The Mysteries of Holly Diem (Unknown Kadath Estates Book 2) (2 page)

Arranged in a row, like chess piece royalty. One endures,
like a diamond with unprecedented and fascinating occlusions. One between the
dark and light. One potential, or maybe actual. One is a cypher, a fetish, a
living doll with a smile that asks uncomfortable questions.

I made a barefoot transverse of the room, weaving my way between blankets
and pillows and the occasional extended arm. The television whispered cartoon
violence and crass merchandising into the sleeping ears of the young ladies littering
my living room.

The kitchen was in appalling disarray. It looked very
much as if the effort to bake sugar cookies the night before had required the
use of every known utensil and ingredient, the majority of which remained in a
precarious stack filling the sink. I sighed and gave up on making breakfast. I
had three mostly teen-aged girls to feed, however, so I crept back through the
living room to the front door, grabbing my wallet and running shoes. I slid out
the door, shut it carefully, and then stepped into my shoes. The landlady’s
black cat, Lovecraft, basked in a nearby pool of sunlight and watched me with
one open eye and undisguised amusement.

April holds frequent, one-sided conversations with Lovecraft,
but distrusts Dunwich, Yael’s pet cat, and avoids speaking in his presence. One
of her many eccentricities. I paused to scratch Lovecraft’s cheeks on the way
out.

My jeans were damp from rain the night before, and the
jacket I threw over my sweatshirt had a cigarette burn on the arm I didn’t
remember acquiring. The sun fought weakly through the cold mist and clouds, which
rolled in before dawn every morning and then slowly retreated to the ocean in
the early afternoon. Birds were probably singing somewhere, but not here,
because there are no songbirds in the Nameless City. I pushed through the heavy
silver gate at the entrance to the Kadath Estates and headed out into the
chilled desolation of Leng Street. It felt nothing like spring, and despite the
layers, I shivered, and swallowed with difficulty past a sore throat that had
lingered for a week and more.

In front of the building, Holly Diem was halfway up a stepladder
with a watering can and a pair of brass scissors, enthusiastically tending to a
withered pomegranate by haphazardly lopping off branches. I glanced up at her,
and then quickly away when I realized that the turtle-print skirt she wore
offered a scandalous view from my angle.

“Preston! Good morning!” Holly called out cheerfully,
very nearly dumping water on my head. “How are you?”

“I’m okay. Thanks for your help last night, by the
way.”

“Think nothing of it!” Holly poured out the remainder
of the water in the can on the mostly dead ornamental tree. “I’m just glad to
see you survived the night. That’s a lot of girls for one guy to handle.”

I muttered something unintelligible. Holly laughed and
accepted a helping hand down from the stepladder.

“How did the cookies come out?”

Holly asked with a smirk and I wondered when she left
the sleepover last night, and if she had anything to do with the terrible thing
that happened to the kitchen sink.

“I’ll let you know.”

“That bad?” Holly laughed and set aside the watering
can. “You must be looking at quite a chore, cleaning up after. It was nice of
you to throw Sumire a party, Preston.”

“April would have never forgiven me, otherwise,” I
said with a shrug, glancing at the time on my phone. “Besides, Sumire only
graduates once, right?”

“I suppose.”

“Not to be rude, Holly, but I need to get moving...”

“Oh?” Holly looked skeptical. “Where’s the fire,
Preston?”

“No fire,” I said, shaking my head. “Three kids about
to wake up with nothing in the house to eat.”

Holly nodded and took my arm.

“That’s a kind of fire. Going to the store?”

I nodded eagerly. There are worse ways to travel than
in the company of Holly Diem, even if she is a witch. Also, sometimes, my boss.

“Good! I have some shopping to do as well. Mind if I
come with?”

The question was surely rhetorical, as we were half a
block down the street already. Holly bravely refused to acknowledge the weather,
dressing instead for some platonic ideal of Spring, wearing a halter top and a
sarong-like skirt with silkscreened turtles, carefully tanned and moisturized
skin exposed to the cold and wet. I appreciated her defiance of the elements from
the corner of my eye, but the amused half-smile Holly wore disabused me of the
notion that I was getting away with anything.

“Damn, it’s miserable,” I said, trying not to blush as
she coyly eyed me. “What the hell is wrong with the weather?”

“The seasons are all wrong in the Nameless City,”
Holly explained. “It wasn’t so long ago when it snowed on the foothills in
Sarnath during summer…”

“Really?”

“…along with a winter when the Leng very nearly ran
dry before it made it to the ocean. This isn’t so bad.”

I coughed, remembered at the last moment to cover my
mouth.

“I don’t know. Last spring was rainy, but at least it
warmed up.”

“Please. This is nothing,” she said, dismissing the
clouds and chill with a gesture. “I remember a year when we had two winters.
Two! Can you imagine?”

“No.” I did my best impression of gruff. “That’s
impossible.”

“You have a very limited imagination, Preston,” Holly
said, with a lascivious wink. “We should work on expanding your horizons, don’t
you think?”

“Not at all. I’ve seen more than I wanted to already
out of the Nameless City. Spare me any further weirdness.”

“You say that,” Holly said, squeezing my arm. “But I
think you like it. Are all my little games really such a bother to play?”

“Your games?” I scratched my head. “I thought these
were just the hazards of living in the Nameless City.”

“Same difference, Preston.” We jaywalked across one of
the desolate side streets adjoining Leng. “Are you still feeling poorly?”

I considered it. The answer, as it had been for weeks,
was ambiguous.

“Kinda. You know that April caught that thing that was
going around…”

“I think that half of Carter caught it, honestly. Some
kind of virus, the Professor said. Lost half of his class to the fever. Are you
certain you should be out and about?”

“Like I said, I’m not sick yet,” I said, with a shrug.
“Just dragging, bit of a headache. I’ll be fine.”

“If you say so,” Holly said dubiously. “I’m curious. What
do you think of your newest neighbor?”

Leng Street crumbled from neglect and disuse. There
were no other pedestrians, and the buildings on either side of the street were desolate
tenements and vacant commercial properties. No one speaks of the incident that gutted
the neighborhood, but it cast a long shadow. Even the homeless avoid the Empty
District. Apart from the train station and an adjacent convenience store, the Carter
Academy is our closest neighbor – and it’s a walk. We had to go most of the way
to Ulthar just to do the shopping.

“You mean Yael?”

Holly nodded, but I didn’t need the confirmation.
Until Yael Kaufman had moved in at the start of the year, April and I had been
the new tenants. The Kadath Estates doesn’t see a great deal of unit turnover.
Even Sumire Iwakura, having just graduated from Carter two days earlier,
planned on holding on to her apartment, though vague proximity to the school
was about the only thing the Estates had going for it.

“Smart kid,” I said, considering my response
carefully. “Little nervous, maybe.”

“Those two do tend to go together,” Holly said,
patting my forearm affectionately. “How does she get along with April?”

“Eh, okay.”

That was a lie, and chances were Holly knew it. She
kept a careful eye on her tenants, and her relationship with Yael Kaufman
predated her arrival at the Estates, so I found this line of questioning slightly
frustrating.

Chances were Yael was fond of April. After all, April
Ersten gets along with everyone. I doubt that April returned the favor.

“When I first met April, I thought that perhaps she
and Yael could be friends…”

“That reminds me,” I said, helping Holly across a
particularly treacherous section of pavement, slick with water dripping from a
broken gutter overhead. “I meant to ask you – where do you know Yael from?”

“I’ve known Yael since she first arrived in the Nameless
City,” Holly said, smoothly sidestepping my question. “We share a professional
and a personal relationship.” Holly pinched my arm, smiling at me with violet-tinged
eyelids. “A bit like you and I.”

I snorted, and Holly tightened her grip on my arm.

“She works for you?”

“On occasion,” Holly said, trailing her hand along the
dusty cascades of dark green ivy that covered the partially collapsed building
beside us. “Does that surprise you?”

“I guess. Yael seems a little prissy for that sort of
thing…”

Holly laughed and entwined her fingers in mine.
Despite her love for oversized, dangling earrings, Holly never wore rings. Her
nails were long and carefully manicured, painted the color of brass by April a
few nights earlier.

“You’re so judgmental, Preston,” Holly chided, the
side of my arm brushing distractingly against her ample chest. “Do you really
think so little of her?”

“It’s not that. She just strikes me as a bit of a good
girl, if you know what I mean.”

Holly’s eyes overflowed with laughter.

“I doubt it very much,” she said, squeezing my hand.

“You’re making fun of me, aren’t you?” Holly didn’t
bother to answer. “She just seems out of place at the Estates.”

“Don’t we all?”

I shook my head and mumbled curses.

“Just surprised you have work for her. I’d think your
business would be out of her comfort zone.”

“Oh?” Holly glanced at me. “What do you think my
business is, Preston?”

“Driving me crazy, apparently,” I grumbled, leading
her across the parking lot to the convenience store. It wasn’t much, but I
would be able to buy eggs, bread, and maybe even bacon. I might even return
before the girls woke and went on a low blood-sugar induced rampage. “Your
business is your business. I was under the impression that you pay me not to
care.”

Holly released my arm and waited for me to get the recalcitrant
door to the market.

“That’s not it,” Holly explained, as I followed her to
the grocery aisle. “I’m just selective about what I share.”

I found a carton with twelve intact eggs on my third
attempt. Holly poked at the slightly past their prime apples piled in a basket
on the top shelve as if she were unfamiliar with and suspicious of the fruit.

“Fine with me.” I dug through the small freezer in the
corner that held actual food, hoping to find an overlooked package of bacon.
The much larger freezer in the center of the store was reserved for ice cream.
“As long as I can make rent, I don’t much care about what it is you do, Holly.”

This was entirely untrue. Holly’s business was a point
of more than academic curiosity. I made a mental note to talk to Dawes about
it, sooner rather than later. Holly smiled at me, wiping a green apple against
her deep blue sarong and then studied the result closely. I couldn’t find any
bacon, but that might have been for the best, because I thought that April had
told me that Yael was a vegetarian.

“You see! That’s what I like about you, Preston.”
Holly slunk up next to me while I considered the drink section, trying to
decide between orange juice and milk, and ran her fingers down my back. “One of
the things, anyway.”

“Enough,” I growled, taking a liter of orange juice
and a smaller container of milk from the glass case. “Is that all you needed?”

Holly nodded, and then followed me to the counter,
where Elijah Pickman waited attentively. I dumped my groceries on the counter,
then snatched the apple from Holly’s hand and added it to the pile, along with
a braided length of teriyaki beef jerky that I strongly felt I deserved, as
compensation for hosting a slumber party for three female students of the
occult in a very small apartment.

“Good morning, Mr. Pickman,” Holly chirped. “How are
you today?”

“Not too bad, Miss Holly,” Elijah said tiredly,
looking harried. “And yourself?”

“I can’t complain.”

That was probably a lie, but I can’t prove it. To call
Holly’s disposition sunny was probably an understatement. With the exception of
one particular neighborhood vagrant, Holly Diem only had nice things to say
about everyone.

“Congratulations again on your graduation, Mr.
Pickman,” Holly purred. “The Carter Academy is very prestigious. You must be
proud.”

“I am,” he exclaimed guilelessly, picking up the
scanner and manhandling my groceries. “My father went there, too, you know. And
my grandfather!”