didn’t
seem like he could track the cadaver without the ghost’s help.

Unless he can track Leo.

Who knew what Saul was
capable of? All those weird jars of color in his kitchen. Yellow
Sign, Red Death. He’d taken the Red Death with him.
Why?
Did I ever known
the real Saul?
It didn’t seem that the
mentor he’d yearned for was ever there. Not for him, anyway. For
Leo, yes.

Don’t think about Leo.
Don’t get angry.
He saw light streaming
into the tunnel from fissures in the ceiling, through which dangled
soggy strands of blanched grass. The morning light struck through a
brownish haze in the tunnel, and Malcolm became aware of how dark
the water was down here. Tendrils of other fluids snaked along the
surface, oily, foul-looking stuff. It swam around the edges of a
concrete partition that looked half-finished. Lengths of rebar
jutted out from it, and Malcolm saw something caught on one of
them. It was a ragged thing, like snakeskin, blood gleaming on its
surface. It was cadaver-skin.

Malcolm passed through the partition and
into a new tunnel, this one stained and splattered with waste. He
realized where he was. This was part of the defunct storm-water
system that led to Old Valley Municipal. There was evidence of the
private developer’s half-hearted attempts to seal it off, but sure
enough, it was the new system that had led Malcolm here. Ray
wouldn’t have had any trouble winning this one. The water was black
with whatever the developer was dumping. Another tunnel branched
off from it, sloping upward toward the surface. Malcolm ascended
it, as he assumed the cadaver had, and emerged from a hole in the
middle of the woods.

The drizzle had subsided,
though the sky was still suffused with gray. He saw the remnants of
the old treatment plant through the trees. He heard a distant that
may have been the cry of a bird, or a man.
Leo’s alive. It wants him, just like I did.

Brown pools dotted the ground surrounding
the plant. Above-ground tanks and pumping stations, threaded with
dense pipe-works and unhealthy-looking vines, rose from the spoiled
earth. Malcolm listened intently. He heard another cry, and saw a
large black bird sitting atop one of the tanks. It looked directly
at him and shrieked. When he drew closer, it lit into the air and
was gone.

A metal door in the side of the tank lay
open. Malcolm entered into its shadows. Water dripping noisily from
the ceiling inside. He could make out a steel walkway, going over a
pool that must have been used to remove sediment. It was half-f
of gray water gone black.

Malcolm crossed the walkway. A door on the
opposite side led into a narrow stairwell, which led him below
ground again. He entered an unlit corridor, he was barely able to
make out any detail from the light trickling down the stairs.
Unable to feel the floor or walls, he almost felt lost in a
limitless void—until he heard Saul’s voice bouncing down the
hall.

A flashlight’s beam cut through the darkness
some yards away. Malcolm moved to the wall, slipping partway into
its steel-and-earth structure to conceal himself, as Saul and
Bonnie searched the corridor. Bonnie tried a door while Saul
consulted a control box in the opposite wall. A second later,
buzzing lights flickered to life on the ceiling.

Bonnie jiggled the handle on the door. “Look
at the floor.” She pointed out a set of damp prints with her gun.
“They went in here.” She brought the butt of the gun down on the
handle and wrenched the door open with a groan. “Down again.”

“
Let me go
first.”

“
Saul, what the hell is
going on?”

“
Malcolm…” Saul cocked his
head. He glanced subtly to a side, and he saw the ghost.

“
He is beyond help, that’s
all I know.” He stepped back, allowing Bonnie to take point. When
she went through the door, Saul turned to Malcolm, and the ghost
swept into his face. Saul showed no fear. “I lied. I can help you,
and I will. You’ll be at pace.”

WHAT DID YOU DO?

“
It wasn’t my fault,” Saul
sighed. “I knew Jean was going to slip you Yellow Sign at the Arms.
I didn’t need any spirit guides to tell me, it was his nature. He
didn’t know about Leo and I. Poor Jean, always wanting to be
involved.

“
So I brought a little Red
Death. I put it in your drink before he added the Sign. It tastes
sweet, and goes down like silk. It doesn’t feel like what it is. I
gave you just the right amount, but he must have used too little
Sign for them to fuse properly.”

WHAT DID YOU DO?
Malcolm’s senses were wavering. Saul knew it,
too, his calm was causing Malcolm to come unhinged all the
quicker.

“
Yellow Sign clears and
focuses the third eye. Red Death corrodes it. A cocktail unknown to
western doctors and detectives alike. You should have been drawn
out completely when their combined effects overtook you, but you’re
still tethered to the cadaver, snagged on some bit of temporal
filth on that lens.

“
I can’t pull you free
now. And it obviously can’t pull you back in. I think the poor
thing’s just an empty vessel seeking substance. Nature abhors a
vacuum, we remember.” Reaching into the pockets of his coat, he
produced a pair of hypodermic syringes, each filled with what could
only be Red Death. “Two more doses ought to kill the brain for
good.”

What will happen to me?

“
Truthfully, I don’t
know,” Saul said. “And, really, I don’t care.”

Malcolm had only his words
at this point, he could no more stand in Saul’s path than he could
knock the son of a bitch out. So he spoke.
He still loves me. That’s why you did it.

Saul laughed, but the laugh was a lie.

Maybe he never loved you, Saul. Maybe it was
all magic and potions.

“
No!”

Then it was manipulation. You’ve made it
your life’s work. You’re a monster.

“
I’ll kill you!” Saul
screamed.

Bonnie called his name
from the darkness. He stiffened. “I’ll kill
him
,” he snarled. “And her. I swear
it.”

Then it was Bonnie who screamed.

Saul’s threats vanished as his eyes widened
and he whispered, “Leo!”

He raced through the door.
Malcolm tore after him, through a waste-splattered passage that
sloped and twisted downward, beneath lights that flickered and
popped excitedly. Saul slipped and crashed against the wall.
Malcolm shot past him, casting himself forward as quickly as he
could.
Leo!