The Bone Triangle (14 page)

After getting to know him better, I’d learned that Gilling had a number of hidden objects, one of them being a collection of old books. He liked to read from them when he created new rips in space, like some medieval sorcerer. The books contained old French poetry, and he had always said reading them helped him concentrate. I’d suspected he liked the atmosphere it created—he was quite a showman.

Unlike any of the other artifacts I’d met up with, these two books were connected somehow. The books were identical copies of
The Flowers of Evil
, a book of poems by Charles Baudelaire, published in 1857. They could be physically separated, but any action performed on one book affected the other. Therefore, when I picked up the volume from a high shelf on the dusty, empty wine rack and opened it, I knew its companion volume was opening wherever it was at this moment.

These two books intrigued me for several reasons. First, because as far as I knew, they were the only artifact that operated as a single entity, despite the fact the two books were physically separated. All the other artifacts were a whole piece that could not be torn apart by any known force. I’d tried to shoot holes in them, burn them, clip pieces off with wire cutters, and more. But I’d never managed to do so much as scar an artifact of power. I’d even used the technique to prove that a given artifact
had
power, even if I didn’t know what the power might be. If a piece of paper didn’t burn, for example, I knew it had some hidden secret ability.

“Another impressive thing about the books is the fact that the link between them seems to transcend any distance,” I told Jacqueline. “Even if you step through a rip and page through one of the books while standing under the light of an alien sun, the book’s twin will page right along with yours. As far as I know, they are the only means of communication between two different worlds.”

It took a few minutes to explain all this to Jacqueline, who looked at me and the book with wide, excited eyes. She kept watching it, as if expecting it to shower her with sparks or something.

“You mean when you open one, it opens the other? When you leaf through the pages, the pages of the second
book move by themselves, as if ghostly fingers are touching them. Freaky! I want to see it work.”

I took the book down from its shelf then, handling it gingerly. Somehow, the idea that it might start struggling with me of its own accord had always creeped me out a bit. I didn’t really like using it. I’d once handled a large black scorpion with my bare hands at a zoo. The book felt like that to me—like a living, dangerous thing that had a mind of its own.

“Well?” she demanded, her voice hushed but full of excitement. “Are you going to do it or not? Open that thing up and start paging!”

I opened the book and paged to the first poem. Jacqueline watched with shining eyes.

“It’s not doing anything,” she said in immediate disappointment. “What’s it supposed to do? Do you just riffle the pages until someone notices?”

I shrugged. “I guess that could work, actually. But we have a system. If I open the book to the first poem, it signals him that I want to talk. In practice, he usually comes to visit after that.”

“Oh, really? How dull.”

“Well, we have a system worked out in case he can’t communicate in a normal fashion,” I said. “Either of us can leaf to various passages. The page displayed will show a word or a message. Usually, the title of the poem on a given page provides the meaning.”

She stared at the book for several seconds. She stepped closer, and her breath puffed on my fingers. I found her proximity pleasantly distracting.

“It’s not doing anything,” she said in a husky whisper, still staring at the book. “Oh, there it goes! That’s
so
freaky.”

My eyes had wandered from the book to her hair, which had many stray strands I found entrancing. I snapped my
attention back to the book. It shivered and squirmed in my hands.

It was the oddest sensation to hold something that should not be capable of movement, but which writhed gently in one’s hands. I could feel the stroke of invisible fingers on the pages.

I tried to ignore the tingle in my palms and the sensation of superstitious dread that crawled over the back of my neck. I behaved coolly, although I had the strong desire to toss the book on the floor. Moving the book as a whole had no effect on its twin. Only bending it, opening it, or leafing through it was mirrored by the state of the other.

To my surprise, the book did not open to the first page of the first poem. That would have been a simple acknowledgment, indicating that Gilling was going to call or come to see me. Instead, the book flipped through half the pages of its volume before coming to rest, displaying a poem that was at first unfamiliar to me.

“What’s he saying?” Jacqueline demanded excitedly.

“Um,
Causerie
,” I said, reading the poem’s French title. “It means ‘conversation.’ He wants to talk using the book.”

“Why? Is he in some kind of trouble?”

“Hold on, the pages are flipping again.”

Jacqueline lifted a hand and let the pages riffle past her fingertips. She laughed delightedly.

I watched the pages closely.
Causerie
was in the middle of the book, but now we were moving quickly toward the front. It finally stopped at
Don Juan aux enfers
.

“Don Juan?” Jacqueline asked in confusion.

“Yes. ‘Don Juan in the Inferno’—in hell. It means he’s in trouble.”

It was my turn to flip pages, as the book was still now. I paged to
Le Vin du solitaire
, “The Wine of the Solitary Man,” as way of asking if he was alone.

He flipped to
Sépulture
. I frowned in worry.

“Something’s wrong?” Jacqueline asked.

“Definitely. This poem is about the death of a cursed poet. He’s indicating he’s in a prison of some kind, in deadly danger.”

“We should go help him.”

“But how? We are off the grid with this book now, as I’ve never tried to have a full conversation with the books. We talked about it as a possibility, and came up with a few signals, but it is hardly a perfect medium for exchanging information.”

“Let’s tell him we’ll come help,” she said.

“I don’t know how. None of these poems are about hope of rescue.”

“Let me see,” she said.

I gave the book to her with some reluctance. She paged through it, back to the poem about Don Juan’s plight. “Here, right at the top of this page. Let’s try this.”

I read the English translation of the passage:

            
A great stone man in armor leaped aboard;

            
Seizing the helm, the coal-black wave he cleft.

            
But the hero unmoved, leaning on his sword,

            
Kept gazing at the wake and deigned not look aside.

I eyed her critically. “What are you trying to say?”

She smiled. “That we’re coming to help him, and he shouldn’t worry.”

I grunted. I liked the sentiment, but I wasn’t sure exactly how I was going to pull off this miracle.

After a while, the book stopped sending us messages. We tried a few more things, but got no response. Worried, I pulled out my cell phone and began doing some much more mundane communicating: I called Gilling’s friends. They’d always been easier to find than he was. Abigail told me he’d vanished several nights ago. I realized that was the night the cat-lady had visited me at my house. I nodded thoughtfully. Meng wasn’t Gilling’s friend. He’d been my ally in the past, and she knew it. She might want to kill him almost as badly as she wanted to get rid of me.

I was getting angry. It was one thing for Meng to send her mind-slaves after me, seeking revenge. I’d expected that for a long time. But it was now clear she planned to make a clean sweep of it and erase any rogue she didn’t like. This amounted to a war on our kind.

“What are you going to do?” Jacqueline asked after I explained the situation to her.

“I’m not going to sit around and wait for her next brainwashed killer.”

“I bet she’s behind the monster in the Triangle, too,” she said.

“I don’t know about that. Whatever it is, it seems to be eating people at random. Besides, that’s not her power. She influences minds. She doesn’t summon interdimensional monsters. At least as far as I know, she doesn’t.”

“Who else should we call for help?”

I thought about it. He was trapped in another world. Maybe Meng had sent an assassin after him. Gilling was resourceful, but he wasn’t a fighter. His primary power was the ability to switch worlds, and he’d probably done so in a hurry to escape. Maybe he was stuck out there, in some other place.

“Wait a second,” I said, standing up and beginning to pace. “He said he was in hell. Historically, that’s a hot place to be.”

“Not if you talk to the Vikings,” she said with a half smile.

“I’m guessing he means he’s in a hot place somewhere. He’s trapped there. Rostok told me to look for a hot world, to use a rip to search for places where Ezzie might have gone.”

“Ezzie?”

I took a moment to explain again about Ezzie, the wandering lava-creature that had burned my Berber carpet into a charcoal slag.

“Oh yeah, that thing. You think Gilling and this rock slug are in the same place?”

I shook my head. “No way to tell. But I need to follow up on a suggestion I received from Rostok. I’m going to have to talk to McKesson about it.”

I’d been avoiding this, I realized. McKesson bothered me. His goals always came first, above the needs of all others.
I doubted he’d save my life if it made things difficult for him in some way. With all that said, he was the best at what he did: keeping the monsters out of our world. For years, he’d doggedly policed the fractured border between Las Vegas and all the horrors that tried to break in. If someone from our side was helping others move back and forth across his border, he’d want to know about it, and he’d take action.

I picked up my cell, waved for Jacqueline to stay quiet, and called the detective. He answered on the second ring.

“About time you called me. You’ve got a new phone, don’t you?”

I admitted that I had made a switch. I did so periodically, in order to keep the bill collectors’ databases guessing.

“So, what’s up?” he asked. “Are you in a murdering mood again tonight?”

“What are you talking about?”

“That dead guy in the Triangle. You shot him, didn’t you?”

I hesitated. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Sure. Sure, you don’t. Same old Draith. I knew as soon as the report came back from forensics it was you. Who else carries around a rare .32 pistol like he’s some kind of secret agent, and likes to pop holes in fat accountants with it?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. But out of curiosity—did the accountant live?”

“Barely. Why did he come after you?”

“Because Meng doesn’t like me.”

McKesson laughed, then told me he’d already figured out Meng was involved. “Give me something else,” he said. “Something I don’t know.”

“All right, I think she’s trying to kill Gilling, too. And she’s pulling things into town from other worlds to do it. She might even be behind the monster that’s eating people
in the Triangle. I haven’t figured that one out yet, but she’s my top suspect.”

“Why have you been hanging around the Triangle so much lately?” McKesson asked. “Thinking about moving into the neighborhood?”

I glanced over at Jacqueline. She was the reason, of course. First, I’d been looking for her. After that, I’d been dragged there to look at her shoe collection. I certainly didn’t want to admit to that, however. It was embarrassing.

“Hardly,” I said. “But I have made some new acquaintances there.”

“She’s with you, isn’t she? The girl with the shoes?”

“Forget about her. Let’s talk about Meng.”

“I’m on my way.”

I narrowed my eyes. “How would you know where I am?”

McKesson chuckled. “You’ve been on long enough. The cell towers and a gizmo in my car have you pinpointed in Henderson. You’re at home, and I’ve got your number now.”

I hung up and cursed. “He’s coming. That’s exactly why I don’t like calling on him. You can’t control a conversation with McKesson. He’ll take it his way every time.”

“Should we run?” she asked.

I shook my head slowly. “I’ll answer the door when he shows up. You vanish, and hang around. He doesn’t know about your little trick yet.”

“Don’t tell him, okay?” she asked. “He makes me nervous.”

“You’re probably right to feel that way,” I admitted. “He can probably find you again—if anyone could.”

The doorbell chimed precisely twelve minutes later. It was just after midnight when McKesson crossed the threshold into my house.

“Nice night, Detective.”

“Yeah. Not like a few days ago; that was a boiler.”

I nodded.

McKesson stalked into the house, his head swiveling this way and that. He was taking in everything, I could tell. He spotted a long-tailed cat sauntering out of the kitchen to see who had arrived.