The Mysteries of Holly Diem (Unknown Kadath Estates Book 2) (26 page)

I took another breath, and it was expelled in a
similar squirming, agonizing convulsion. My nasal passages screamed, my mouth
filled with caustic saliva. I jerked and writhed as I fought the need for air,
my chest throbbing.

Behind my eyelids, the world went dark.

Before I could make my peace with it, I smelled
silicone and Yael’s sweat. Unable to hold out any longer, I took a massive,
shuddering gasp. The air was stale and tasted of rubber and chlorine, but I
didn’t choke. I opened my eyes, and couldn’t see much of anything besides a
membrane stretched crudely across my face. I eventually worked out that Yael
had pulled her mask over my head – but it was facing backwards, blinding me.

Beside me, Yael coughed and retched. I peeled the mask
cautiously off my head, and was neither blinded nor suffocated. I glanced
around, but the Servants of the Deep were all cowering around the periphery of
the room, lying prostrate, or covering their faces with webbed hands. Madeleine
Diem was absent. Yael and I spent several minutes spitting and expelling mucus,
wiping and rubbing our eyes. I was terminally exhausted, the blighting residual
effects of the Azure muddying my head, my arm burning from the needle teeth of
the Servant, the wound in my stomach weirdly slick and sensitive to the touch.

“What was that?”

“Desiccant,” Yael said, coughing. Her eyes were
ruby-red, her nose running like an open tap. “Professor Dawes came up with the
idea, but I helped synthesize it. The compound isn’t fatal, but it should
incapacitate them for a while.”

“Looks that way.” I nodded, and then made a show of
clearing my throat, shifting my feet, and averting my eyes. Yael watched in
open confusion and alarm. “Thanks, by the way. For the mask. You didn’t have to
do that.”

“Unless I wanted you to live,” she reminded me gently,
wiping her nose. “Then I had to do that.”

“Oh. Well, still. Thanks.”

“Don’t mention it.”

Everyone always says that, but Yael actually sounded
as if she meant it.

I knew what April expected from me – she didn’t need
to say anything, I just
knew
– but right about then, doubt entered the
equation, where Yael was concerned. That was a new and mortifying experience,
so I shoved it aside for later perusal, and focused on locating my scalpel in
the fishy carnage. It has sentimental value, you see.

“What now?”

“I don’t know.” Yael cleaned her eyes with a tissue.
“The observatory is probably full of those monsters.”

“Yeah. Do you have any more desiccant?”

She shook her head and then suffered a sneezing fit.

“No. I wasn’t even sure if it would work.”

“Do you have anything else in that pouch that would…?”

She laughed half-heartedly and dumped out the contents
on the stone in front of me: a cellphone in a turquoise case, a granola bar, her
picks in their velvet wrapping, a small aerosol can, a clutch stocked with lip-gloss
and eyeliner pencil, a set of squat metal spikes that looked like tent pegs, a
flashlight, and a transit card.

“You ever a Boy Scout, Yael?”

“What? Why would I…?”

“Never mind. Should we check what it looks like down
there?”

Yael sighed and nodded her agreement, pulling the mask
over her head. The desiccant left a fine green powder on the floor, and puffed
into tiny clouds with each footsteps. The heavy wooden door was as we had left
it. There was no sign that the Servants of the Deep attempted to force their
way in. Yael shook her spray can, which sounded nearly empty, and nodded at me.

I took a deep breath, set my feet, and then pulled the
door open in one smooth jerk, leaping back to avoid the expected flood of
squishy fish-people.

Dunwich waited impassively on the other side, orange
tail swishing.

Yael cried out and seized him, holding the
disconcerted cat to her chest. I looked over the railing of the stairwell, and
was not surprised to see the Cats of Ulthar swarming over the floor of the
observatory. The few fish-people who remained weren’t moving, and looked rather
well nibbled. I didn’t see Snowball, but I was sure he was about. I couldn’t
imagine what Yael had on the Cats of Ulthar, but it must have been huge, to
merit such efforts on their part.

“You’re popular with cats, Yael.” She had removed her
mask, but persisted in her attempts to cuddle with the reluctant cat. “People
too, I guess. It’s pretty amazing.”

“I look after my friends, Preston,” Yael explained
seriously, finally released Dunwich, who immediately leapt clear of any further
hugging attempts. “That’s all there is to it.”

“If you say so.”

“Dunwich told me that the Servants of the Deep didn’t
even try to fight,” Yael said, taking a comb from her satchel and running it
through her hair. “They tried to flee as soon as the Cats of Ulthar arrived.
The bodies are the ones who didn’t make it to the water fast enough.”

“Odd. There are a lot of cats,” I said, glancing at
the activity on the observatory floor. “But there were so many fish-people. Are
they really so weak that they had to run from a bunch of stray cats?”

That earned me a pair of glares.

“The Cats of Ulthar are a greater power than you
realize,” Yael said stiffly. “You are not entirely wrong to be suspicious,
however. The Servants of the Deep outnumbered the cats, who came expecting a
fight.”

That seemed like a good time to shut up, so I did. We
hung around a while longer, poking around. Yael messed about with Madeleine’s
old chair and restraints while I examined the strange devices the fleeing
fish-people had abandoned. They were clearly weapons, though they looked more
like something that belonged in a brass band. I couldn’t make heads of tails of
the controls, which were like contoured piano keys and nearly as numerous. They
were all different, as if each device was manufactured by hand, for divergent
purposes. When I saw Yael and Dunwich rounding the last curve in the stairwell,
I abandoned the devices were I found them, and joined them in leaving.

Prospect Hill seemed taller on the way down. It was
hardly past noon, and I already wanted to go to bed. I was dragging, my brain
foggy and unresponsive thanks to the Azure hangover. I checked my cell –
Prospect Hill is one of the few places in the city with reliable service – and texted
April. Yael was similarly absorbed, but careful enough that I couldn’t read her
phone over her shoulder.

“I’m hungry.” Yael turned off her phone and dropped it
into the denim bag she had slung across her shoulder. “Do you want Sichuan,
Preston?”

“You mean the Chinese place?”

“Yes.” A sigh. “The Chinese place.”

I was hungry. Also suspicious. Low blood sugar won
out.

“Why not?”

Why not indeed.

Yael nodded and led the way. I lingered behind and
tried to figure angles with a drug-sullied mind. I felt adrift in a sea of
conflicting emotions and horrible fish-people.

“There!” Yael yelled, pointing at something I couldn’t
see. “In the shadows! The mask! Preston, do you see it?”

She took off sprinting before I could respond.

I’m not even really sure what it was that Yael saw at
the base of the hill – something in the shadows of a gabled and gilded home, an
injustice requiring her particular intervention – but she went off like a shot,
yelling about a mask. And maybe she was right about that, I thought, squinting
to see through the multi-hued lights that danced at the edges of my vision –
there was
something
the color of bone bleached in the sun, conflicting
and contradictory motion, a vague approximation of a face…

I ran after Yael, shouting her name.

That was a mistake.

She turned a corner at the base of the hill, her shoes
skidding across the cobblestones, chasing after something I couldn’t be sure I
had seen. I trailed after her, the muscles on my injured side crying out with
every other step, and made what felt like the same turn.

The street was empty, but just past a curve in the
road, I was certain I heard Yael shouting. I ran after her as best I could.

An empty street, devoid of traffic. I made a right
turn into an alley, chasing echoes.

I felt cold metal prongs against my back, and had time
to tense before the cattle prod activated. The current tore through my body,
clenching my jaw and taking the wind from my lungs. There was a sharp crack,
but Yael was too far away to hear it. The pain spread like ice water, frigid
numbness followed by trembling agony. My knees went soft, but before I could stumble,
a thick plastic bag was pulled over my head. I tried to suck in air in a panic,
to cry out, but succeed only in filling my mouth with dirty plastic.

A wire tie looped through the base of the bag and dug
into my neck, but I managed to work my fingers underneath, buying myself a few
small gasps of air. Then the wire was twisted into a crude knot and pulled taut,
cutting ribbons of skin from my fingers and slicing into my bruised neck.

I struggled to get my clumsy fingers underneath the
wire, desperate to free myself from the plastic bag, already airless and humid.

Rippling pain washed through my body like a current of
freezing water. I was dimly aware of the crackle of electric discharge. I
slumped, semi-conscious, and someone caught me beneath the arms. My head scraped
the pavement as I choked on a mouthful of plastic.

My assailant deposited me unceremoniously at the base
of a wall. The world was dim, and quiet, as if my ears were filled with cotton.
Through the bag, someone seized me by my ears, and then slammed the back of my
head against the wall. It didn’t hurt at all, but the sound reminded me of an
egg cracking, and for obscure reasons, I wanted to sob. The plastic worked its
way so far into my mouth that I gagged on it. My assailant drove my head into
the wall again.

There was a dark interval of indeterminate time.

Someone tore the bag from my head, depriving me of the
looming oblivion of suffocation. I retained sufficient live brain cells to resent
that intervention. I rolled onto my back, and was kicked in the teeth for my
troubles.

Jenny Frost’s face shown like a full moon as chewed
furiously on her gum. Elijah Pickman watched with a look of distaste
prominently stamped across his face. Jenny grabbed me by the ear, her skin
sticky with dried sweat and hot as a furnace. Drugs and excitement enlarged her
pupils, while unnoticed tears ran from the corners of bloodshot eyes. She
smirked at me, and then spat in my face.

“Sorry now, fucker?”

***

“I wanted the opportunity to have a talk.”

“There are simpler ways, you know.”

That seemed to be news to him.

“Perhaps. Any method held its own complications, I
imagine.”

“Kidnapping, though…”

“Yes. I apologize, then, if there is something I
should apologize for.”

“Accepted. Can I go now?”

“Not quite yet.”

I couldn’t see a thing. Coils of nylon rope wrapped
tightly around my arms and legs and attached me firmly to a chair. I tested my
bonds, and found very little play. After a ride of uncertain length in the
trunk of a car, I had arrived here blindfolded and bound, covered in bruises
from Jenny Frost’s abuse.

“Okay. What’s this about?”

“I would imagine you could guess.”

“You have questions?”

A pause. Confusion in his voice.

“Should I? I was under the impression that you didn’t
know anything at all, Mr. Tauschen. What could you possibly tell me?”

I didn’t have an answer for him. I kept waiting for my
vision to clear, or adjust to the dark, but neither happened. There must have
been something over my head – a bag, or a blindfold – but I couldn’t feel it. I
strained against the darkness, occasionally convincing myself that I saw
something.

“I know more than you might think,” I boasted, playing
for time. “If you don’t have questions, though, then I’ve got some for you, Eli.”

“More questions about my supposed crush, then?”

I tried out a laugh, and it sounded weird.

“Not exactly. I got that one figured. Kinda weird,
though, when you consider that the woman you are hot for is your great grand aunt…”

“Great grandaunt,” he corrected, sounding annoyed. “And
you are mistaken. Madeleine Diem has been a friend and a patron.”

“What about Holly?”

“I have no doubt that my great grandmother cares,”
Elijah said coldly. “Holly has been decidedly less helpful to me, however, in
recent months. Jealousy, no doubt, over my acquisition of such a choice relic, but
it is little matter. We will have to time to work out our family affairs once
more pressing matters are settled.”

I was relieved to hear it. I doubted Elijah would lie
to me, particularly when he had me at this kind of disadvantage. He simply
didn’t think enough of me to bother. A lie can be a sort of compliment,
approached correctly.