Vicious Grace (16 page)

“I had this idea,” he said. “If I understood the way my grandfather went crazy, maybe I’d at least get a little insight into what was coming next. How it would all go. I had some boxes in the attic. That was in them. I don’t know any German, though, so it didn’t help.”

“Here’s the thing,” I said. “You’re not crazy. Neither was your grandfather. The place you’re drawing? It’s Grace Memorial Hospital. Your uncle . . . sorry, your
grandfather
redesigned the place back in the forties. And there really is something weird and powerful that’s buried there. And it’s alive.”

David sighed.

“No,” he said. “Thank you, but no. That won’t work.”

“I can get you pictures of Grace Memorial,” I said. “Or don’t trust me. Google Maps is going to have a street view. Go look for yourself.”

“What if it is? What does that prove? That as my brain started breaking down, it grabbed anything related to Grandpa Del. Including some building of his I’d seen and half forgotten.”

“You’re pretty rational for someone in the throes of a schizophrenic break,” Aubrey said.

“I think I am,” David said. “But I would, wouldn’t I?”

I leaned back in my chair, coffee mug in both hands. The movement sent little sparkles of pain through my back and shoulder. I ignored them.

I’d been where David was now. I knew what it felt like to fall down the rabbit hole. Only I’d been lucky. Aubrey had been there to help me, and through him Ex and Chogyi Jake. There’d also been a truly ugly vampire named Midian Clark whose company I still missed. He was one of the bad guys, but we’d still been friends, just for a while.

David, though, hadn’t had anyone. The weird hidden world had washed into him, and he’d made the only sense of it he could. He saw what he was prepared to see: a slow, creeping madness. And over months, he’d turned in on himself and made it almost true. I couldn’t help wondering what I would have done in his place. Proving to myself that riders existed had almost gotten me killed, and I’d had guides and allies. If I’d been on my own, I might have come to the truth. Or else my doubts and disbelief might have gone septic too.

“We can agree that you haven’t told anyone else about what’s been going on? At least not in specifics?”

He nodded.

“Cool. Hang here,” I said, and put the coffee mug on the table with a thump.

Stepping outside, I was astonished by how late it was. The sky was already crawling toward a steel blue twilight. The air smelled damp, like it had rained when I wasn’t watching. The conversational barker had gone away or been put in a house, and the distant throb of outsized car speakers rose and fell in its place. I went to the car, popped open the passenger-side door, and took out my laptop carrier. I opened the computer as I walked back through David’s house, stepping carefully over the scattered papers and the fragments of coffee table. I had the file pulled up and ready to play when I got to the kitchen.

I didn’t talk or explain. I just put the laptop on the table in front of him, scooted the cursor over to the play button, and clicked. Oonishi’s dream sequence played out in silence, and I wasn’t watching it. David started off guarded, maybe even amused. And then his face went bloodless, and he sat forward. I could see the pulse pushing the bandage on his neck. When the recording was done, he played it again. And again. By the fourth time through, silent tears were running down his face.

“That’s it,” he said, his voice soft and choked. “That’s the thing in my dream.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Other people have seen it too.”

“Oh,” he said. “Oh, thank God.”

TWELVE

“Well, you two look smug,” Kim said as Aubrey and I came in. “What’s with the new shirt?”

“Bled all over the old one,” I said.

“Where’s Ex?”

“We just got him to take a nap,” Chogyi Jake said, coming in from the kitchen. “I told him I’d get him up as soon as the lasagna was ready.”

The condo had changed in our absence. The night pressing in at the windows was the same, but the smell of dust had been replaced by the reassuring scents of garlic and hot butter. And instead of a ragged hole in the wall, fresh pale wood made a clean, unpainted door frame. The iron security door was gone too. The scum of white that had covered everything had been cleaned up, and a squat red shop vacuum lurked in the corner beside the couch. Aubrey put the box of Declan Souder’s belongings borrowed from David’s attic on the coffee table, and I told the story. Kim and Chogyi Jake sat, listening to the whole thing.

Kim picked up the
Der Körper und der Geist
, paging through it with a frown. Chogyi Jake looked through the other contents of the box—a couple of books on architects named Speer and Troost whom I’d never heard of, a notebook of sketches, and a moth-eaten blue suit. In return for it, I’d left David my number, an offer to call him if I found out anything important, and stern instructions to start carrying his cell phone instead of leaving it at the office. If I’d asked for his car, I think he’d have given it to me.

“Poor bastard,” Kim said. “He must have been in pretty bad shape.”

“Worse than Kelly after his gels went bad,” Aubrey said in a tone of agreement. “This guy’s been trying not to sleep for months.”

“Kelly?” I said.

“Sorry,” Aubrey said. “Guy we used to know. I just meant that David was messed up. I did a couple small cantrips to lessen influences and help him sleep. Hopefully, they’ll give him a little cover. At least until we can get whatever this is resolved.”

“Speaking of,” I said. “What did we miss? And who’s the carpenter?”

Chogyi Jake tilted his head, unsure what I meant, and then followed my gaze to the new door frame and grinned.

“Harlan seems to have been taken by a generous impulse,” he said. “I think he’s still relieved that he’s not being sued. He sent building maintenance just after you left. I had them take out the security door too. I hope that’s all right?”

“Kicks all the ass,” I said.

“Other than that, we’ve been hitting the books,” Kim said. “Dividing up the material into piles. Division of labor and all that. No word from Oonishi yet, but I left him a voice mail. And I have more details on the interment ceremony. It does look like it would take someone of the same bloodline to open it.”

“Which fits in with the idea that Eric was looking to pop this thing loose,” I said. “He was keeping tabs on David on the theory that if Grace Memorial was the prison, then Declan Souder was the one the Invisible College sacrificed. Big Dave’s the key that opens the coffin.”

“It begins to look that way,” Chogyi Jake said.

Ex came in as Kim and I were setting the table, his face still marked by the pillowcase. He insisted that the whole story of David and Grandpa Del be retold, and then ignored dinner in favor of sitting alone in the living room with the German book. Aubrey rolled his eyes, but other than that, we let him be. The lasagna was out of the frozen section, but it tasted wonderful. Kim had brought a couple bottles of red wine that went with it beautifully. I relaxed in my chair. The conversation wandered off the subject of riders and magic quickly, turning to things like the story of Kim’s sister accidentally running over their mother’s leg with a truck and Aubrey and Chogyi Jake debating when exactly Quentin Tarantino had jumped the shark. It was as if we’d all tacitly agreed to step back, take a breath, and just have a quiet dinner among friends.

I went along with it, talking movies and books and politics, but it was playing a role. I wanted to relax into a simple, uncomplicated dinner. I could act like I was, but inside, I felt like I was lined up for a race and waiting for the starting gun.

After dinner, Chogyi Jake and Kim cleaned up while Aubrey brewed some distinctly nondecaf coffee. I headed back out to the living room where the blueprints of Grace Memorial still lay unfurled. Ex nodded to me, but didn’t speak. I sat cross-legged on the floor and let my fingers trace the curves and lines of the hospital. Even at this level of abstraction, it looked overpacked and organic. I found myself thinking of dissections in high school biology. Frogs and fetal pigs. The blueprints had the same feel. Here was something that had been hidden, brought to light.

And just like with the frogs, I wasn’t quite sure what I was looking at.

Sleep didn’t come easy that night. I’d expected it to. I was tired enough, but also restless. The tension that dinner had tried to dispel was seeping back. Every time I closed my eyes, images popped up like a slideshow—Grace Memorial glowering out at the street through the huge compound eye of its windows, the face of the red-haired man who’d attacked me, the coffin opening. And every time I opened my eyes, the darkness pressing in at the bed made me think about being buried alive. The interment ceremony. Some poor bastard having the unreal force of a rider driven into him, and then the coffin closed. I told myself that I couldn’t imagine how horrible that would be, but the truth was I could almost feel it: the painful, electric rush of the spirit entering my flesh; the constriction of the coffin; the air growing thick even before the sound of earth being shoveled over it had faded. I stared at the distant, dark ceiling above me and wondered how long Declan Souder had been alive. A normal person, it might have been hours. With the support of a rider, anything was possible. For all I knew, the man was still alive, down there in the darkness.

Aubrey muttered in his sleep, turning his back to me and pulling a pillow over his head. His back rose and fell with slow, soft breath. My hand tapped at my leg, and I noticed that I was humming a song. It was a kid’s gospel song I’d sung in church group about a million times.
I’ve got the joy, joy, joy, joy down in my heart, down in my heart, down in my heart
. But the voice I heard singing in my head was a man’s and the words had changed themselves.

I’ve got the boy, boy, boy, boy down in the dark
Down in the dark
Down in the dark
I’ve got the boy, boy, boy, boy down in the dark
Down in the dark he’ll stay

My skin felt like it wanted to crawl off. I sat up. It didn’t matter how tired I was, I wasn’t sleeping. Even if it was only because I didn’t want to know what kind of dreams bubbled up out of a mind that was writing songs like that for itself. I got up, fumbled into my bathrobe as quietly as I could, and stepped out of the bedroom. The glow of light from the living room was a relief.

Ex was still on the couch, hunched over
Der Körper und der Geist
, one hand holding back his long, pale hair, one on the page. He was smiling like a wolf that’s just scented a rabbit. The west wall had been stripped of art. Instead, it had about twenty wide, yellow Post-it notes with bits of information on them, and half a dozen pictures stuck to the wall with thumbtacks. A picture of David taken from Eric’s big box o’ surveillance was posted by the door just under an image of his grandfather that I recognized from the Wikipedia article. One of the Post-it notes written in Chogyi Jake’s hand read
CCU/fMRI suite—ley line connection?
Another one beside it said
CIVIL DEFENSE WARD
in block letters I didn’t recognize and assumed were Kim’s. The whole thing reminded me of a homicide board out of a murder mystery.

“You all right?” Ex asked without looking up.

“Can’t sleep,” I said. “Creeped myself out. I’ll try crashing again in a little bit. Did Kim take off?”

“No. She’s in the new guest room. I loaned her a T-shirt and a towel. I assume that’s all right?”

“Sure, of course. How’s she holding up?”

“She’s a professional,” Ex said. His tone made it a high compliment. I wanted to follow up, dig more. How did she seem when I wasn’t in the room? Did she talk about Aubrey at all, and what did she say? I couldn’t think of a way to ask that didn’t seem weird and petty. I let it drop.

“Hey,” I said, “I didn’t ask how things went with the chaplain. Did you meet up with him?”

“Did,” Ex said. “Nice guy. Totally out of his depth. He’s aware that something’s happening at the hospital, but he’s spending his time and energy ministering to the patients and praying for guidance.”

“Doesn’t sound like you have much use for that,” I said. “I thought you were a big prayer kind of guy.”

Ex sat back. His eyes were narrow and intense. With his unbound hair spilling down his face, he looked softer, but it was deceptive. From the first time I’d met him, Ex had never seemed anything less than driven. Wrongheaded sometimes, condescending and paternalistic. Frightened sometimes. Even brokenhearted. But never soft. For a moment it seemed significant that he and I were the only ones awake.

“I am a big prayer kind of guy,” he said. “But I have a more nuanced idea of prayer than Father Gilmore. For him, it’s a way to not take responsibility. When he gives a problem over to God, he thinks he’s done, you know? Yesterday, he wanted guidance. Today, I showed up. Tomorrow, he’s still going to be asking for guidance. I don’t have a lot of patience with that.”

“Sounds like you didn’t think much of him,” I said. A stack of files sat, ignored, at Ex’s side. I picked them up just to have room to sit.