Darkwalker: A Tale of the Urban Shaman (15 page)

She peered around the room. Rok had occasionally grumbled about the mess, but Morgan would just dump whatever inconvenienced her off a seat or a table, though she was careful to put it in an appropriate spot. One-handed, she shifted the treasurer’s photos off a chair and slumped them against a pile of transcripts of interviews with his associates. She plunked down in the chair and shoved some files aside to set her cup down on the table.

I sipped appreciatively at the coffee. Remembered belatedly to mutter, “Thanks.”

Morgan chuckled. I could hear Rok stirring in the other room, and the shower went on.

“
You getting anywhere?” Morgan asked.

“
Dunno yet,” I muttered. “Maybe.”

Morgan nodded, got up with her coffee, abandoning any attempt at conversation. She knew what I was like at times like this. “Parade’s at ten,” she said, heading for their room.

“
Ceremony is at four,” I said. I had my dress tunic already laid out on my bed. “I already told Roth we might not make the parade. You go without me if you want.”

Morgan laughed. She knew I hated parades. She said something else as she vanished into the room she shared with Rok, but I didn’t catch it. I was already back to my contemplation of the Beast’s calendar.

When the Beast takes his first victim, the fishing boat captain, Summersend is five weeks away. It’s not quite first quarter past the full moon, a Thursday. It would have been bright that night, the three-quarter moon shining off the water. The Beast walks onto the boat and kills him there. Eight days later he takes the teacher, Juan Castro. The weather was bad that night, no view of the last quarter moon. Castro was killed in an enclosed bridge between two of the college buildings. Private, like the boat, and indoors. Fitch, the guardsman, is taken the night before the dark moon, a Sunday night. He’s on patrol, apparently gets dragged into the shelter of a tramway station. This is a little bolder, more exposed. He’s taking his victim off the street, not coming to him in a place he thinks of as secure. Then nothing for almost two weeks, the whole of the waxing moon, until two days before full, a Monday. That’s when Suzi Mascarpone of the Harlot’s Guild gets taken in the street, out in the open, and Auden attempts to capture the Beast. The timing blows the “waning moon, baneful magic” connection all to hell. Two days later, the Beast walks into the guard’s wardroom and kills the chief. Moon’s just past full, waning again, one week to Summersend.

If you’re looking for baneful magic, you usually look at the waning moon first. But could the Beast be running on the sun instead? Midsummer is the equivalent of the full moon, while Summersend is the equivalent of a moon in its first waning quarter. I wondered what, if anything, we could expect of the Beast on Summersend.

The Summersend ceremony commenced at four P.M., but it was already feeling like sunset in the square, shadowed as it was by the tall buildings on all sides. Central Square was a wide open plaza in front of the main entrance to the CA Tower. For the city’s Summersend celebration the big fountain in the center of the plaza had been emptied of water and a huge Corn Guy had been set up in it. At least, I assumed it was a Corn Guy. The figure must have been twenty-five or thirty feet tall, but as we entered the plaza that afternoon it was still shrouded by what appeared to be a parachute. On the side of the square opposite the CA Tower a temporary stage had been set up, hung with speakers and sound equipment, but it was empty at the moment, and the crowd’s attention was focused on the steps of the CA Tower, where Roth, Weldt, Gage, and several other city officials were gathered, along with the three of us, and the priests and ministers of the city’s major churches and temples. Among the black robes and suits of the more conservative denominations I saw Thudisar Tyburn in his pale-blue over-robe, a woman in the orange robes of a Buddhist monk, and the representative of the Church of the King in his formal white spangled jumpsuit. Between the tower steps and the fountain with the shrouded Guy stood a huge cart filled with produce: bundles of corn, wheat, baskets of fruit and vegetables, and of fresh fish on beds of ice. I knew that beneath this pile would be dozens of financial statements and year-end reports, representing the less tangible fruits of the city’s harvest.

Speeches were made, of course, though there was nothing particularly memorable about any of them, and certainly no mention made of the predations of the killer we were calling the Beast. I didn’t think the Beast would appear and wreak havoc at the public Blessing ceremony. That wasn’t his style. But even though it was unlikely he’d appear, he was clearly on everyone’s mind. Everywhere you looked there were tight mouths, haunted eyes.

When the appropriate time came, city guards moved the closest of the crowd back, the priests and ministers ranged out in a circle around the Harvest Barrow, holding their hands out toward it, and the entire crowd seemed to hold its breath as I stepped forward to pronounce the Blessing of the Harvest. I had never performed the blessing for a crowd as large as this, nor had I ever used a microphone to do so, but I didn’t feel particularly nervous.

I wasn’t quite prepared, however, for what followed. At the end of the Blessing the assembled community traditionally joins in a tone, and the crowd assembled in Central Square did so with great enthusiasm. I’d never heard a tone chanted by a crowd that large, and I could feel their joined voices vibrating through the pavement beneath my feet. For a moment I wondered if the vibration might actually cause some damage to the structures around, it was so loud, and then I realized that was silly. Bay City had been celebrating Summersend in just this way for many years; surely there was no danger of such a thing. There were probably outdoor concerts that had a higher decibel level. What I was really reacting to, I reflected, was the intensity of emotion the crowd put into their tone. A whole city that had been living in fear was putting their hopes and desires into this great sound, wishing for blessings on the results of their labor, as well as relief from the threat that hung over them.

At the other side of the square a band had climbed onto the stage, and as the ceremony came to its end they began to play. I saw bottles being handed out, and people began dancing, despite the lack of space to move around in. The various dignitaries on the steps began to move around me, filing back into the tower, or down the steps through a cordon of guards. Now I had only to get through the formal reception upstairs, in the penthouse ballroom of the tower. I wasn’t looking forward to that.

Politics and diplomacy can be a bitch. They come with the job, of course, and we’re all trained to that stuff, but I’ve only ever met a couple of Railwalkers who actually liked that end of the work. The rest of us deal with it just because we’ve been drilled in the necessity.

Across the square I noticed a father and son. Dad was apparently explaining about the Corn Guy as Son stared up at the giant, shrouded shape, glancing between it and a corn dolly in his hand. I wondered what it was like to grow up with a knowledge of these ceremonies and traditions.

My Pa had never stood before a town’s Corn Guy and explained it to me. We never had a Yule tree, hunted colored eggs on Osterday, never hung corn dollies. My father considered all that stuff superstitious nonsense. As a kid, they were strange foreign practices that I never quite understood.

In the square, Mom joined Dad and Son, and I watched them vanish into the crowd together. My mother left when I was barely three, and from what I learned later in life, I can’t say I blame her. Oh, I suppose there’s some residual resentment left in me that she didn’t at least try to take me with her. But if she was anything like the other women I saw my father with over the years, that would have been at least as big a disaster as leaving me with my Pop turned out. Women like that, they just had no real “mother” genes in them. They’ll ooh and aah over a baby, sure; they’ll pinch a kid’s cheek and call him cunning and cute as a button. But don’t ask them to change a diaper, or clean the kid’s spit-up. I don’t really know if my mom was one of those women or not, but I guessed she probably was. There’s not much I do know for sure about my mother; my Pa never talked about her.

Pa wasn’t much better at being a father than his girlfriends were at mothering, come to that, but we got by somehow. He thought of himself as a professional gambler, and it was true he knew the games inside and out. There’s an old song about gambling, how you gotta know when to hold, and know when to fold. Pa knew all that shit. He knew the percentages on every game of chance there was, knew how to play ’em, too. But knowing is a different thing from doing. Gambling is an addiction, just like hooch or poppyshot, and however much intellectual knowledge an addict has about his chosen poison, he’s never really in control. All that knowledge just makes him think he is.

When I was a kid we were always on the move. Sometimes Pa was just feeling the urge, needing to move on to greener pastures, convinced that his luck would be better in the next town or city. Sometimes we were doing what he called the Kansas City Shuffle. Doing the KC Shuffle always meant that Pa had been losing bad and didn’t have the money to pay off his losses. That happened almost as often as him just getting itchy feet for their own sake.

I was woolgathering, I realized. Staring out unseeing over the desperately celebratory crowd, dancing and drinking before the shrouded figure of the giant Guy, I was thinking back to my days on the road with Pa. I felt a touch on my elbow, and turned to face Micah Roth.

“
Coming along with us?” he asked.

“
Of course,” I said, and turned to join the procession to the elevators. Why was my father so much on my mind these days, I wondered. It wasn’t like I’d seen him in... how many years was it? Ten at least, probably more like twelve or thirteen, if I’d stopped to do the math. Perhaps it was just being in Bay City, or perhaps contact with Micah Roth was provoking old memories, though Roth had said nothing about our previous meetings.

Waiting for the elevator in the vast lobby, the burble of conversation going on around me, I settled my Crane Bag more comfortably under my tunic, feeling the shape of the small rolled paper cylinder inside it. Yes, I’d been in Bay City with my father several times as a child, but the last time I’d actually seen him, it had been in further north, in Alturo. Which was ironic, I suppose, considering. The first time I remembered being in Alturo I was about eight or so, I guess.

Our travels had brought us back north again, and we had landed at the house of one of my father’s older friends, a couple by the name of Bill and Patty Morris. The Morrises had a largish spread just outside the city, a ramshackle farmhouse and several outbuildings, all of which were filled to the brim with old junk and bric-a-brac. The farmhouse was chock full as well, both with old furniture and odds and ends, as well as with live bodies—the Morrises, their four kids, two dogs and six cats.

The couple were a study in contrasts. Patty was as broad as she was tall, a miniature mountain of a woman with a sharp, beaklike nose in the middle of her soft, round face. Bill was medium height and thin, bearded and balding, with a pug nose and blunt features. They scraped a living for their large family with a variety of small business ventures—besides dealing junk (the hand-painted sign declared “Anteeks,” but hardly anything in the place really deserved the name), Bill did a bit of small engine and appliance repair and hired out for haulage with his oldest son, using Bill’s beat-up panel truck. Patty took in washing and did a bit of seamstressing, read tarot cards and cast horoscopes, and acted as midwife and herbal doctor for the local women.

Everything in the Morris place was strange to my youthful senses. Traveling with my Pa I’d met rich people and poor, stayed in palatial suites and fleabag hotels, but I had never spent much time in an actual home, never met people who were both so poor and so happy, had a life so rich. The smell of the place was a strange stew of spices and herbs, incense and old cooking smells, dogs and cats and dust and other things I couldn’t identify.

I’d also seldom had home-made food, unless you count the peanut butter sandwiches or beans out of a can that we dined on now and then when Pop’s luck was running bad. Dinner at the Morris’s house was lively and fairly noisy with five kids at the table, even though I didn’t contribute that much to the noise. I had spent very little time around kids my own age, and was more than a little wary of them.

After dinner I followed Bill and my Pa outside, Bill carrying a large flashlight, my father smoking a cigarette. Bill led the way to a small, padlocked shed beside the swaybacked barn.

“
I’m really sorry, Doc,” Bill said. “But it’s been four, almost five years, and we really need the space.” My father’s name was Bryce, but no one ever called him anything but “Doc.” Since he knew nothing about medicine, to this day I have no idea why they called him that.

“
S’okay, Bill,” my father said. “I understand. Appreciate you keeping the stuff this long.” He stared off into the distance, smoking, while Bill fumbled through a ring with what looked to me like about a million keys on it, until he found the right key to fit the padlock.

Inside the small shed were a few chairs, a table and dresser, a disassembled bedstead, and a pile of boxes. Unprepossessing, maybe, but I was fascinated. Here was all I would ever see of my father’s past, of my own life as it had been before my earliest memories decomposed into fragmentary, dreamlike images. Before my mother left us. I stared at the collection. The headboard against the back wall looked like a wide tombstone standing mute watch over the remnants of my father’s past.