Beast of Wonder Page 3

  Plop-splash. “Good. Go out into the kitchen.”

  Cara blundered out of the bathroom and stood shaking in the hall, still clutching Evan’s clothes.

  Chapter 7

  The kitchen was just as clean and worn as every other room. Eggs bubbled in butter, a round black cast-iron skillet on a clean white enamel stove. A coffeemaker sent a thin stream down into its pot, and bacon sizzled.

  “He’ll be fine.” Mama Lodi chuckled, reaching for a sturdy metal spatula. “Now we deal with you, my dear.”

  That didn’t sound welcoming, or even pleasant. “I’m dead,” Cara said tonelessly, perched on a plain wooden chair at the small round table. Alive but amnesiac didn’t explain the bathtub.

  Nothing could explain the bathtub.

  “You could be, yes.” Mama Lodi nodded. Her long frayed mat of grey and white hair swung. A strap of black leather served her for a belt, cinched tight and gleaming against the violet background of her housedress. “That is an option.”

  “This is hell?” It was a reasonable guess. Still, she felt alive. Her heart beat, breath filled her lungs, her bare toes tingled when she slid her feet out of the shoes for a few moments, stretching them. She laid her fingertips against her chest. Under the soft black sweater, she felt alive.

  “Or something else.” The old woman tapped the spatula against the side of the egg pan, a soft musical click. “Wheat or white?”

  “What?”

  “Toast.”

  A prosaic question, but Cara couldn’t even figure out which kind she preferred. Did dead people eat bread? “It doesn’t matter.”

  “Good.”

  A short while later, a thick white ceramic plate thumped on the red-checked tablecloth in front of her. Wheat toast, scrambled eggs, crispy-melting bacon. The silverware was heavy and glossy, freshly polished. Who cleaned all this—Mama Lodi, her spidery fingers, rubbing with wet rags? Scrubbing the floor bit by bit, on arthritic knees?

  “You’re probably wondering a great many things.” The old woman pulled out the other straight-backed wooden chair and settled a green coffee cup in front of her. “You’re lucky. That’s the first thing you should know. You’ve been given a chance to go on living.”

  “Is this living?” It was a silly question.

  “You’ll be young and beautiful forever.”

  Beauty everlasting. A shudder walked cold and liquid down her back, under cashmere and a jacket she couldn’t remember but that fit her as if tailored. “If you can do that, how come you’re not?”

  “I killed my guardian and escaped.” Mama Lodi’s strong yellow teeth showed, a rictus of merriment. Her hands lay, painfully swollen knuckles red and chapped. “And I waited, getting more and more decrepit, for someone to take my place.”

  Well, that answered that. “Me.”

  “You.”

  “What if I don’t want to?” Cara touched the fork with a cautious fingertip. A butter-bell stood, upended, next to salt and pepper shakers, a wire holder for paper napkins.

  Mama Lodi’s left eye blinked, then her right a fraction of a second later. Her fingernails were yellowed too, not from nicotine. The skin and nails were stained in small, intricate patterns, applied so long they had worked through several layers. When you got old, maybe your body simply remembered everything. “Now we give you a name, girl. Pick one you like.”

  “Cara.”

  Lodi eyed her suspiciously. “Where did that come from, I wonder?”

  She buttoned her mouth and glared at the other woman, ignoring the food. Steam drifted up in thin questing fingers. A cat-shaped clock on the wall swung its long question-mark tail, another heartbeat. Tick-tock, tock-tick.

  “Stubborn,” Lodi finally said. She leaned back in her chair; it creaked with indignation though she probably didn’t weigh enough to be a burden. “Well, too late to back out now. Especially for him. Eat.”

  Cara lifted a piece of bacon, nibbled on one end. Salt stung her mouth, a delicious burn. Hunger woke, a yawning hole inside her guts, and she stuffed the rest of the slice in, chewed, and picked up the heavy, shining fork.

  “Good, good.” Lodi sucked at her strong yellow teeth. Wiry white hairs stood up on the backs of her wasted forearms, and the mole under her chin quivered a bit. “Appetite’s a good sign. Tomorrow, you start work.”

  “Work?”

  “What did you think, you get to sit here in your tower and watch the world go by?” Lodi shook her head. Hr bent spine pointed her sharp chin at the table. “No, little girl.”

  The eggs were good, fluffy and warm. Toast, dripping with butter, crunched satisfyingly. Cara almost moaned, it felt so good to eat. “What’s the work?”

  “There are some rules. Only for the first job.”

  “Why only for—”

  “Stop. Asking. Stupid. Questions.” Silverware rattled, the window over the sink flushed briefly with red neon, and the metal of the range gave a short, sharp grown, metal cooling too quickly. “Or I’ll strangle you.”

  Cara pushed her feet back into her shoes and loaded a piece of toast with scrambled egg, not looking at the woman. “You’ll have to wait for another replacement to come along, then.”

  “I hate the smartass ones,” Lodi muttered. “I’ve waited this long, I can wait some more.”

  So there had been others? “Fine.” She kept eating.

  After a long pause, the old woman lifted her jadeware cup. “Don’t touch the bathtub. You interrupt the process now and the good detective could die of shock. Got to let him get out on his own, like a butterfly. Shake those wings and dry them.”

  “Is he dead too?” Almost-dead? Undead?

  “Him? No, little girl, he just traded himself in.” Lodi laughed, that impossibly pretty sound brushing painted surfaces, the stove’s white enamel, the cabinets. “For a newer model. Heh. You’ll understand in time.”

  Chapter 8

  The bedroom was spare and white, a narrow cot with tight, bleached linen and a single window that stared over the courtyard garden. Lodi shuffled in, peeked through the glass, and snorted. “Too late to back out,” she muttered again, and beckoned Cara. “Come on, look.”

  Silvery light ran over juicy-fat branches, glowed on stone walkways in a geometric pattern. Vines shifted, crawling over each other, vegetation full of slithering movement. Cara looked up—the sky was faint orange, light pollution bouncing off low clouds. “There’s no moon.”

  “So you do have half a brain.” Lodi nodded, sucked on her teeth for a moment. “I wondered.” A snorting laugh, and she moved away. Cara rested her fingertips on the white-painted sill. Antique window glass, full of bumps and tiny bubbles, solidity caught in ripples as if it remembered being liquid. The dresser was antique too, all its paint scrubbed off. The floor, lightly varnished, reflected white glare from a single bare bulb overhead. “The good detective will sleep here when you return. For tonight, just lie down and think of whatever you want.” With another cackle, Lodi jabbed at the switch next to the door.

  The bulb died, leaving Cara in a square of soft silvery glow from the window. The door swept shut, and Lodi’s steps dragged down the hall. Had she locked it?

  Ridiculous. Where was there to go? The snaking garden full of strangeness, or the cold street outside? Finding a police station. I’ve lost my memory.

  A warm lump of food in her belly, her calves a little stiff from walking, her lungs filling and deflating regularly. Cara held out her hands, cupping innocent, unnatural moonlight.

  The cot-linens smelled of fresh air, of sunlight. Cara tried stretching out in her sweater and skirt, her feet finally able to breathe, and only lasted a few minutes before surging up again. Bare feet on cold wood, she stripped and looked down at her body. Flesh glowed like the window-glass, a lamp in the dark. Breasts, hips, dark pubic fleece—it looked familiar. It felt familiar, right down to the white, well-healed scar on her knee.

  An identifying mark.

  She stretched out again, under two thin blankets
and the fragrant sheet. There was a long time of staring at the window trying to remember anything before the silver snake of the baggage carousel. Finally, she fell, soundless as a dry leaf, into the terrifying black abyss of sleep.

  Chapter 9

  Garlic. Cooking meat. And…coffee? Good smells tiptoed into the white room, filtered into dreaming, and drew her softly out of a black well. Cloudy grey sunshine spilled through the window’s old, rippling glass, and Cara pushed stiff fingers through her hair. Her clothes were right where she left them: skirt, sweater, jacket, shoes. Nothing else, unless she counted the secret cargo of round metal in her jacket pocket.

  She carried her shoes down the hall. The bathroom door was half-closed, the light inside making a strange shape on hardwood floor. The urge to peek warred with a strange uneasiness, and she paused on bare feet, considering the door.

  “You can look,” Lodi called from the kitchen. “But don’t touch.”

  The door creaked, its hinges singing subtle protest. Cara blinked against the brightness multiplied by mirror and white tile, and thin acid touched the back of her throat again.

  Scarves and strands of decaying slug-sheen dripped over the tub-lip, threaded with traces of that tarlike, bubbling black cancer. Lodi hadn’t managed to draw it all out of him, perhaps, so the slug-stuff had scrubbed the rest. Or traces of it had ribboned off her liver-spotted hands as she dredged the sickening clumps free.

  The commode was clean, white, and innocent. Cara glanced at it, and wondered why she felt no pressure in her bladder. Her mouth held no ghost of last night’s bacon, either. She simply felt…awake. And slightly unwashed, but getting into that tub with the slug-stuff melting and gurgling down the drain—no. That made the revulsion at the back of her throat even thicker.

  Cutlery rattled. “Don’t touch it!” Lodi shrilled, though Cara felt no urge to. “Come out, little girl.”

  Cara backed out of the bathroom, watching the slug-stuff. A long skein of it stretched, then retracted with a wet sliding sound, and the tub-drain gave a slow bubbling glorp.

  She fled down the hall, coming to a heel-bruising halt just inside the kitchen’s warm, antique bubble.

  The man at the table was…different. The face Evan’s, but slightly younger, and his shoulders were broader. The bruises on his arms, bared by a pale cotton T-shirt, were gone. Ropy muscle moved under fine, hairless, newborn skin, and his hair was platinum instead of black now. Even his irises were altered, grey instead of blue.

  Bleached.

  Photo negative, she thought, and her lips moved soundlessly. Her shoes dangled from one hand; her other hand, wrapped around the side of the doorway, flexed, trying to drive her fingernails into wood, paint, plaster.

  Lodi, at the stove, banged the metal spatula. “Don’t just stand there. Get me some coffee. You’re not hungry, he’ll eat for you now.”

  Then why bother with coffee? She opened her mouth to ask, thought better of it, and studied the detective again. A small mountain of steak strips, medium-rare, crouched on his white plate like the world’s thickest spaghetti, and a tower of whole-wheat rolls rose on a smaller side-plate. A glass jug of milk sat primly next to a thick jelly-jar glass he filled, then drained in several long swallows. His grey gaze rose and settled on her, not lingering on breasts or hips. Instead, the weight pressed against her face. Did he recognize her?

  “There now.” Lodi banged the spatula again, picked up the cast-iron skillet, and tumbled several browned sausages onto yet another plate. “Oh, you like that, don’t you? Dumb beasts, all of them. Rutting and eating, that’s all a man’s good for.”

  Cara stood on one foot to slide her left shoe on, balanced in black patent leather and diamanté buckles to put the right on too. Relief pushed her shoulders back and her chin up—it was probably how knights felt, encased in uncomfortable but comforting armor.

  The coffeemaker was a huge silver contraption full of knobs, dials, wands, and a self-contained grinder. Cara ran a fingertip along its top edge, pulling back as a double-scorch—temperature and knowledge—jolted up her arm. First that button, then that one…you pour the water in there. I see.

  “Things talk to you,” Lodi said, slamming the sausage-plate down on the table in front of the detective, who kept chewing. How on earth was he going to fit all that inside him? Was he going to swell up until he burst, a bloodfat tick?

  Ticks. She remembered, hazily, walking in sunlit woods, a breeze whispering through summerthick leaves overhead, a meadow full of long grass and small blue flowers. As soon as it appeared the image faded, and she found her hands moving, tamping down ground coffee and twisting the holder into its socket, flicking a switch and sliding a small white ceramic cup under a pair of metal teats. Espresso streamed out, brown froth lining each edge of the liquid stream, and the heavenly, lying scent of fresh coffee drifted against the heaviness of browned meat.

  “Bring that here. You’re a slow one, aren’t you. Well, I suppose I wasn’t much different at the beginning.” Lodi made a spitting sound, her thin lips pursing, and jostled the back of the man’s chair with her hip. “Eat, don’t stare at her. You’ll have all the time you want to look later. Might even get sick of it.”

  The old woman snatched the ceramic cup from Cara’s fingers, tossed the contents back all in one gulp. “Even that tastes like sand,” she continued. “Came along just in time, you two did. Go make yourself some, now, and we’ll get started.”

  “Get started on what?” Cara backed away as the old woman glanced at her. She decided it wasn’t an unreasonable or stupid question and halted, folding her arms.

  “Getting fresh, aren’t you.” Lodi cackled. “It’s a nice change. I’ll tell you everything you need to know, little girl. So make yourself some coffee, and let’s begin.”

  * * *

  Lodi folded her veiny, age-spotted hands. “It’s simple. He’ll take you to a place. You’ll have a nice dinner with a nice family. Afterwards, the father will give you a package, which you will take to a certain building, knock on a certain door, and deliver it to a man who paid for the service. Then you come home.”

  It did sound simple. Cara held her own tiny ceramic cup of fragrant, steaming liquid and glanced at Evan. He kept eating, mechanically, strip after strip of steak vanishing into his mouth. Chewing slowly but thoroughly, swallowing like clockwork. His gaze settled on her face again, and he nodded slightly as if she’d spoken.

  “Now, the rules. Once you step outside for this first job, you speak only to him until you get back in the door here. If you have a question, you ask him. They can hear and answer, but that doesn’t concern you. Directly address anyone else and it’s all over.”

  “What happens?”

  “You take my age, and I’m free as a bird with yours.”

  “Can he talk?”

  “Of course he can.”

  Cara looked at Evan. “Are you sure?”

  He swallowed, coughed to clear his throat. His voice, husky, had grown deeper. “Yes, I can.”

  Well, that was good. “How do you feel?”

  Lodi snorted. The window over the sink was full of golden light, richer than the overhead fixture’s illumination. The one in the bedroom was full of rainy winter, instead.

  Cara’s head hurt again, a sharp piercing spike. She exhaled, softly, and kept her gaze on Evan’s.

  “Better,” he said, a spark struggling in his grey eyes. “Stronger.”

  “Did it hurt?” Cara lifted the cup, wished she hadn’t because his gaze focused on her mouth.

  “A little.” A slight shrugging motion of those broad shoulders. Under the table, he wore jeans and engineer boots with thick, rubbery soles. Muscle moved in his forearms, denuded of their black forest. A male presence, taking up all available space, squeezing Lodi and Cara into the margins.

  Except when he looked at her, she expanded, too. A strange feeling, her jacket pocket far too heavy for the small lump of metal it carried. “Was it what you wanted?”

  L
odi snorted. “Who the hell knows what they want?” she asked her own coffee, her proud high nose wrinkling. The gold light drained some essential solidity from her papery skin and matted hair, a dusty antique doll with beady, wicked eyes on a high shelf.

  “I didn’t ask you,” Cara snapped. The woman was irritating. Vexation was a tonic, running down her arms and legs, much better than any caffeine kick.

  The old woman subsided with a malevolent grumble.

  Evan took a long drink of milk, and when he finished, he looked much more awake. Less of a somnolent eating machine. “I don’t know,” he said, finally. “I was dead anyway.”

  All that cancer, riddling his body—well, he probably wasn’t far wrong. Cara took another sip, and shifted a little to face Lodi. “What happens to you once we finish this?”

  “I get to move on.” The old woman’s face screwed up, an apple-granny puckermask. A tiny, queer gleam filled her tired, worn eyes, and she lingered over the words one by one, a private joke. “Staying between is boring as fuck after a few hundred years. People are stupid, especially the ones you look at every day.”

  Well, she certainly looked old. It made as much sense as anything else did, here. “What’s in the package? The one we’re picking up?”

  “Don’t ask. It doesn’t matter.” Lodi rested her elbows on the table. Her grin turned predatory, lazy, the satisfied thin-lipped look of a cat who is quite full but still watches a small struggling thing. “Just do this one simple thing, and it’ll all be settled.”

  “It’s never just one simple thing.” Evan returned to his slow, steady consumption, ignoring the glare Lodi darted in his direction.

  Cara sipped espresso. Bitterness balanced with rich aroma, and it vanished somewhere behind her breastbone. No hunger, no thirst. Yes, they were both dead anyway. “The espresso machine wasn’t there yesterday.”