From Black Rooms (13 page)

bus parked across the street. The driver emerged with his scarecrow arms clamped over his head like the jaws of a vise to hold his skul together. Dressed in black jeans and a Bauhaus concert T-shirt that years of washing had Swiss-cheesed with holes, he tottered toward them, flinching and lurching as if struck by unseen blows.

Natalie rushed forward as he faltered and dropped to his knees. Her eyes widened when Calvin Criswel lifted his face, his cheeks scarred by tear tracks.

"P
lease help me," he rasped.

Natalie and Serena buttressed Criswel as he shuffled into the condo. While Serena eased him down onto the living-room sofa, Natalie shut the drapes. Outside the window, she could see Sanjay Prashad seated in his car, having a heated conversation with someone on his cel phone.

The first few minutes they tried to question him, Criswel merely held his head and moaned. Natalie sat down beside him and touched his shoulder in sympathy.

"What's wrong? How can we help?"

He jerked away from her hand as if it were a branding iron. "Make them stop!"

She withdrew to the opposite end of the couch. "Make
who stop?"

"You know. The voices. The--the souls." She traded a startled glance with Serena. "Whose souls are you hearing?"

"Just people. In my apartment, on the street. I don't even know who they are. Please...you guys are Violets. Tel me how you get rid of them."

Natalie remembered the dark glasses Criswel had worn the last time she'd talked with him and how she'd wondered if he might be on drugs. Perhaps he was

suffering some kind of bad trip now. "Calvin, please don't take this the wrong way," she began, "but if you're hearing voices, maybe you should see a doctor. You're not a Violet."

"I am now." He put his fingers to his eyes, and for one awful instant, Natalie thought he was going to pul an Oedipus and pluck the bal s from their sockets. Instead, he pinched the soft green contact lenses off his corneas, flicked them away with disgust, and stared at her with eyes unlike any she'd seen before: irises zigzagged with a corona of violet around the pupil yet speckled with green, like the inlaid surface of a Faberge egg. "See?" Natalie could not respond. A breach of Nature's laws, those misbegotten hybrid eyes fil ed her with the fascination and repugnance ordinarily reserved for sideshow abominations. She suddenly understood the revulsion Violets must inspire in ordinary people, a thought that further sickened her.

Serena lunged forward to grip Criswel by the jaw, tilting his head up and spreading one of his eyes wide to scrutinize the mutant flower of its iris. "It's a trick," she snapped. "Probably sent here by Carleton Amis himself."

Criswel let out a hysterical laugh. "Are you kidding?

He'd kil me if he found out I was here."

His turn of phrase jarred Natalie, reminding her that, while they spoke, Sanjay Prashad sat right outside their door, squealing to Lord-knows-who on his cel phone.

"What does Amis have to do with this?" she asked Criswel . "How did he do this to you?"

"Why don't you ask him?" he sassed back. "You guys were buds before he ever came to me."

Serena evidently didn't find any fakery in his eyes, for she released him with a shove. "Funny how you didn't know who Amis was the last time we met. Any other lost memories you'd care to recover?"

"I'l tel you anything! Just--make it stop!" Criswel clutched his temples and let out a yelp.

Natalie winced in empathy. He was acting exactly as she often had as a child, before her Violet training at the School. "Is someone knocking right now, Calvin?" He sniveled. "Knocking?"

She clarified the conduit slang. "A soul. Is a soul bothering you right now?"

"Yes! Yes, already! Make it stop!"

Serena gave a derisive snort. "He's lying. I don't feel squat."

Natalie frowned. She didn't sense anyone knocking, either. Indeed, she'd bought this condo because it was brand-new at the time, so it could not serve as a touchstone for any deceased prior residents. Of course, the electromagnetic energy of certain souls constantly circulated through the atmosphere like a free-floating ether, but they seldom knocked unless a Violet

established a quantum connection with them by making physical contact with some object the dead individuals had touched during their lifetime. If Criswel was somehow picking up those random entities, he was a far more sensitive Violet than either Natalie or Serena. Too incredible to believe, but...

"I'l be back in a sec." Natalie rushed from the living room to the kitchen, where she snatched a rol of aluminum foil from one of the drawers beside the stove. Returning to her seat beside Criswel on the couch, she ripped off a large rectangle of the foil and handed it to him. "Wrap this around your head."

He looked at the sheet of metal in his hands with miserable chagrin. "You've got to be joking." Natalie blushed, and even Serena regarded her as if she'd lost her mind. "It won't work as wel as a ful soul cage," she said by way of explanation, "but the metal should serve as a buffer to the souls' energy. Like driving under a bridge wil fade out your radio

reception."

Calvin Criswel sighed, then molded the foil over his cranium, pressing it down over his curly brown hair and crimping it to keep it in place, until his head looked like a Jiffy Pop bag. The fact that he was wil ing to endure such an indignity convinced Natalie that his desperation was real.

Crowned with aluminum, he tilted his head this way and that as if it were a satel ite dish. His face brightened. "I think it's working!"

Serena folded her arms with sarcastic casualness.

"Swel . Now, if the voices in your head are done talking, mind if we have a few words?"

Natalie scolded her with a glance and took on the role of good cop. "Calvin, if we're going to help you, we need to know how you got this way--and what

Carleton Amis has to do with it."

He goggled at them, perplexed. "But I thought you guys knew al about it. You're in the Corps, aren't you?" Natalie hesitated. "Um, that's kind of a long story--"

"Guilty," Serena cut in. "Mind tel ing me what I'm supposed to know?"

"Project Persephone." Criswel paused for a reaction and seemed surprised by the puzzlement he got in

return. "That is the name, isn't it?"

"The name of what?" Serena demanded.

"Of this." He indicated his eyes. "It's some kind of DNA hocus-pocus that's supposed to make me like

you."

Project Persephone, Natalie repeated silently,
wondering why the name sounded so familiar. Then it came to her: the movie company Carleton Amis had

claimed to work for. Persephone Productions.

She strained to dredge up what little she'd learned of Greek mythology in her English classes at the School. Persephone had been the beautiful daughter of Demeter, the goddess of grain and fertility. Determined to make Persephone his bride, Hades, god of the underworld, tricked her into eating part of an enchanted

pomegranate, after which she was condemned to reside with him for a portion of every year, presiding over the dead as his queen. If what Calvin Criswel said was true, that's what Project Persephone intended to grant-mastery over the dead. Natalie fought to quel her disquiet. She felt as if part of her birthright had been stolen from her, as if the Corps had cloned her without her knowledge. It isn't possible, she thought, but she could tel that even Serena's skepticism had begun to slip into fear.

"You say Amis did this to you. How?" Serena bent until her own violet eyes peered into Criswel 's two-toned ones. "Why?"

The artist took a long breath, either to calm himself or to stal for time to get his story straight. "Amis needed some paintings--"

"Some forgeries," Natalie amended.

Criswel bobbed his head, a tacit admission of guilt.

"Given my record, he knew I wouldn't risk the job unless he had something...special to offer."

"He offered to make you a Violet?" She shook her head. "Why on earth would you want to do that?"

"I was washed up. My career was over. Amis promised me a job with the Corps's Art Division." Criswel stated this rationale with rote concision, but the way he avoided her gaze made Natalie certain he hadn't

revealed his true reasons. Before she could probe further, however, Serena continued to gril him.

"If Amis didn't send you, then how did you find us?"

"The art community is a smal world...and word gets around about someone who does a painting like Self
Portrait as a Woman." He snuck another glance at
Natalie. "I cal ed a few of my connections."

"Then how do we find Amis?" Serena demanded.

"I don't know."

"What's his real name?"

"I
don't know."

"Come on, Calvin! You're doing business with the man, aren't you? How do you set up your meetings?"

"He sets them up. I give him the painting, he gives me the treatment--that's it. I don't even know his phone number."

A plan took shape in Natalie's mind, hazy as an

unfocused telescope image. "When's your next rendezvous scheduled?"

Criswel 's silvered head drooped. "Saturday. But there's no way--the picture isn't even close to being done."

"What if I could finish it for you? Do you think you're up to meeting Amis?"

He slapped his palms on his temples. "If I can keep these dorks out of my head."

Natalie nodded. "Can you bring us the painting?" Criswel shook his head so hard he had to grab the foil to keep it from fal ing off. "No way. I can't go back there. A woman--she kil ed herself in that

apartment...

He didn't need to go on.

"That's okay. I can get it," Natalie said. "But where are you going to stay?"

Calvin Criswel 's eyes glazed over with the desolation of the suddenly homeless. "I don't know." Natalie screwed her mouth shut, resolving not to be a pushover. But he reminded her so much of herself as a child, tossed and tugged by tidal forces she could barely comprehend, that she couldn't help feeling sorry for him.

"You could crash here, I guess."

He pounced on the invitation like a mouse on cheese.

"You wouldn't even notice me, I swear. I'l even take the couch."

Natalie tightened her mouth again. "The couch is mine."

"The floor, then. Heck, I'l sleep in the closet if I have to. Please--let me stay."

"Whoa. Cut." Serena chopped her hands together like a movie clapboard. "You can't trust this guy, Nat. He's in league with Amis."

Natalie sized up Calvin Criswel . With his head capped in what looked like a toddler's space helmet, he seemed as harmless and helpless as a four-year-old.

"He needs to find Amis even more than we do," she decided.

Serena grunted grudging assent. "If you say so, girlfriend. But you ain't going to his place alone." She snapped her fingers at Criswel and opened her palm.

"Gimme your keys."

He surrendered his key ring without objection. "The painting's on the drafting table next to the easel," he volunteered. "Storm on the Sea of Galilee." Natalie knew an act of fraud shouldn't impress her, but it did. "You paint Rembrandt from scratch? Without his help?"

"Yep."

If it had been up to her, Natalie would have talked shop right then, pumping Criswel for details on his

technique, but Cal ie pounded down the stairs, dragging her grandfather by the hand.

"My favorite girl suggested we get pizza." Wade took in the scene's interrupted tension, noticed the stranger with the ridiculous shiny wrap on his head. "This is a bad time, isn't it?"

Cal ie aimed an index finger at Calvin. "See? That's the weird guy who showed up this morning." She turned her fearless face ful on the artist. "Are you Evan?" Natalie watched Criswel for any sign of recognition, but the name seemed to mean nothing to him.

"No," he said. "Sorry."

"Are you a bad man?" Cal ie asked.

He fidgeted before answering. "Depends who you ask, I guess," he replied, chuckling to make it sound like a joke.

Serena reached beneath her suit jacket to produce a stun gun, which she passed to Wade. "We've got to go. If he acts up while we're gone, zap him and cal the cops." Natalie's father clutched the weapon as if she'd handed him a live grenade. "I guess that's a negative on the pizza."

"Whatever. C'mon, Nat." Serena did not spare a glance at Calvin as she headed for the door.

Natalie, however, reached for his hand to comfort him, then recal ed how he'd shied from her touch. It occurred to her that she could serve as a touchstone for any number of dead people. In his heightened state of sensitivity, Calvin might even feel Natalie's murdered mother knocking if she made contact with his bare skin. She withdrew her arm. "You'l be safe here." His eyes grew liquid again. "Thank you," he whispered. She left him with a sympathetic smile, grabbed her canvas tote bag to fetch a change of clothes for him, and joined Serena outside.

"I guess we don't have to worry about being tailed," her friend remarked dryly. It took Natalie a moment to catch her drift.

Sanjay Prashad's car was gone.

11

Unfinished Business

THE NAACC'S ROUND-THE-CLOCK surveil ance

that Prashad's sudden absence worried her far more than his usual intimidation. No change in her

relationship with the Corps could be for the good, she thought, and she almost hoped that she'd see the

Security agent's black Mitsubishi in the rear-view mirror as she and Serena drove to Silver Lake. When they pul ed up in front of the mock Mediterranean vil a, however, Prashad was stil nowhere in sight.

"Want me to go with you?" Serena asked when Natalie opened the driver's-side door to get out. "Never know who might be up there."

Don't be silly--I'll only be a minute, Natalie was about
to say, but another look at the apartment house's frowning facade made her reconsider. Maybe Sanjay Prashad hadn't tailed them in his car because he was already here, lying in wait for them. Perhaps he had cal ed Carleton Amis to arrange an ambush, and the two of them stood inside, licking their lips in anticipation, with a half-dozen other Corps Security agents stationed in hiding around the building, ready to take her into