The Long Way Down (14 page)

One thing was clear: Stacy’s half-souled wraith wasn’t going anywhere until I got my hands on that pouch and used it to put her back together again. I decided to pay a visit to Artie’s mysterious brother and see if he wanted to do this the easy way or the hard way.

I hoped he’d choose the hard way.

• • •

A tenor saxophone purred under the clink of glasses and low, seductive laughter. I sat in a leather-backed chair, cigar smoke swirling through the hazy air, and tried to remember how I got there.

The nightclub was a swath of mahogany and scarlet, elegant and baroque, the kind of place you see in photographs of prewar Berlin. All around me lovers talked, drank, shared cigarettes in the dark. Everyone but me, sitting alone in front of an empty stage.

“A drink for you, sir.”

A prim man with a white jacket and a towel draped over his arm, his lip adorned with a pencil-thin mustache, set a tall glass of something amber and smoky on the small table beside me.

“I didn’t order this,” I said. I didn’t think I’d ordered it. I couldn’t remember.

“Compliments of the lady, sir.”

“The lady?”

“The lady on stage,” he said with a flourish and stepped to the side. I looked up to the stage. Caitlin smiled back at me, draped in a scarlet dress that matched her flowing curls. She cradled her fingers around a standing microphone like a 1940s radio starlet in the footlights.

I’m dreaming
, I realized. Normally that would be enough to jolt me awake, but instead I sank deeper into my chair as she began to sing, an invisible band striking up a slow, torch-song melody.

“You flew to the clouds but your ghost’s in my bed

The scent of you bringing back words we both said

In the dark, in the dark o’ my love…”

I leaned forward in my chair, watching her sing, drinking her in. The lilt of a violin caressed the air, notes flowing on a breeze of hopeful melancholy.

“Every life that collides, every scar left behind

Of long memories and longer goodbyes

You’re gone but you linger, my love…”

I thought about Roxy and the night she left, throwing her things into a suitcase like she was trying to stone it to death while I paced the room and railed against the inevitable.

“Roxy, will you—stop. Will you at least
talk
to me?”

The nightclub suddenly gone, I stood in the memory of my own apartment and watched myself on the other side of the bed, torn between misery and rage.

“We did talk,” Roxy said, not looking at me, rummaging through the drawers and throwing clothes in the suitcase as fast as she could pull them out. “We’ve been doing nothing but talking. You don’t
listen
.”

“So that’s it. After all we’ve been through together, just like that, we’re through?”

She paused, frozen over the suitcase, then nodded as she slammed it shut and reached for the zipper. “Yeah. We’re through.”

“She broke your heart,” Caitlin said, standing beside me.

I shook my head as the voices of the memories faded, silently acting out their desperate pantomime.

“I broke hers,” I said, “or we both did. It gets hazier the more I think about it. It’s easy to tell stories about the people we leave behind, turn them into monsters in our heads, you know, so the loss doesn’t hurt so much. Truth is, we both said some things we shouldn’t have, we dug the knives in deep, and she packed a bag and got on the next bus for Reno.”

“Something to be said for a clean break,” Caitlin mused, watching the silent argument.

“Nothing clean about it. People go, but they stay,” I said, tapping my forehead, “up here. The hard part’s learning to move on, to let it all go instead of wallowing in regrets. I’ve imagined a thousand different ways this night could have played out, a thousand ways I could have kept her from walking out that door, but you know what? It doesn’t matter. This is what happened. This is what’s real. The more I accept it, the less it hurts.”

“You can’t live in your dreams,” Caitlin said, “though it is a fascinating way to learn about people.”

Dream-Roxy stomped out the door, lugging her suitcase behind her. Dream-Me sat on the edge of his bed, face buried in his hands. I looked at Caitlin with dawning horror.

“You’re really here,” I said. “I’m not making this up. You’re here. In my dream. In my
head
.”

“Problem?” she asked with a smile.

The world caved in. A brutal weight squeezed the breath from my lungs, raw panic overtaking me like a knife in my heart, like an arachnophobe dropped into a vat of spiders.

“No,” I gasped, shaking my head, “you can’t be here—”

“Daniel,” she said, taking hold of my shoulders. “Daniel, I did not come here to hurt you. You don’t need to be afraid. Daniel!”

A swirling vortex engulfed us, the dream dissolving in raw chaos. I couldn’t hear, couldn’t think, couldn’t do anything but shake my head and struggle in her arms.

“Show me,” she said sharply in my ear, “show me what you’re afraid of.”

So I did.

Seventeen

I
knew the room in a heartbeat. The cheap clapboard walls, the dingy garage-sale furniture, and the teenager tied to a chair with a burlap sack over his head. A sea of upturned and unwashed faces watched with reverent awe, sitting cross-legged on the floor or sprawled out on beanbag chairs. Someone in the back strummed a Peter, Paul and Mary song on an acoustic guitar.

A strange calmness washed over me. Standing in the echo of my past, I could almost pretend it was a show or a movie I was watching, instead of something that happened to me.

A tall man stood beside the chair. His hand rested on the boy’s shoulder. He dressed like a seventies folk musician, with a string vest, a fuzzy goatee and a lazy, bloodshot smile that never left his lips.

“The angels are with us, children,” he said. “The angels will guide us and ease our path to spiritual ascension. Come now, angel. Come and speak unto us, that we may hear your wisdom.”

The sound that erupted from under the burlap hood was anything but human. The bound figure twisted and squirmed, joints popping and body contorting as he struggled to escape the ropes.

“
Chilkat gamun
!” the boy howled, his words distorted and leaping in pitch. “
Chilkat gamun rabadai!
”

Onlookers gasped as the chair lifted from the ground, slowly spinning, hovering an inch over the pea-green rug as the torrent of arcane words grew louder, more furious.

“Be at peace!” the man said, holding up his hands to calm them. “The angel greets us, but he bears a message of warning. Some of you have not been doing all you can for the family. Some of you have not been sharing freely of your hearts, your minds, and your labor. He says to look inside yourselves, to question if your devotion is true!”

Caitlin leaned against the wall and folded her arms, one eyebrow raised.

“That ‘angel’,” she said pointedly, “is a fledgling demon of the Choir of Wrath. It’s speaking in gutter flensetongue, and it’s promising that man a number of sexual mutilations involving battery acid.”

I felt tired. Old hurts and old angers helped to smother my panic, leaving me numb in the balance.

“We called him the Shepherd,” I said.

“The Up With People reject?” she asked.

“I was seventeen and on the run. Hungry and desperate. When he found me, I was using some crude misdirection charms to hustle a tourist. People like me, people with a spark of raw magical ability and no real training, were like catnip to him.”

“A cult.” Caitlin’s nose twitched with disdain. “So he’d get one of you possessed, claim he was translating angel-speak, and give your marching orders. What’d he do if he got a demon who spoke English?”

“Square it ahead of time. I don’t know what he offered them, but they’d say whatever he wanted them to. Usually that his spiritual powers would be a lot stronger if his bed wasn’t empty that night.”

She peered around the room. “Which one is you?”

I pointed.”I’m the one tied to the chair.”

The chair fell to the carpet with a thud and Dream-Me slumped against the ropes, unconscious under the hood. The onlookers applauded, hugging one another, some with tears of wonder in their eyes.

“I had the bare essentials for learning sorcery,” I said, “talent and insatiable curiosity. He only wanted the talent. He tried to starve the curiosity out of me, tried to torture it out of me with ‘ritual penance,’ tried…other things, but it just made me fight harder. I knew I needed to escape.

“That’s when he decided that being a host for the ‘angels’ wasn’t to be shared among all of us any longer, that instead I’d been specially chosen to be their one and only vessel. And instead of once a week, they had so much to tell us that they needed to come every single night.”

Caitlin stared at me, horrified.

“Humans can’t endure…” she started to say, then shook her head. “How many times were you possessed? By how many demons?”

“I lost count after thirty. Usually a different one every night. Night after night I was a puppet, a prisoner in my own body. The physical pain was excruciating, but that was nothing compared to what it felt like inside my head. The torrents of psychic filth, like someone pissing inside your brain and carving their initials on the back of your eyelids just to show they were there—”

We stood in a grassy meadow under a warm summer sun. Caitlin pressed her finger to my lips.

“Shh,” she said. “I know. You don’t have to talk about it.”

“Where are we?” I squinted at a French manor at the top of a hill. “This isn’t one of my memories.”

“No. It’s one of mine. A peaceful place. I thought you might like it. How did you get away?”

I shook my head. “I don’t remember. I remember running. I got out somehow, and they chased me, but…there’s a place in the city, an occultists’ hangout with an invisible door. It pulled me inside, and I passed out cold on the carpet. A couple of friendly magicians found me and took me in, taught me, made me strong.”

Caitlin tilted her head, taking me in with a curious stare.

“You were already strong. Your survival is proof. I’m curious—I would like you to explain something.”

“Ask.”

“After what you endured at the hands of my kind, and knowing full well what I am, you still saved me. You not only saved me, you risked your life to do it. Why?”

I shrugged. The answer seemed obvious.

“Because what they were doing to you was wrong,” I said, “and it needed to be stopped. Doesn’t matter who you are. Doesn’t matter what you are. Wrong is wrong.”

She blinked.

“Curious,” she said again, and I found myself staring at my bedroom ceiling. Alone in the darkness, I put my palm on my chest and felt the beating of my heart.

• • •

Nothing felt entirely real as I turned on the shower, scrubbing my hair under the spray and turning over the events of the dream. I’d heard of shared dreams before, but I’d never expected to experience one firsthand. Or did I? For all I knew, the entire thing was just my imagination on overdrive. It wasn’t like I hadn’t been thinking about Caitlin.

Finding Artie Kaufman’s brother was priority one, but for that I needed a name. I’d been thinking about Artie’s house, how it was so much nicer than he should have been able to afford on a low-end porn director’s budget. If his brother had helped him pay for it, his name might be on the deed. I got out of the shower and toweled off.

“I love living in the future,” I muttered to myself as I sat down and called up the Clark County property information website. Property records are public information, and thanks to modern technology I just had to type in Artie’s address and let the computer do all the work. When the results came back, I shook my head at the screen.

“Owner: Carmichael-Sterling Nevada”

I’d heard of them. The Carmichael-Sterling Group was an out-of-state concern looking to make a play for some Vegas action. In the last year they’d bought up the old Silverlode Casino and a couple of off-Strip hotels, looking to rehab and reopen them under new management. Their big claim to fame, though, was the Enclave: a sixty-five-story luxury hotel and casino whose unfinished steel skeleton now loomed at the south end of Las Vegas Boulevard. When it finally opened its doors, word had it, the Enclave was going to make Dubai look like a beggar’s slum.

So why the hell were they paying for a porn merchant’s house out in Henderson? Public relations departments have nightmares about this sort of thing. I dialed their contact number and hit buttons until a live person got on the phone.

“Carmichael-Sterling Nevada, how may I direct your call?” chirped a perky voice on the other end of the line.

“Mr. Kaufman, please,” I said, hoping there was only one of them at the company. The receptionist asked me to hold, and after another couple of rings it went to voice mail.

“This is the desk of Sheldon Kaufman, director of finance,” said a deep, sonorous voice. “I’m away from my desk right now, but if you leave your information at the tone I’ll call you back as soon as I return. If this is an emergency, please call Arthur Shaw at extension—”