Tales From the Black Chamber (33 page)

“Everyone in one piece?” asked Claire.

“I burned my wrists and singed my eyebrows and lashes,” said Anne, raising up her raw, red wrists for inspection.

“When one of those shock waves hit, I fell hard on my shoulder,” said John. “I think it popped out and back in the joint. I need about a pound of Advil.”

“Yeah, I got knocked on my ass,” said Claire. “My leg got twisted under me, but yoga saves the day once again. I'm just sore.”

“Guess we took the worst of it,” said Steve to Rafe.

“Oh no, are you guys okay?” asked Anne.

“Well, your Russian wizard failed to mention that you don't want to have your fingertips on the
inside
of the poles when the thing is trying to get out,” said Steve. He lifted his hands and showed that his gloves were completely destroyed above the second knuckle of his finger. His fingers were bloody and little bits of metal embedded in his flesh sparkled in the bright sun.

“Oh shit,” said Claire. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah, I was wearing gloves with steel mesh in 'em. I think I've just got to pick the bits out and dunk my hands in iodine or something. Rafe's worse off.”

Rafe held out two small white pebbles with traces of blood in his right palm.

“What are those?” asked Anne.

Rafe raised his left hand, his middle and ring fingers one joint short. “I think they're called distal phalanges.”

“Oh my God!” said Anne.

“Jesus, what happened?” said John.

“I don't know exactly,” Rafe said. “One second I'm carrying the pole, the next—wham—it feels like someone drove a semi into my hand. The pole didn't move at all though, which was really weird. Once we finally got the poles in place, I looked down and the tips of my fingers were just pulped. There were just shreds left holding the dangling bones.” Anne felt faint. “So I pulled the bones out and tried to bandage the tips so I didn't lose much blood. Hurts like a son of a bitch, and I think my career as a harpsichordist is over.”

“Can I ask why you're still carrying your finger bones around?” said Claire, squinting one eye in repulsion.

“Are you kidding?” said Rafe. “Lucky charm. Conversation piece. Heck, I might put some pips on them and make them into dice like the Romans used to. Of course, these are pointier than real ‘knucklebones.'”

“Gee, too bad you didn't lose one from each finger. You could play Yahtzee,” snarked Claire.

“Very funny. Of course, Roman dice weren't really made from knucklebones. That's just a slang term. They were made from the anklebones of oxen, cattle, and whatnot,” Rafe said.

John incredulously said, “Dude, you just lost your fingertips and you're talking about
dice
?”

“Dice are awesome. And you know, with a little sanding, these might make some cool barrel dice …”

“Oh dear God!” said Anne.

“I'm just kidding, Anne,” said Rafe, putting his phalanges in his pocket. “Mostly. But seriously, you want to talk dice sometime, I can show you some amazing polyhedrals I have. Plus, talking about anything distracts me from the fact that my hand is throbbing like you wouldn't believe.”

“Come see my polyhedrals?” said Claire. “Is that nerd for, ‘Come up and see my etchings'?” They all laughed like they were drunk.

“Holy crap, I thought we were all dead when that thing showed up,” John said. “I mean was it me or was it bigger and nastier than in Canada?”

They all burned off the rest of their adrenaline excitedly recounting, sometimes repeatedly, what they'd each seen, heard, felt, smelled, tasted, and thought at virtually every second. Anne, Claire, and John reassembled all their gear for loading on the plane when it came, Steve and Rafe being excused from manual tasks. Steve wouldn't let them pack up the guns, still worried about a potential cross-border incident in case the Chinese somehow detected something on their radar and came to investigate, knowing that there were no effective border controls.

The entire PLA might have shown up and taken them back to a State Security dungeon, and they'd never have known. When the pilots arrived back at noon, they found the agents of the Black Chamber sound asleep, dead to the world, on the green steppe grass under the gaze of
Möngke Kök Tengri
, Eternal Blue Heaven.

18

When the plane landed to refuel in Honolulu, they took Rafe and Steve to Tripler Army Medical Center to have their hands repaired. As they were sitting in the waiting room of the pink coral building on Moanalua Ridge on Oahu, Claire came in and announced, “I just got off the phone with the Four Seasons resort on the Big Island. I've booked us all in for three weeks. I'm going to go call Joe, Mike, Lily, and Wilhelmina, and tell them to get out here with their families. I think we all deserve some vacation.”

“Fantastic idea,” said John.

“I don't know if I can afford that,” said Anne.

“Oh, it's all on the Chamber,” said Claire. “We do things right.”

“Then I've got to go buy a couple bathing suits,” smiled Anne.

The Hawaiian sojourn was a marvelous restorative. Rest, relaxation, and simple fun, especially once Mike and Joe's children had arrived. Anne went out of her way to be friendly with their wives, as she suspected that a youngish, not unattractive single woman who's working with your husband on matters clandestine was pretty high up on a wife's list of anxieties. They seemed a tad wary at first, but by the time they flew home, Anne felt she'd removed any suspicion that she might be angling for their men, and they all got along terrifically.

Tanned, rested, and still marveling at the details of everyday life that she'd taken for granted, Anne returned to work at the Black Chamber. Everyone was in a marvelous, lighthearted mood. Joe, Mike, Claire, Steve, and Wilhelmina sat at their desks in the central office composing their Memoranda on the events of the past few weeks, laughing and joking with each other. Rafe and Lily did the same in the lab, in between tossing various designs of paper airplanes at a target at the far end of the long room.

Anne worked on her Memorandum, and began work on Library entries for the
Brevarium dæmonologicum
and Professor Geoffrey's transliteration and translation of the Voynich Manuscript. She had decided to file a separate entry under her own name for the magic circle she'd derived, with citations back to the works she'd used. Last, she had decided that the five wooden poles deserved to be filed away in the event, however unlikely, that another demon cropped up and needed trapping. She had told Joe that she'd love a duplicate set for her (still-hypothetical) backyard as a memento. And she'd called a Professor of Altaic and Inner Asian History at Georgetown and found out that the Mongol shaman's valediction,
sain suuj baigaaray
, meant “live well.”
I will
, she thought,
and
sain suuj
to you, friend, wherever you are
.

The phone rang, its screen announcing
HISTORIAN
. Anne picked up with a cheerful, “Hi, John!”

“Hey, Anne. You sound chipper.”

“You know what, I am. Something about billions not dead in a fiery nuclear holocaust gives me a spring in my step,” she laughed.

“Me too,” he said. “Can I come down and have a word with you?”

“Sure, just bring coffee! I'm thinking I'm going to have to buy a little machine for down here.”

A few minutes later, John came down the spiral staircase and sat in the leather guest chair. “Okay, Anne, here's the thing. We saved the world. No, actually,
you
saved the world. We helped.”

“Everyone did what he was good at. I just happened to get stuck with the how-do-you-kill-it problem and lucked into that Russian story that turned out not to be a folk tale,” Anne demurred.

“Well, I won't argue. But, bottom line, I talked to everyone else in the Chamber, and we've decided to make an exception to the Charter for you. We're all willing to look the other way and break the law. You got dragooned into this job like no one else here. We usually cultivate potential replacements, and all of us were happy to sign up when we got the offer. You never really had a choice. So we all decided to give you a mulligan. You can step back out and into your old life. We'll write you an official letter from an unspecified government agency saying that you've been doing great service, we'll cut you a check to cover your expenses and your partnership buy-in fee, and we'll pay Hathaway & Edgecombe for the damage to your office. With that, you should be able to step right back into your old life, no questions asked. Just don't mention us, ever, and you'll be free and clear for the rest of your life. What do you say?”

“I say no.”

John's brows knit together. “Give yourself a minute to think about it.”

“I don't need it. Look, John, everything you say is right, and I'm touched profoundly that all of you would give me the option, given that it's technically illegal under the one law you guys seem to have to follow. But you can't un-ring my bell, to use a really lame metaphor. I'm in. And
we saved the world
! What's more exciting than that? If I left, I'd have no one to talk to about it! And worse, I'd constantly be worrying about other spooky phenomena. I'd probably end up as one of those crazy people who tries to read between the lines of the
Weekly World News
.”

“It's out of business,” John said.

“Really? Aw, too bad.”

“Don't worry, we have Bat Boy in a secure facility in North Carolina,” John said seriously.

“You what?” Anne said.

“Kidding.”

Anne took a playful swat at him with some papers from her desk. “That's exactly the thing. If I left, I'd be thinking, ‘Maybe there was something to Bat Boy …' and they'd eventually lock me up, if I wasn't already devoured by the thirty-nine cats I'd amassed to defend me from hobgoblins.”

“Are you sure? This is a one-time deal. We can't ever offer this again.”

“I understand. And, no, I like it here. I like the people, the job is ludicrously interesting when it's not making you wet yourself in terror, and frankly, saving the world from a discarnate entity of overwhelming evil has spoiled me for anything else.”

“What about your old job?”

“It was fun. I liked it a lot. But what I really liked was the books. And I can stay in that world, just from the other side of the transaction.”

“Last chance.”

“No, I'm in.”

John broke into a smile. “Then we're elated to have you. You've been amazing, and once you actually know what you're doing, you're going to be scary good.” He stood and offered his hand.

“Thank you, John,” Anne said.

John leaned down and kissed her cheek chastely. “No, thank you.”

He went upstairs and Anne sat lost in thought for a few moments.
What have I done?
she thought, then knew,
Something good
.
What will it be like here? And what was that he was saying about cultivating your own replacement?

Anne unlocked the doors of the Coolidge Foundation and ushered Lindsay in.

“Check it out, Linds.”

“Oh my freaking God. And it's got lots of rare volumes, esoterica, and general weirdness? This is
amazing
.”

“I know, right? Well, it's all yours now. I'll show you our offices upstairs, oh, and John's office. He's the vice president. One thing I'll have to warn you about is that the terms of the Foundation are extremely strange, and John and I will be out of the office a lot, maybe for longish stretches, and we're not allowed to disclose to anyone, even you, where we are.”

“Ooh, very cloak-and-dagger.”

“Well, no. But those are the rules. Will it bug you to be here alone a lot?”

“Not in the least. At least until I've read everything here,” she laughed, cracking Anne up.

“Wonderful! I'll be here working and hanging out for at least a couple hours every day, but what I'd really like is for you to really be running the place, in terms of managing the library, loan requests, and eventually, of course, scouting and acquisitions.”