I didn’t think Fletcher would dare tail me again today, not now I knew she was following me. Course, that left her free to stake out the morgue, or the office, or any of the half-dozen places I could reliably be found, that I’d have to return to with Robin in tow. So I slunk back to the morgue still on my more circuitous route, stopping at the intersections and doubling back along the longer streets to confuse any watchers who might have joined me.
Maybe I threw them off. Maybe I just looked like a fool. I doubted anyone would peel out from the shadows to let me know.
Usher had locked the doors of the morgue and hung a sign over the door handle: Closed, it read. Report any deaths to the hotline or refrain from dying until we are open again for receiving. Apologies for the inconvenience (though death is assuredly a much greater one). I looked at it and sighed, before walking over to the nearest window and slipping my fingers underneath the brass-and-iron lantern he kept burning there. Even in the daytime flames still flickered against up its glass edges—some superstition he hadn’t escaped.
Not that I was any better. How could I be? How could I disentangle superstition from nightmare—how could I distinguish the real forces that pressed in against my psyche every waking moment from the fake? My fingers scrabbled under the lantern for the spare key I knew he kept there, and they scrabbled on empty brick.
No key. “Ah, hell, Usher,” I said. “Why’s this what you haven’t kept the same?”
I’d thrown the last of my change that I might have used for a payphone off the edge of a building a couple dozen minutes ago, to impress a woman who hadn’t seemed all that impressed by it. Nor did I think Usher would answer his hotline anyway, not if he was engrossed in his work. The dead would keep as long as he needed them to. I wouldn’t.
I knew Usher. Maybe I knew him better than anyone else. I paced back and forth in front of the windowsill—where would he keep his spare? The man was absent-minded enough, almost literally so given his out-of-body nightmare, that he’d know he needed one. He thought he was clever and sometimes he was; but always, always, his cleverness came at a 90-degree angle to the straight lines in which everyone else thought. I’d need to hop those tracks, follow that strange perpendicular train of thought if I wanted to see where it led.
Half a circuit around the outside of the morgue didn’t get me anything. I stopped, frowned, and doubled back, lifting up the Closed sign again. There was a faint weight at the bottom, and I ran my fingers along the cardstock paper until I found the telltale bulge of an air pocket left open. “Something everyone handles, but no one looks beyond the words,” I muttered. “And you don’t even have to go out of your way to use it, since it’s attached to the door.” My fingers caught something harder, and I started to slide it free. “Now let’s not tear anything, so you don’t know I’ve found it…”
It was a black plastic key he’d gotten cast, light enough that it wouldn’t measurably imbalance the sign unless you knew what to look for. I tossed it in my hands a few times before unlocking the door. I ducked through the open frame, tucked the key back into its sheath in the sign, and locked the door behind me. An odd feeling, to be sneaking into a place that should have been friendly. I grimaced and flicked the lights on. “Usher!” I shouted. “Usher! What’re you up to in here?”
There was a rustling from somewhere on the lower floors. I strolled over to the stairwell and waited for Usher to poke his head out through the door. “Ah, Starling,” he said when he did. “I thought I’d locked that door, hmm?”
“It’s still locked.”
“I see.” He frowned. “Is Mar Low with you? There were a few things I was hoping to ask her…”
“Have to find your own time to do it, then,” I said. I descended the stairs until I was standing next to him. “We were on a tight timeline before. We’ve never not been. But the wolves have picked up our scent again, Usher, and I don’t want to wait until they close in. Tell me what you’ve found.”
Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
I already knew which room he’d have picked out—the smallest operating theatre available, almost child-sized. I let him lead the way regardless. “There are only so many methods available to me that will not harm her, hmm?” he said. “Even with that limited capability, like fumbling around in the dark with blinders on, I’ve been able to eliminate a range of possibilities, hmm-”
“So nothing. You’ve found nothing.”
“I am not built to dredge truth from dreams, Hexel. There is no counterfactual, no test I can run to prove or disprove anything.”
Compared to the dim, flickering, dusky lights of the hallway, Usher kept his operating theater bathed in a searing white light. Robin was seated on a too-tall table with paper across its top, feet dangling. She looked bored, and one of her pupils was more dilated than the other. “Starling!” she said when she saw me. “What’s happening? He’s just been shining a bunch of lights in my eyes.”
He shrugged. “Calling them the window to the soul is wishful thinking, hmm? Yet I am not supposed to dissect you to find the source of these…dreams? Visions? Memories? Still I am unsure. Looking back through your eyes must serve well enough, then.”
“Do you know anything more than when I left you here?”
“I still don’t like doctors,” Robin said.
“These are not memories,” Usher said. “They don’t arise from the same source. I hypothesize that Robin is, for whatever reason, still tethered to this beast of a nightmare, hmm? Its fearsome presence has left an indelible mark in her mind. But to prove that, I would need to examine her memories of that night, and they are still locked away behind a wall I cannot break.”
“Someone could,” I said. “Someone’s already offered. Drakon.”
Robin leaped down off the table. She walked over to where Usher kept a rack of his instruments and ran a finger across them, plucking what looked like an ancillary sphere mounted on a stick from the wall and turning it over in her hands. “Even if we catch it,” she said, “what happens next? I don’t remember…then…but we’ve seen what the monster can do here, now. It will kill you, it will kill all of you, and I don’t want that to happen. I don’t want you to chase it down because you’ve found out where it is from me.”
“The problem isn’t that we’re suicidal,” I said. “The problem is we don’t know a damn thing. That monster might be stalking us right now-” I paused, and the floorboards above me creaked obligingly. Robin’s eyes widened- “and we wouldn’t know, cause we don’t know how it operates. You’re the only one who’s seen it.”
Usher plucked the tool from Robin’s hands. He spun it, and the concentric rings expanded outwards. “Dragon or Jabberwock, then?”
“You have neither?” I said.
“No one lets me keep a stock, hmm? No independent dealers.”
“I’m not walking into either den.” Philippa’s words came back to me. “And I’m not giving them that information about the monster. Not for free.”
Robin looked between us. “Whenever you’re talking like that, it means you’re thinking of something bad. I recognize it. You have to tell me what you’re thinking.”
“Alright. I’ll tell you,” I said. “It’s those damned nightmare power trips. Dragon and Jabberwock, powder and vial. They’ll turn the little key in your brain and let the memories come spilling out.” I chuckled. “Maybe that botched job at the warehouse is why you started dreaming again, all those fumes seeping up through your nose. But they won’t let us do it again. They don’t want us getting our hands on it.”
“I thought people were buying it,” she said. “Can’t you? Just a little bit?”
“I bet I’m well blacklisted now. And it’s about the administration, too—I don’t want to break you, Robin, but I’ve never done this before. If we could get someone alone, pressure or threaten them or something-” Oh. No. Surely that wouldn’t work, I thought. It’d be a plan resting on gum and spider string, and if one line broke then it’d fall through. But it could work.
“That look’s not good either,” Robin said. “None of yours are, actually.”
“The good news is,” I said, “it doesn’t make any more enemies than we already have. We’ve picked up a hanger-on, a tail following us to see what we’re up to. Our old friend Fletcher, from Jabberwock.” Robin blanched a little, at that. “I don’t like her much either. But she’s got pull and she knows how the drug works, and most importantly, I’m pretty sure she’s following us alone. I don’t know what she’s hoping to see, I don’t know where she wants to tail us to. But, if we really want to know what this monster’s up to, if we want to know what really happened to Chesnes and to you, Robin…”
She was rooted to the spot. She didn’t answer for a second, finding a spot on the floor to stare at in seeming enrapturement. Then, ever so slightly, she nodded.
“Then we’re going to set a trap.”