Redheads (43 page)

“I know how to find him.”

“Tell us,” Julissa said. She knelt next to him and brought her lips close to the man’s ear. “Tell me.”

“You’ll need a key,” Stark said.

His hands, soaked with sweat and shaking, moved up to his collar. He loosened the knot of his tie and then started to unbutton his white shirt. Julissa looked up at Chris and he saw what might have been fear in her eyes, though he couldn’t see the expression on her face because of her mask. The man unbuttoned the shirt all the way to his navel, then fumbled at a leather cord around his neck. The key was beneath his undershirt, ancient-looking and forged of bronze.

“You would need a key like this.”

Chris glanced at the key, then reached into his pocket. He found a brass and nickel two-pound coin. He stepped over to Julissa’s backpack, getting her camera. As he walked back to Stark, the attorney said, “If you had a key like this, you could go to him.”

“Where’s the door for that key?” Chris said.

Now he knelt next to the man and gently took Stark’s hand from the key. He placed the coin on Stark’s chest for scale and began to snap close-up pictures of the key, turning it so he had pictures of both sides and from different angles.

“Advocate’s Close,” Stark said. “Halfway down Advocate’s Close from the High Street. An iron door on the right as you walk down.”

“And that’s where he lives?” Chris said. “Just off of Advocate’s Close?”

“Not where he lives. But where you can find him.”

“Is there a number on the door?”

“No. But there’s a carving in the lintel stone above the door. A ship.”

“What about alarms or guards?” Westfield said.

“He doesn’t need any. You’ll see.”

“Is he there now?”

“He comes there in between. He sleeps a lot.”

“In between what?” Julissa asked.

Stark looked at her again, his eyes suddenly swimming up from beneath the strange surface of the drug and focusing on her.

“Redheads,” Stark said.

“Why redheads?” Julissa asked.

“I don’t know,” Stark said. “I think it’s because they’re different. Because there’s something he needs and he can only get it from them. But I don’t know what it is. I don’t want to know what it is.”

“Let’s take it from the beginning,” Chris said. “Go back to when you first met it, and tell us from there.”

Chapter Fifty-Two

Stark’s eyes slowly opened.

The light was over his head, bright as the sun. He squinted and recognized the room. This wasn’t his bedroom. He was in his office chair with his cheek planted on his blotter, staring across the broad oak and leather surface of his desk. The light was his reading lamp. An inch from his nose was a crystal tumbler from the wet bar with two fingers’ worth of whiskey. The bottle that had poured the whiskey lay uncorked on its side farther down the desk, empty.

There was a second empty tumbler with a red lipstick stain on the rim.

When he slowly sat up, he saw a dry crust of vomit down the front of his white shirt. His tie was gone.

Was it a weekday?

He swiveled in the chair, and though the wooden shutters were drawn across his windows, he could see it was dark outside. His watch confirmed it was one a.m. Then he noticed a tube of lipstick on the edge of his desk, weighing down an empty Durex wrapper. He stared at that for a long while, his head still buzzing with whiskey. He sat in the silence and tried to remember what he’d done in the last twelve hours. Had he picked up a girl and brought her back to the office after his partners had left? He’d started doing that more often, especially now that he was almost divorced. But he’d never woken up like this.

Standing wouldn’t be a good idea yet.

Instead, he felt for his wallet. Normally, he carried three hundred pounds in notes. But that money was all gone. There was a receipt from the whiskey shop downstairs for the empty bottle on his desk. He didn’t remember buying it, but if he’d drunk all that, even with some help from the girl, he probably wouldn’t remember. The receipt was for eighty-two pounds. He must have paid the rest of the money to the girl. At least he’d used a condom, he thought. There was no telling what you might get from a girl, even a good-looking young one. He unbuttoned his shirt and felt for the key. That was still there, so everything was okay. He leaned back in the chair and tried to think of what to do. He could throw his shirt in the trash can, wadded around the Durex wrapper, the lipstick, and the empty bottle. The cleaning ladies would get it in the morning. Then he could call a cab. It was only a mile home but that was too far to walk tonight, and he didn’t like walking down the closes at night anyway. He was probably safer than anyone in Edinburgh—after all, he had the key to the door, he had the numbers to the offshore accounts, he arranged the voyages—but he knew what was in the closes at night. And he knew no one, not even Howard Stark, III, would be safe if its blood was running high.

Its blood had been up a lot this year.

Yes, he thought. Throw everything into the trash, call a cab and go home. Lock the doors and go to bed. He looked at the tube of lipstick and felt a little twitch down in his lap. He wondered what the girl had looked like, and what they’d done together. He felt stirrings of memory but there was nothing solid. Surely she had been very young, because he always picked them young. He had never hurt a girl, at least not that he remembered. Working as he did, he sometimes wondered about it, though. Anyone would, after spending that much of his life with the thing. Of course he wondered about that kind of power. He also thought about how far it went with them before it was satisfied, if it could ever be satisfied. It had been a long time since he’d walked all the way to the bottom of its abandoned lair off Advocate’s Close and through the ancient bone pile in the chambers beneath Old Town, the dripping darkness of old caves and stone-lined passageways a thousand years older than the oldest wall in Edinburgh, his employer circling in the shadows just beyond the light of his flashlight, its voice coming from above him, behind him, underneath him, telling him what to do and how to do it. Some of the bones down there were gnawed to splinters, as though it kept returning to them, circling back for another taste.

Suddenly he wanted to be out of here, out of Old Town. He stood, walking shakily to the corner of the desk to get the lipstick. But he never made it.

Some thought stopped him, a flash of an idea, an image. He couldn’t say.

He turned again to the window. The shutters were still closed but behind them the windowpane was open and he could feel the cool night air moving into the room like a rolling wall of fog. The window had been closed a minute ago, he was sure of it. He looked at his watch: two a.m. He steadied himself against the desk and looked around the office: the ceiling, the shadows in the corners near the door.

Where’d the last hour go, Stark?

Maybe he’d just misread the watch the first time. But then again, maybe not. He knew about this sort of thing, about the way some seconds could become swollen and engorged, and then devour the hour of which they were just a part, like a snake swallowing something twice its size. His employer could do this.

What do we do with things we don’t want anymore, Stark?

The hair on his arms stood straight out. If he knew about time, he also knew about thoughts: not every idea that rose up and burst inside his own head was something he could claim to own. Thoughts jumped mind to mind like a virus; images burrowed body to body like worms. He’d seen landscapes of death he never could have imagined, felt stirrings his mind could never dream. All thanks to his employer, a thing that had lived in the base of his skull for forty years, and underneath the city for uncountable centuries before that.

That’s right, Stark. What we don’t want, we throw away. But first we break it, and we peel its skin off, and we take its heart in our fist and we squeeze. So that what we don’t want, no one else can have.

There was a gold-plated letter opener on the desktop. He picked it up and held it close to his chest, his right hand shaking. In fact, his whole body was shaking, as though he had a high fever. His neck felt like he’d wandered into a hornet’s nest. It rippled with bumps and hives, like some kind poison had been under the skin.

Then the tapping started: a closely spaced group of four clawed fingertips falling in succession against the wood.
Click-click-click-click.
He wasn’t surprised. He knew how much it liked to toy with its prey, to build up the fear. Maybe, later, it could taste it in the meat. The brass door handle bent downwards and the door opened six inches. No shaft of light fell across the floor—it had put out the chandelier in the lobby.

Stark leaned against the front of his desk and tried to extend the arm holding the letter opener. But his hand was shaking so badly he dropped it onto the carpet. He fell on his knees to grab for it, and when he looked up, the door was fully open. A man stood there. Not a loping shadow, or a blur of vague smoke, but a man.

“Drop something, Dad?”

His fingers had closed on the letter opener but he let it go again.

“Ian?”

“You look like shit, Dad.”

“I thought you were at—” he trailed off, trying to remember the name of the place. He drew a blank. “At school.”

His son stepped the rest of the way into the office and squatted in front of him on the carpet. His motorcycle boot was on the dull blade of the letter opener; his hands were behind his back. His hair was greasy and matted, and his eyes were blank.

Ian had been with it: somehow, the creature had gone and found him and brought him north to Edinburgh.

“I was. At school. But I’ve been up here awhile. Talking. Learning,” Ian said. His voice was dull and bland. “About you. Us. And now I came to watch the rest.”

“Watch?”

Ian looked up and Stark let his eyes follow. The thing was on the ceiling, looking down at them. He saw its watery yellow eyes and its needle teeth. Its voice inside his head was like being strangled with a piano wire.

All the Starks, always
, it said.
But only one at a time.

In his mind, Stark took out a box and opened a locked memory. Something his employer had buried for him, buried well enough he’d forgotten he owned it. But now he remembered it all, so clearly he could taste the salted copper of blood in his throat from that long-ago meal. The meat had been so fresh it was still twitching as he swallowed it. He saw his own father. In this office, upon his knees on this carpet.

This was the end and the beginning, the closing of the circle. He knew what was coming next: Ian brought his hands from behind his back, and showed Stark the knife.

Maybe it was the same knife from forty years ago, and maybe not. It didn’t really matter.

Stark tried to scream but the thing’s voice exploded inside his head and cut him off.

What we don’t want, we take its eyes out. We rip its jaw off and we pull away its tongue. And when we’re done skinning it, Ian, we take its heart. And we eat it, Ian Stark. You and I.

Chapter Fifty-Three

They cut through Advocate’s Close on their way back to the Balmoral Hotel. Midway down, right where it was supposed to be, they saw the door for the first time. The carving above the door showed what Westfield imagined was a three-masted schooner under full canvas in the midst of a gale. It was faded and lichen grew across the entire lintel stone. The door itself was cast from a single piece of bronze, reinforced with half-inch-thick strips of iron that had been through-bolted across the front at six inch intervals. The metal was blackened with old soot and dust, and in that dust there was a handprint just to the right of the lock where someone had pushed the door open. They all saw the claw marks there, five razor-thin streaks in the dust, tracks that cut to unblemished bronze.

Something had shoved through in a hurry.

They didn’t linger, but went back to the hotel, converging in Chris’s room where they locked the doors and drew the window shades. They sat in the armchairs near the fireplace. Westfield looked into the empty fire grate and thought about the last thing Stark had said. Finally he turned to the others.

“It’s not just a monster with claws and teeth,” he said. “When I was on the ship and in the same room with it, I could feel it trying to get into my head. It wanted to find out about me, but it couldn’t. I know that sounds farfetched, but it’s true.”

“You’re saying it’s a mind reader?” Julissa asked.

Westfield nodded.

“I was thinking about what Stark said. He told us it needed something it could only get from redheads, but he didn’t know what it was. When I was on the ship, I had to listen to it kill a girl. I could hear it taunting her, dragging it out. It wanted to make her suffer as much as it could.”

“What’s that got to do with redheads?” Chris asked.

Westfield looked at Julissa. “You ever had any kind of surgery?”

“On my jaw, when I was a teenager.”

“The anesthetic, it worked like it was supposed to?”

She shook her head slowly and he could see from the sadness on her face that now she understood why it went after her sister, why it targeted women like her.