Fathomless

 

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To Howard, for the feverish cosmic dreams

 

AFTER THE FIREWORKS

Arkham's
Independence Day festivities had drawn thousands of souls to its harbor, including Redemption Orne, who looked for a single soul of peculiar quality. To conserve magic, he'd dropped his customary illusion and walked as the young man who'd escaped mortality centuries before. The candor posed little danger; in Arkham, only two living men knew his true face, and the dead he disregarded.

He had started hunting at noon. With nightfall, the barges in the harbor began to vent their pyrotechnic cargoes, goading the crowd to an exhilaration that deafened his psychic “hearing.” Redemption retreated from the boardwalk to the comparative peace of Saltonstall Park. Where benches afforded a view of the fireworks, gawkers still clustered. He walked deeper under the trees and leaned against a trunk to regain his bearings. After the show, he could work the throngs milling homeward. Except—

Except …

Except he might not have to. Though the din of the fireworks continued, a far subtler vibration rattled the bones of his inner ears. Ambient energy ebbed as someone nearby drew upon it. The person was no magician—they took too little energy for that—but they had the spark Redemption needed.

He traced the ebb to a clearing where Captain Saltonstall, in bronze, defied King and customs men. Present-day patriots had deserted their Revolutionary hero and left the clearing empty except for a boy not much older than Sean Wyndham, who'd last summer answered Redemption's ad for an apprentice. The sparse beard he'd managed to raise emphasized rather than disguised his youth. Youthful, too, even childish, was his hunch over the artist's pad on his knees. To observe unobserved, Redemption paused beyond the glare of the sodium lamps that allowed the boy to draw. On the bench beside him slumped a scarred leather backpack. Equally scuffed were his work boots, and the knees and cuffs of his jeans were frayed. Add to these signs of rough travel a Mohawk lapsing into all-over carrot-red stubble, and the boy hadn't seen home for some time.

Nyarlathotep clearly favored Redemption, to send him such a perfect donor.

Before entering the light, he took out his phone and feigned conversation. His ploy had the desired effect: the boy looked up, wary but unstartled, read him as harmless, and returned to his drawing. As Redemption approached the boy's bench, he channeled magic into his voice, warming it to a trust-inducing balm. “Okay, I'm off. Tomorrow, lunch. Don't forget.”

The boy's hunched shoulders relaxed. He sat up, blinking.

Redemption halted in front of the bench. “Hey,” he said. “Somebody else who doesn't like fireworks?”

“They're all right.” The boy flipped his pad shut. “I was going to check them out, but I got distracted.”

“Drawing?”

The boy hesitated before nodding.

“Cool. I draw some. Can I have a look?”

Another hesitation, but Redemption's balmed words affected this target strongly. The boy's spark explained part of that susceptibility. More, though, his simultaneous shrug and grin belied a hunger for contact. “I guess so. If you like scary stuff.”

“I think I can handle it,” Redemption said. He sat to receive the pad. Handing it over, the boy said, “The base sucks. I blew the perspective.”

The minor errors in Saltonstall's statue were unimportant; the strength of the sketch lay in the creature coiled around the monument. Its upper body was human, female, lissome. However, its smile revealed viper fangs, its eyes had slitted pupils, and from the neat waist down, the body turned into a python that constricted Saltonstall's bronze legs and granite pedestal, then trailed off into the grass. It wasn't a novel concept, but the execution showed conviction. In some remote country of his soul, the boy knew monsters existed.

At his age, Redemption's demons had been the trite ones of woodcuts, easily vanquished by God's Word. Well, Redemption had learned better, and he'd teach the boy better, too, though with mercy, so he remembered nothing of the monster's clasp.

“Hey, come on,” the boy said. “Don't shit me that you're really scared.”

Redemption stilled the hand tremor the boy must have seen. “Not scared. Maybe jealous. This is damn good. You been to art school or what?”

“High school's all, so far.”

The boy's slight breathlessness signaled that honey, too—praise—would work. “What's the ‘GL' here? Your signature?”

“Stands for Garth Lynx.” Who cleared his throat and confessed, “Not my real name. It's what I'm gonna go by, drawing comics.”

“That's what you want to do?”

“Yeah. I got this series idea, too. Apocalypse, but not with zombies. Zombies been run into the ground.”

Redemption tapped the sketch. “So, with lamiae instead?”

And with that remark, he had set the hook. Garth said, “You know what lamiae are?”

He didn't laugh—irony would have introduced an errant note into his vocal snare. “Vampires or succubi. Snaky, like yours.”

“Snakes rock. I had two before I ditched my mom's place, a reticulated and an albino Burmese. Had to give them to my friend.”

“Why'd you ditch your mom's?”

Garth's eyelids sank to half-mast. “Her boyfriend's a dick. He burned one of my sketchpads. Said drawing's gay, get a real job. I'm, what, mowing lawns like you? Big fucking man. He busted me for that.” Garth pulled back his upper lip to display a broken incisor. “So I busted the headlights on his truck. I had to leave then, but I wanted out anyway.”

The duller the man, the more he wanted to stamp out any spark of magic he encountered. Redemption might
use
this boy's spark—he
would
use it, now that it was practically in his hand—but he wouldn't destroy it. Into the balm and honey of his voice, he trickled molten iron, compulsion: “You were right to get out of that, Garth.”

“Tony,” not-really-Garth murmured.

“No,
Garth,
because that's the name you've picked for your work. It'll be good work. You'll do all right.”

“How d'you know?”

Redemption flipped through the sketchpad. “I'm looking at these, that's how. But you're tired.”

“Kind of.”

“Tired right through.”

Garth's eyes finished closing. Redemption reached for his backpack. He slipped the pad inside. “You need sleep. I'll take care of you until you wake up. Then you can go wherever you need to.”

“Where's that?”

“Maybe you'll dream the answer.”

Garth smiled. His eyes opened, unfocused.

“Stand up.”

Garth stood, and Redemption eased the backpack onto his shoulders. “Follow,” he said.

On the main path through the park, they joined revelers pressing toward the parking lots. The fireworks were spent, and only the smell of gunpowder remained, a scorched phantom that would haunt Redemption and his prize all the way home.

*   *   *

Number
Five Lich Street was a modest Gothic Revival facing Arkham's oldest cemetery. The boneyard was full of ghosts Redemption had known in the flesh, but the hubbub of celebration must have driven them underground, for not even good Pastor Brattle poked out his spectral head to murmur about lambs bound for unholy sacrifice.

Inside the house, Redemption ordered Garth to shower, put on a hospital gown, and walk to the basement. The boy obeyed magical instruction until he reached the subcellar stairs. The balk was understandable, given his sensitivity to the uncanny. She who lay below gave off no odor save the attar of rose with which Redemption tried to sweeten her dreams. Usually the attar failed, and the spiritual fetor of nightmare, exquisite and (by her) exquisitely enjoyed, thickened the subcellar air.

Words of adamantine sternness brought Garth down the last steps and onto the waiting gurney. Restraints dangled from it, but Redemption relied instead on Geldman's Powder of Lethe, a bottle of which stood on the cart beside the gurney. He poured fine white dust onto his palm and gently blew it into Garth's nostrils. The boy's face contorted for a sneeze, then slackened again. Self-awareness flared in his eyes, then faded. His lids drooped closed. “Sleep,” Redemption said, so his words would drift with Garth into the deep waters. “I'll watch out for you, no worries.”

Garth sank beyond reach. Except for the slow heave of his chest, he lay motionless. For the next two months his dreams would be the kind one yearned to live in forever. Geldman guaranteed it.

Geldman had also helped devise a procedure to make one donor do the job of dozens. A rare occurrence, they'd agreed on the morality of the project, for who could argue with less hunting, no killing, even no lasting harm? Geldman's Resanguinary Tonic would accelerate donor blood production, if one could keep the donor hydrated and fed. Redemption had tried IV lines, but they needed frequent replacement and monitoring beyond his scope. Less troublesome were Geldman's “reverse leeches,” larvae of the between-spaces he'd long been molding to sustain unconscious patients.

He'd lent Redemption the one that lolled in a tank on the lower shelf of the gurney. It looked like a jaundiced maggot swollen to watermelon size. Its sole feature was a ropy proboscis that stretched like rubber as Redemption pulled it from the tank and looped it around Garth's left wrist. Its tip nuzzled the boy's inner arm, then flattened into a suction cup and gripped tight. Redemption didn't see it thrust a hollow harpoon into the vein it had selected, but its slow throb told him the leech had begun to pump water and nutrients into Garth's undernourished body. It had absorbed them from the clear broth of its bath, Geldman-calculated to sustain both leech and man. With a precision Redemption couldn't approach, the leech would also administer the Lethe and Resanguinary Tonic he'd periodically mix into the bath.