Nowhere Land: A Stephan Raszer Investigation (24 page)

    
“How did
you know that?” said Emmett.

    
“They
don’t make PIs like they used to,” said Raszer. “I’m not going to find Katy
Endicott by tracking credit card receipts.”

    
“You
know chaos magick?” asked Emmett, and suddenly he seemed very young and—despite
the lines of experience already carved into his pale face—very, very innocent.
“’Cause this thing . . . it won’t go away. Can you make it go away?”

    
“I can’t
make any promises,” said Raszer. “And you’d have to
act
. . . just like Henry said. Act as if we together have power
over the servitor.”

    
“I could
try.”

    
“All
right,” said Raszer. The cold was creeping up his limbs, a cold that did not
make any sense in a sealed, stuffy room. “Would it be okay with you if I took
hold of your wrist?”

    
“I
guess,” said Emmett, in a small, distant voice.

    
As soon
as Raszer touched the boy, he knew where the cold came from. It came from the
woods just below the snow line, and carried the scent of cedar and fear. It was
the cold you felt when you were lost and alone in winter without a coat. A big
V-8 purred in the background; the smell of its exhaust filled the room. The car
door opened and the dome light shone on black leather.

    
This was
the place where Emmett’s mind still lived. He’d brought it home.

    
“We need
to do something first,” Raszer said. “We need to remember before we forget.
There’s a girl out there as scared as you are, only she doesn’t have anyone to
hold on to. I need to know where these men came from, and what Johnny owed
them.”

    
Emmett
shook his head. “They never told me,” he said. “Or Joe. It was something they
got into over there.” He glanced down at Raszer’s hand, at where it gripped
him. He saw the old scars on Raszer’s wrist.

    
They
were an offering to the boy. A psychic kinship.

    
“In
Iraq,” Raszer said, after a beat. “In Babylon.”

    
“I
guess. All Johnny ever said was that the men came when you went beyond the
perimeter. When the game got real. They weren’t good or evil—they were
something else—and you only had one choice after they came. You had to serve
them until you knew enough to be their master.”

    
“
When the game got real
,” Raszer repeated
to himself.

    
“And
then you’d win. You could make a new world. That’s what Johnny wanted. He said
this world was going to end soon, and chaos would rule.”

    
“Pretty
heady stuff for a boy from Azusa, California,” said Raszer.

    
“Johnny
always said that Jesus was a yahoo, too.”
   

    
“And
what would Johnny’s new world be like?”

    
“Perfect
freedom,” said Emmett. “Or p-perfect slavery.”

    
Raszer
moved closer, wanting to lend some of his own ebbing body heat, and this time
Emmett didn’t recoil. His lips were a dull purple, and his teeth were chattering.
Moreover, he’d made his inner coldness manifest in the room. Quite a trick.

    
“And
Katy . . . did she know these men?”

    
“No,”
Emmett replied. “Only from Johnny talking about how they were his
t-ticket
to paradise.Katy was like an
angel. Katy was—“

    
“--the
last pure thing?”

    
Emmett
nodded. “Until Layla. Katy wanted to be like her…wanted Johnny to want her like
that, and Johnny said she could. She
would
be, if she f-followed the plan.”

    
The
plan—
right
. So she didn’t
struggle…didn’t scream when she saw him killed?”

    
Raszer
pressed his thumb lightly into the papery skin on Emmett’s wrist. The pulse was
reasonably strong, but it was ticking at barely more than a beat per two
seconds. Without taking his eyes off the boy, Raszer reached over with his free
hand and pulled his jacket down from the bed, then draped it around Emmett’s
frail shoulders.

    
“She
didn’t . . . I don’t think she saw what they did. Like I said, she was way
fucked up. We all were. I wish I was
more
.
It was dark, and there was the fog, and it all happened way too fast. Johnny
and the rest, they were just . . . they just went down like birds. Like there
was life and then there was . . . there was . . .
nothing
, except this . . . this thing that Henry made. This
entity
. This thing in the woods with
yellow eyes, howling and screaming, pressing me down.
Oh, God
.
Oh, God, the
smell.
I puked so bad . . . and then I
just ran. I ran all the way back inside.”

    
Raszer
pushed up to a squat and slipped his hands beneath Emmett’s armpits, talking
the whole time, keeping his eyes on the boy’s wildly dilated pupils. “I was up
there yesterday, Emmett. In those woods. On that road . . . ”

    
Using
only the rock climber’s strength stored in his legs, for his arms had no
leverage, Raszer began very gingerly to slide Emmett Parrish’s body up the
wall, crushing him to his chest as they cleared the black stripe. “I think I
had a run-in with your ‘entity,’” he said. “The smell is the giveaway. Got a
good whack on the head from him, too. An old squatter. Believe me, he’s as
flesh and blood as you are.”

    
“Are you
s-s-sure
?”

    
“I’m
sure,” said Raszer. “He was probably just as freaked out as you, too.”

    
“You
mean . . . somebody else saw what happened?”

    
“Uh-huh.
Lost his tongue for it, evidently. There was a second witness, Emmett.”

    
Emmett
suddenly realized that he was standing, his head well clear of the protective
barrier. His knees gave out in Raszer’s embrace.

    
“Oh,
shit. Oh, shit,” he whimpered. “I can’t—”

    
“Yes,
you can,” said Raszer. “It’s okay. It’s cool. Tell me something, Emmett: When
you were little and there were monsters in the room, who cleared ’em out?”

    
“M-my
f-father,” the boy stammered.

    
“Well,
I’m a father, too. I’ve got a license to sweep out servitors.”

    
For the
first time, Emmett Parrish smiled, then giggled, and after that, he cried.

    
“There’s
something I don’t understand, though,” said Raszer. “If Johnny had this whole
deal set up, and Katy was ready to go along . . . why did he and Henry switch
the game plan at the last minute and try to double-cross these guys with a
sex-magic spell?”

    
“It was
Henry’s idea. I think he thought he could defeat them ’cause he had something
of theirs. Something he won in the game. The sigil.”

    
“The
sigil?”

    
“The
black rock.”

    
“What
about Johnny? Was he in on Henry’s plan?”

    
“I dunno
about Johnny. I don’t know anything. I just went along.”

    
“Who
does know?” Raszer pressed. “Who’s still alive, that is.”

    
“Layla
would know,” said Emmett darkly. “And maybe Ruthie.”

    
“Katy’s
sister,” Raszer affirmed. “How would Ruthie know? She was back in Taos, wasn’t
she, when all this happened?”

    
“Her and
Henry had this connection. He called her his mystic sister. He must’ve emailed
or texted her ten times a day.” Emmett’s body temperature had at last begun to
rise, and his jaw relaxed a little, but Raszer did not let go. “Henry said you
could use the web for magic, too. He said he could change the quantum flux. He
swore that him and Ruthie even had sex on the Net, and that it was better than
physical.”

    
“Would
Ruthie also know how Henry lost his testicles? Do you know?”

    
Emmett
flicked a strand of hair from his pocked face and turned aside, suddenly
conscious of his near nakedness, and Raszer’s.

    
“All I
know’s he said they had more power off his body than on it.”

    
Raszer
processed this. “Emmett . . . were Henry’s testicles a sigil, too?”

    
“I think
so. That night, when he made me invisible, he gave me this blue velvet bag to
keep. With his . . . his things in it.”

    
“Did you
hide that bag in one of Johnny’s Chinese lanterns, Emmett? Up there behind the
trailer? Emmett?
Emmett
?”

    
A
thin column of light from the cracked bedroom door bisected Emmett’s face, and
he squinted hard. Standing in the crack was his mother. Raszer turned his head
and saw Grace Parrish’s face shift from surprise to relief, then alarm, and
finally puzzlement, like cloud shadows scudding over an uncertain landscape,
giving it form.

    
“Excuse
us for a minute, Mrs. Parrish,” said Raszer, “while we get our street clothes
on.” He returned his eyes to the boy. “I believe we’ll be right out.” He nodded
to Grace and noticed that the woman’s jaw had gone slightly slack at the sight
of his paisley shorts, and at the intimacy with which he held her son. “Not to
worry,” he said. “It’s an old sweat-lodge technique. Sometimes bare skin makes
for a better connection.”

    
“I’m not
worried, Mister Raszer,” she said, stepping back. “I just can’t believe
nobody’s tried it before.”

    
She
closed the door gently, and, without further words, the men went about the
small ritual of getting dressed. All of Emmett’s T-shirts were clean. When they
had finished, Emmett left his room for the first time in months, his fingers
gripping Raszer’s wrist until he had been safely planted on the sofa.

    
Layla stepped from the shower, tucked the towel
around her torso, and listened. She did this habitually, because if anyone had
entered the flat during her shower, she was certain his presence would reveal
itself to her acutely sensitive ears. Today, the vigilance was unwarranted,
because Harry had come with her staples: goat’s milk, candy, and a new pair of
shoes, and was waiting for her in the bedroom. Harry adored her still. He would
die before letting anyone enter her bath. She counted on that.

    
She
stood at the foggy mirror and began to comb out her thick, lustrousblack hair,
making three parts in the form of a Y and applying a scented oil to her exposed
scalp. She lifted the comb, then stopped and listened again.It wasn’t a sound,
but the absence of sound that had caught her notice. When Harry was there, he laid
on the bed, noisily turning the pages of her fashion magazines, or chatting on
the cell phone, or both. He did it to reassure her. Human noises were
comforting, he’d told her. Now there was no sound coming from the bedroom but
for the faintest gurgling, like that of a coffee maker in its final cycle. She
listened as a bird listens, intently focused but disengaged from self. All
ears.

    
“Harry?”
she called through the door, and, immediately upon saying it, felt the muscles
in her belly tighten. By the time she said it a second time, the tone was
markedly different.

    
“Harry!
”

    
There
was no reply, but with her ear to the door, she could hear the gurgling,
draining sound a little more clearly. Then she heard what sounded like breath,
and the soft rattling and shifting of hangers in her closet. She squatted down
and peered through the old keyhole. She could see nothing in the background but
her walk-in closet, its doors closed, and nothing in the foreground but Harry’s
right boot, parked just where it ought to be at the foot of her bed, toe up.
The boot trembled once, then again, and listed to the side, motionless.

    
Layla
put her lips to the keyhole. Her voice was low and strong now.
“Harry
?”

    
Layla
had a gun, but it was in her closet. She waited, counted, and breathed, and
when the waiting was over, she flipped the deadbolt and very slowly opened the
door. The scream that should have come from her throat stayed pinned down in
her breast, where she’d put it long before. From years and miles away, she
heard the bell and knew it was for her.

    
She
strode deliberately to the night table and scooped up Raszer’s business card
from where he’d left it. The scream stayed inside even when she stepped
barefoot into the warm pool of blood at the bedside. Then she turned to the
bed, took the cell phone from Harry Wolfe’s right hand, and, wiping the bloody
keypad on her towel, backed into the bathroom, leaving footprints. As she did,
she counted the daggers embedded in Harry’s flesh. If the message was what she
thought it was, there would be: