The Night Market (26 page)

“Why?” Yael asked, puzzled. “My brother always did as
he was told, always excelled, while I deliberately broke rules...”

“That very trait, combined with your own innate gifts,
is probably why Nyarlathotep had an eye on you from the beginning,” Mr. Sothoth
said, voice dripping with solicitousness. “He is fascinated by curiosity and
you represent something of a wildcard. You are quite correct in your assumption
that we are not here in our typical professional capacity, Yael Kaufman. We are
here at the personal behest of Nyarlathotep, to convey his sincere apologies to
you.”

Yael stared with her mouth open while her mind puzzled
over the new information, stunned by revelation.

“Are you being sarcastic? After what I did to your
master, I hardly expect an apology.”

“If anything, he is all the more enamored of you, Yael
Kaufman,” Mr. Sothoth said, with frightening sincerity.

As if to punctuate that statement, Mr. Yog offered a
curt nod.

“He went as far as to describe himself as being in
your debt. Nyarlathotep feels that you did him a great favor by preventing him
from casting you into Avici along with your brother. Though your actions
rendered him incapable of being here, he bears you no grudge or ill will over
any harm you have done to his avatar. In fact,” Mr. Sothoth insinuated wetly,
“he is most
eager
for a reconciliation.”

“Are you done talking?” Yael asked, her hands tight
around the objects she clenched behind her back. “Because I am certainly finished
listening.”

“We will return you to the Black Train, Yael Kaufman,”
Mr. Sothoth said, with false reluctance. “If it must come to persuasion...”

Mr. Sothoth leveled his staff at her and Yael scrambled
to avoid whatever was going to come out of the business end of the device. She
needn’t have worried, however, as the rod proved to be little more than a
temporary perch for a wounded Tobi to rest on before he leapt for Mr. Sothoth’s
veiled face.

“Yael!” Tobi, Yael noticed with horror, left bloody
paw prints on all that he touched. “Now!”

She didn’t wait. Yael ran, swerving in an effort to stay
out of the way of the staff while Mr. Sothoth howled with rage and pain. As she
crossed the distance between them, Mr. Sothoth used the rod as a bludgeon
against his own face where Tobi had latched stubbornly with all four paws. The
lawyer bashed himself in the face with the stick once; twice; then the cat
fell, his body broken and limp before it hit the ground.

There was no question that he might still be alive. Tobi
wasn’t even in the same shape any longer.

Yael did not hear herself scream as she drove the last
of her titanium spikes through the rear of Mr. Sothoth’s ankle, where she hoped
the thing kept its Achilles tendon. She did not let herself look at poor Tobi,
staining the old stone red, or wait to see what happened with the wicked old
lawyer.

If she had, Yael was afraid that she might have killed
him.

Mr. Yog waited for her, his arms spread as if he
expected her to leap into them.

Yael did just that.

It was like jumping into the grips of a surprised
great ape, except she was fairly sure that apes didn’t smell of drain-cleaner
and rotting fruit. Mr. Yog was startled, shifting his arms to cradle her close
to his chest, holding her claustrophobically tight to his prodigious robes as
if she might be foolish enough to struggle.

The embrace was almost too much for Yael, her knees
crushed to her chin and her arms squeezed to her chest. She spent a long moment
working a hand free from the sickly flesh crawling beneath the acrid fabric of
Mr. Yog’s robes, pulsing in time to an internal current.

Yael jabbed him with an syringe of AHS-125. She drove
her hand through the voluminous cloth until she felt repulsive flesh at her
fingertips.

Whatever Mr. Yog was made out of, it wasn’t enough to
stop the needle. Yael pressed down on the dropper until it wouldn’t go any
further and then let it drop to the ground below. She wasn’t sure if the lawyer
had felt the prick or not, but he continued crushing her against him, squeezing
the air from her chest until black spots danced across her field of vision and
the sounds of the battle behind her grew impossibly distant.

Then, abruptly and without warning, Mr. Yog let her
slip from his arms, and then fell to the cobblestones with an economy of motion
that Yael was forced to admire. In the time it took for Yael to gather herself sufficiently
to get back to her feet, she saw bubbles of saliva bleeding through his veil,
the shape of his body fluctuating by the moment.

“Yael Kaufman,” Mr. Yog said softly as she walked by
him, afraid to look back, because what remained of Tobi was there. “What shall
I tell Nyarlathotep?”

Yael paused to consider.

“Tell him that I will find him myself, at a time and
place of my choosing. And when I do that,” Yael said, her voice shaking,
“Nyarlathotep will answer for all of this.”

She walked resolutely on.

“He will be glad,” Mr. Yog croaked, “to see you.”

***

Yael walked those final blocks by herself, but there was no danger of her
losing her way. Though she had never been to Kadath before, it felt like home –
the cold absence of life, broken windows jaggedly reflecting the sickly
moonlight, weeds slowly fracturing the sidewalk. She recognized the echo of her
own footsteps down an empty street and took small comfort from the sound.

Her heart ached with guilt and grief. The loss of her
truest friend left Yael feeling brittle and hollow. If there had been wind, it
might have simply blown her over, sent her tumbling down the street with the
fallen leaves. But there was no wind.

And the Night Market was hardly difficult to find.

There were only two buildings with lighted windows in
the empty district. One was an ornate and dilapidated apartment building that
she was certain she remembered from a dream – intriguing, surely, and strangely
familiar, but not her present destination. Instead, Yael turned her attention
to the illuminated pavilion in the center of the wooded area adjoining the
trickle of a river, filled with canvas tents and candle light and the general
clamor of distant commerce. She walked briskly, and did her best not to think
about anything that might start her crying.

The streets of Kadath were a gothic maze, an elaborate
affront to the very idea of urban planning, turning in on themselves and
winding down the side of the hill toward the river, but Yael navigated them
with the confidence of a frequent visitor, the map her brother had implanted in
her mind burning brightly.

Eventually, the bizarre and domineering architecture
receded to a heavily treed area far too wild to be called a park. Yael was
surprised as the rather mundane mixture of elms and oaks gave way to luminous Moon
Trees – something she hadn’t seen since Roanoke. Yael felt a profound wave of
nostalgia.

The further she went into the woods, the more frequent
the Moon Trees became, until Yael could navigate by their gentle blue light.
When she stumbled into the relative brilliance of the Night Market’s suspended gas
lamps, Yael’s eyes were briefly dazzled.

“You finally made it,” a lovely woman in a rather
inappropriate dress cried out, clasping her fingers in front of her formidable
bosom. “I was starting to worry. Why are you wearing a mask?”

“I’m sorry... Do I know you?”

“My name is Holly Diem,” the woman said cheerfully,
flashing a smile that would have been the pride of any dentist. “Welcome to the
Night Market, Yael Kaufman. I have been expecting you.”

Yael peeled off her mask, which had become hot and
confining.

She wasn’t sure how it happened, but she found herself
lying on her back on the grass beneath a Moon Tree, her head resting on her
duffel bag while Holly Diem sat beside her. A black cat curled on top of Yael’s
legs, gentle yellow eyes watching her with placid consistency, purring softly.
Yael reached to scratch him behind the ears before she attempted to speak.

“Ah. What just happened?”

“You fell down,” Holly explained gently, brushing
Yael’s hair away from her eyes. “You seem very tired, Miss Kaufman.”

“Yael. Please.”

Holly’s smiled perked up again.

“Alright. You can call me Holly. Do you want some
water?”

Yael shook her head though her mouth was bone dry. She
was afraid her stomach would rebel if she were to put anything in it. She was
trying very hard not to think about Tobi, forcing her thoughts away from the
image of his broken body on the cobblestones as it reoccurred to her in an
endless cycle. Her whole body shook with tiny tremors and her skin was hot and
tingling.

“No, thank you. I am fine.”

“You don’t look fine,” Holly said softly. “You look
tired, Yael.”

“I am alright,” Yael insisted, her voice louder than
she had intended it to be.

The concern in Holly’s eyes was obvious, even if her motivations
were hard for Yael to puzzle out. Then again, thinking coherently was growing
difficult. On some level, Yael knew what was happening – she had taught herself
to avoid unhappiness the same way her brother had – by sleeping through it.
Yael didn’t want to face her grief at her friend’s sacrifice, or her own sudden
doubts about whether or not her own quest was worth something as precious as a
cat.

“Yael, you seem exhausted. Why don’t you take a little
nap?” Holly suggested, mopping Yael’s brow with a cool, wet cloth. “The Night
Market has only just begun. We have hours yet before dawn.”

She wanted to object. She felt the ghosts of worry, a
nagging fear that she would oversleep and miss what she had traveled so far to
see. But Yael’s eyes had already made their own decision.

***

“Thirty-six secret kings and queens of the world.”

A cold morning, frost on the stained
glass diffusing the light. She is lying on the carpet in her father’s library,
watching her brother play the piano. He plays lightly, with a halting cadence,
his fingers slowly remembering how to work the keys. Later that night, for the
first time in years, she will sing along with him while he plays sad songs from
a book of Virginian folk music.

In the mirror. Someone else’s face.
Her fingers dig into skin and it comes away like wax paper.

She hangs on the fence briefly,
testing it, waiting to see if it can take her full weight. It shudders and
rattles, but the chain-link doesn’t tumble. Yael nods to Elian, who makes a
basket of his hands, giving her a first foothold. She knots her fingers in the
chain-link and wedges her sneaker just above a hinge in the gate. Elian pats
her rear-end affectionately as she starts to climb. He claims it’s for good
luck.

“Nothing is real.”

From the vantage point of her bedroom
window, Yael watches a hawk take a field mouse from the main lawn, tiny pink
legs wriggling in panic as it disappears into the sky.

At the dinner table, Yael can find
nothing but desserts, meats in rich sauces, mashed potatoes swimming in melted
butter, toasted sourdough with melted white cheese. She is on a diet; then
again, she always is. Forbidden to consume anything besides lemon water and
spinach until the next morning, Yael searches the table for something she can
eat and tries to pretend that her mouth doesn’t water.

Her brother is asleep in a strawberry
field. Yael is running behind a Labrador that belongs to a neighbor. Eating a
peach the color of a sunset, she is disgusted by the way the fuzz on the skin
of the fruit feels inside her mouth.

Elian has his hands beneath her
shirt, fumbling with her bra until she takes pity on him and undoes it. His
touch is rough, almost painful, but Yael is fascinated by the awe she can see
in his eyes.

Yael has lost an Algebra book, and
she needs to reference a table inside of it for a test. Yael turns to borrow
her neighbor’s text, but finds herself alone in the classroom.

Eleven years old, playing marbles
with the kids on Drough Street, the children of the squatters that live in the
more intact buildings of the old factory district. Yael shoots rapidly, not
even bothering to aim, but every attempt ends with a satisfying click as
opposing marbles are knocked from the chalk circle.

“Everything is permitted.”

Fitting herself through the window
into the basement is a multistep process. Her legs go in first, then she puts
her weight on her hands and turns so that her hips fit through diagonally, in
order to make the most of the limited space between the bars. To manage the
angle, Yael contorts herself further, moving slowly and grateful for her
stepmother’s insistence on yoga classes, to fit her shoulders through the same
space. All the while, as she makes her way carefully inside, she is aware of
the darkness around her, the unique vulnerabilities of her position. Yael is
more than nervous – she is genuinely frightened – but she forces herself to
move slowly and carefully, determined not to pull a muscle or tear her clothes.