The Bone Triangle (39 page)

“You would have assumed it was a trick and would not have come.”

I had to admit that what she said was true, but I wasn’t at all interested in helping this woman. “Your Beast has killed my friends and innocent citizens all over town. Are you out of your mind?”

“
My
Beast? Hardly,” she said. “The Beast serves no one. It can be baited and teased, at the peril of one’s life, but it can’t be controlled.”

“Then why are you toying with it?” I demanded. I picked up a rattling handful of parchment and tossed it on the floor. “It’s obvious you’re trying to call it, or talk to it, or whatever. You don’t deny that, do you?”

She shook her head. “No, Quentin. But your hatred for me has blinded you. I understand somewhat, as I once used you as a tool. But please hear me out. I need your help now more than ever. You were the best agent I ever had.”

I snorted. “You’re mad,” I said. “I won’t help you. And you don’t have the power to force me. I think you’re obsessed with me, and it can only end up with one of us being dead. I suggest you forget about me, and we can both live to see another day.”

She shook her head sadly. “But we can’t,” she said. “The Beast won’t allow it. The attacks are growing bolder—you admit that, don’t you?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Have you thought about how they are going to end? Have you considered how strong the Beast may be?”

I thought about it. “It’s a monster in a pocket universe. It can reach through and eat a few people. That’s horrible, I admit, but there are a few million citizens in this town. Surely we can arm and fight it.”

“We could try that,” she admitted. “But thousands of lives could be lost. The Beast would attack the city if we failed.”

“Wouldn’t it be just as pissed if I go in there and try to assassinate it?”

She shrugged. “Not if it kills you. One failed man is a meal to the Beast. An army, if it fails, would increase the level of the attacks. You would have a devastated city and a lot of dead soldiers on your conscience.”

“Not
my
conscience. I didn’t summon this plague.”

“Neither did I,” she said firmly. “Another factor to consider is our deal with the government. Calling for a large armed force would break our arrangement with them.”

I opened my mouth to say
so what
, but stopped. I nodded slowly.

“I see,” I said. “You can’t allow the government to step in. You can’t allow riot squads, tanks, or armies of scientists in hazard suits roaming the streets, quarantining the place. Because then you would have failed to keep a lid on the freaky stuff in this town. Have they threatened you with—eviction?”

“Something like that.”

I was beginning to understand how strong her motivation was. If she left the sanatorium, she’d age instantly. It would be a death sentence.

“Why do you need
my
help?” I asked.

“You’re strong, unafraid, and you’ve already survived one trip into the Beast’s den.”

“You’re wrong about the unafraid part,” I said. “I was terrified. The monster has some kind of aura. It projects a feeling of dread that is overwhelming.”

Dr. Meng nodded quickly. “I can fix that, if you want me to.” She lifted a hand, and I saw the ornament was there, like a scalpel hidden in her palm.

I realized after an instant what she meant and took a step backward. “Ha! I’m not going to allow you to touch my mind again. Not even for a good cause.”

“Are you sure about that?”

“What do you mean?”

“I’m talking about the payment for your services. I can return your mind for you—your memories. I can make you whole again.”

I felt a rush of emotion.
My memories.
I’d lived without a past for months now, maybe years. I often lay awake at night, missing my past, trying to remember that which had been erased. It was like searching for something you had in your hands a moment ago—and never finding it. Faced with her offer to return my past, I felt the loss more than usual. Meng was the only person I knew of who could possibly fix the part of me that had been broken.

“What would I have to do?” I heard myself ask.

“We can transport you into the Beast’s lair. We can get you to the heart of it.”

I narrowed my eyes. “You mean, you can send me to the
real
Beast? Not just some tunnel full of tentacles and guardians?”

“Exactly. That’s what we’ve been working on here.”

I looked around at the parchments, the slack-looking Gilling, and the empty desks. I shook my head. “I’ve been meaning to ask you about all this. Where are the patients I saw here a while ago, scribbling?”

She took a deep breath and let it out. “They’re gone. The Beast’s universe is large, and we’ve been probing it.”

I stared at her, then toward Gilling and the chalkboard. “I think I get it now. You are a bigger monster than the Beast itself. You’ve been using people to open pathways? Then sending them through into the Beast’s lair to find where you are? You used a whole room full of people in a failed experiment? Blindly spending lives to probe the Beast’s world?”

“I didn’t
send
them in!” Meng snarled. “We try to avoid its appendages—but we failed in this case. The Beast reached out and consumed them.”

I looked at the pushed apart desks, the fallen parchments. The Beast had reached into this room and snatched away the scribes? I glanced toward the door. I must have been busy talking to Gutter Jim and working on the sealed doors at the time.

Meng turned to Gilling, whose eyes fluttered.

“I can explain,” he said, coming to life.

It was faintly disgusting to see a man so used, so mistreated. He was a friend, and that only made things worse. Meng handled him with callous disregard, like a puppet or a hand tool.

“Please do,” I said to Gilling, mastering my emotions.

“You know that I have, as one of my gifts, the ability to open portals to other places, yes?”

I nodded.

“Well, the Beast’s lair isn’t like any other spot you and I have traveled to. It’s not a natural splinter of our world. It seems to be an artificial reality—a place purposefully designed to exist outside all normal universes. This makes it more difficult to navigate. It requires the best fuel, and a lot of focus from a group of participants to reach out to that faraway place.”

I stared at him for a moment. “I recall you saying that a rip between places is like a fire.”

He nodded excitedly. “And like all fires, it requires fuel. In this case,
organic
fuel.”

“Blood? You’re using blood again?”

He nodded.

“I don’t see a big puddle of blood here.”

“Ah-ha!” he said, becoming more animated by the moment. “The blood operates somewhat differently in this case. It functions to focus the minds of the cabal. I have a new methodology, you see.”

I frowned. “The gloves? The parchments? They were writing with blood?”

“Their own blood, to be precise,” Gilling said brightly.

“That explains the small knives,” I said. “What about the gloves?”

Gilling’s tongue snaked out and snapped back, and he looked a trifle apologetic. “Sometimes, in the throes of the casting, they become overzealous in their seeking of fresh ink.”

I thought about that for a second. “They cut off their own fingers, don’t they?”

He nodded. “Occasionally.”

I looked at Gilling’s own missing digit and felt disgusted. I was in the company of a pair of ghouls. I wondered if perhaps the parchment was made of human skin. I decided not to ask. If it was, and I’d been handling it, I was going to become sick.

I struggled to see the big picture. These two were engaging in the darkest of rituals, but for a greater good. Their failures had killed a few, but if they succeeded, they might save the lives of thousands. It was difficult to wrap my mind around the morality of the situation.

Staring at the chalkboard and the odd, five-sided shape there, my eye was captured again by the words written at the top.

Thias Amasma.

“Is this thing a demon?” I asked quietly.

The two frowned uncertainly. Meng spoke up first.

“Let’s stick to science and facts,” she said. “It is an aggressive, malevolent alien. It’s trapped in a small world, which
was possibly built to imprison it, and it occasionally reaches out to molest others and even devour them. That’s what we know for sure.”

I shrugged. The description seemed to match that of a demon in my book.

“One last thing,” I said. “What is the meaning of that phrase?”

I pointed to the scribbling, which was on every scrap of parchment, printed in blood.

“
Thias Amasma
?” Gilling asked. “Why, that’s the Beast’s name. We use it like an Internet address, to find its lair with our minds.”

I nodded, pretending that I understood. I hoped I never would fully comprehend what he was talking about.

“Will you do it?” Meng asked.

“You swear to help me do this, and to return my past to me if I do?”

Meng nodded solemnly.

“I’ll do it,” I heard myself say. “If only to stop your work here.”

The scribes began working again behind me. I turned and watched for a moment. They worked with renewed intensity, their long quills scratching on thick parchments.

While the preparations went on, I mulled over my own motives. Becoming Meng’s ally had been the last thing on my mind when I’d journeyed here. I’d never have believed it possible, and still doubted my sanity in accepting any kind of cooperative arrangement with her. It seemed a long way from planned assassination to reconciliation.

But the circumstances were complex. I knew what a threat the Beast was to my city. She’d pointed out what I had been ignoring: the attacks were becoming steadily worse. I could not deny that reality.

When I’d believed Meng was behind it all, my mission had been clear. I would kill her, and the Beast’s attacks would stop. No more assassinations, no more deaths like that of my newly found and lost friend, Cartoon.

I had to decide whom I hated most—or whom I feared most: Dr. Meng or
Thias Amasma
, the Beast in its dank lair.

In the end, I decided I hated the Beast more. After all, Meng had never tried to eat everyone in the Lucky Seven. What’s more, if I did do this, Meng and I could call off the feud between us. If I killed Meng instead, I would still have the Beast to deal with, and I would have solved only half my problems.

Then there was the matter of my memories. I burned at night sometimes, straining to remember. The glimpses of my past came only at random, however, and were always tantalizingly incomplete. I occasionally remembered a snatch of conversation, a colorful scene, or an unusual scent. Full memories were always phantoms, just beyond my reach, like dreams that once were vivid but faded away the more I tried to recall them.

To prepare for my mission, Gilling called down a fresh batch of patients. There was indeed a hidden passageway and a stairway behind it. Meng was nothing if not tricky. Even her building was full of secrets.

These new people, I could see, were victims injured at the Lucky Seven. They had been bandaged and given crutches, but their eyes were glazed over.

One of them was McKesson. He didn’t look at me as he took his place at a desk. His neck and head leaned to one side, his broken collarbone had been set, and his arm was wrapped in supporting bandages. He used his free hand to take up a quill and a tiny knife. I noticed that he was moving more slowly than the other mind-slaves. More deliberately. I was sure that he knew at some level what was happening to him, and he was resisting.

“What if you fail to find the Beast’s heart again?” I demanded. “I’m not going to stand by and watch all these innocent people die.”

“Good!” Meng said. “I’d hoped to see you show some spirit. Stand near the chalkboard, please. As you’ve probably figured out by now, that’s where the anomaly begins. If the Beast makes an aggressive move, please feel free to take action.”

Her eyes were shining, and I wasn’t really sure if she was calling my bluff or actually expecting me to stand physically in the path of the Beast’s wrath. I stepped toward the chalkboard but stood nonchalantly to one side. I had no intention of being in front of the rip when it opened.

I had the bottle in one hand and slipped the liver into the other. I’d put away McKesson’s gun, having decided it was the weakest weapon I possessed. Besides, I was out of bullets.

I figured that if the experiment failed again, I would simply sting the tentacles and try not to get caught while they flailed and died.

Gilling had a fresh light in his eyes while he instructed his new group of weary, injured apprentices on their task. I wasn’t sure if his energy came from the suggestive power of Meng’s artifact or his own excitement about the project. I assumed it was a little of both. He’d always had an explorer’s soul.

“Firstly, we must clear our minds of extraneous thought. Do not think of food or conflict. Forget about tonight’s startling events. We need the full power of every mind here to find what we seek.”

A hand went up. I glanced at Meng to see if she would quell this upstart. She frowned briefly but did not do anything to interfere. Perhaps it was all part of the process. Perhaps, even when under a powerful spell of suggestion, people still needed to ask questions to learn what was required of them.