* * *
Returned whining. Keening. A low, animal sound from deep in his throat. Lay curled up on the chair. Sweating. Things crawled around inside his skull. Didn’t know how much time had passed.
An enormous grub drowning in a sack of its own liquid skin.
Coughed. Sat up.
A rotting tank with the insignia of the Houses on its side, asleep under the fruiting bodies.
Feral rubbed up against his extended arm. Finch got up, made it to the phone, dialed Rathven, said “One done, one to go” when she answered, and hung up. Grabbed the second memory bulb. Collapsed back to the chair.
A monstrous City, balanced atop a single building.
Started laughing. Didn’t know what was so funny or why he couldn’t stop.
Falling through cold air and couldn’t feel his legs.
Wondered how much this would mess him up.
6
The night half over. Something important slipping away?
Drank more whiskey, and let it swirl around his mouth. Held the burn in the back of his throat. Followed by numbness.
The sounds out in the dark beyond the window hadn’t made him shudder or start for a long time. Skitterings. Moanings. A cut-off shout of alarm.
A spotlight of lavender and crimson painted itself across the far wall of his apartment, then leapt away. Once, Finch had seen a shoal of spores take the form of a huge, bloated green monster. Spiraling red eyes. It had bellowed and dived into a neighborhood to the north.
Smashed itself into motes against the ground.
A child might see that and cry out in delight.
Sidle, quick-shadow, scuttled up the side of the wall near the window. Pursuing moths that had flown into the apartment. Sidle was a happy little predator with bright black eyes. Didn’t care about anything but his next meal. Finch could put him in a cage with a branch and water, and Sidle would be content his entire life. So long as he got fed.
“I guess we’ll soon find out what kind of bastard he was,” Finch said to an oblivious Feral. Feral was looking up at the wall. Mesmerized by Sidle’s stalking of the spiraling moth. Finch wondered how many Sidles Feral had caught over the years.
Finch forced the second bulb into his mouth. Chewed it into a dull paste as he moved from the chair to the couch. Lay down. Swallowed.
The room spun a little. Righted itself.
The ceiling had a few odd discolorations but nothing to suggest infiltration. Invisible spies. Who lived upstairs, anyway? Sometimes lately he had heard a person pacing across the floorboards in the middle of the night.
After a minute or two, Finch sat up. Nothing seemed to be happening. Nothing at all.
The dead man sat in the chair next to him, smiling.
“Uhhh!” Finch leapt to his feet.
The man was flanked by a Feral grown large as a pony. A Sidle grown as large as a Feral. They both looked at him the way Sidle had been looking at the moths.
“Sit down,” the man said. An order, not a suggestion. In a strange accent. The man looked much younger than he had on the floor of the apartment. Had lost the fungal beard.
Finch sat down slowly. Didn’t take his eyes off the man. Left hand groping across the cushions. Where was his gun?
“I’ve been waiting for someone like you,” the man said. “You won’t understand it, but I’m going to give you what I know. Just in case.”
The window behind the man no longer showed the city. What it did show was so impossible and disturbing Finch had to look away. And yet the image entered into him.
The man said Finch’s name. Except he didn’t say “John Finch.” He used Finch’s real name. The one buried for eight long years.
Finch tried to slow his breathing. Failed. Chest felt like something was going to explode.
He must be inside the man’s memories.
Then why is the man sitting across from you?
“Who are you?” An obvious question. But it kept pounding against the inside of his skull. So he had to let it out.
The man laughed.
“I didn’t say anything funny.”
“More to the point,” the man said, “who are you? And who are you with?”
“Shut up. This is just one of your memories. Manifesting in me. It isn’t real.”
Blindingly, unbelievably bright, a light like the sun shot through the window. The night sky torn apart by it. Through the tear: a turquoise sea roiling with ever-changing patterns.
“You don’t have to understand it. Not now,” the man said.
Didn’t know if he was inside a mushroom or outside the universe. Glimpses of the city from on high: each street, each canal, an artery filled with blood. Hadn’t known there could be so many shades of red. Spiking into his eyes.
“Be careful,” the man said, echoing Rathven, and took Finch’s hand. The man’s hand was warm. Callused. Real. “Don’t lose yourself, no matter what happens.”
The man and Feral and Sidle disappeared. The window became a huge mouth, and they were all nothing more or less than memory bulbs within it. Finch fell through the same skein of stars he had seen in the gray cap’s memory.
Woke up:
Teetering on the battlements of an ancient fortress, looking out over a desert, the sand flaring out for miles under the seethe of dusk. Moments from someone else’s childhood. A parent’s death. Sitting in a blind. Crawling through tunnels.
Woke up:
A cavern glittering with veins of some blue metal, huge mushrooms slowly breathing in and out. Seen in a flash of light that faded and kept fading but never went out: more caverns, an old woman’s face, framed by white hair; another woman, in her twenties, her thirties, her forties. A shadowy figure hobbling down a street.
Woke up:
The insane jungle of the HFZ, almost floating above it, through it, coming out into a clearing ringed by twelve green men planted in the ground, arms at their sides, their mouths opening and closing soundlessly. And the jungle was made of fungus, not trees, poured over trucks and tanks and other heavy machinery junked and rusted out and infested with mushrooms, some of it still slowly, slowly moving. And back to the fortress, at the edge of a man-made cliff, many hundreds of feet above the desert floor, and out in the desert a thousand green lights held by a thousand shadows motionless, watching. A sound of metal locking into place. A kind of mirror. An eye. Pulling back to see a figure that seemed oddly familiar, and then a name: Ethan Bliss. Then a circle of stone, a door, covered with gray cap symbols. And, finally, jumping out into the desert air, toward a door hovering in the middle of the sky, pursued by the gray cap, before the world went dark.
* * *
Wake up … Came out of it seconds, centuries, later. To find Feral and Sidle watching him. Feral on the floor near the couch. Sidle on the windowsill, a large black moth trapped between his clockwork jaws.
The phone was ringing and ringing. Reached out for it. Put it to his ear.
“Are you okay?” Rath’s voice.
“I’m going to be fine. I think.”
Hung up.
Closed his eyes.
TUESDAY
I: The fanaarcensitii. You said he had fallen from a great height. Did anything you saw in the memory bulbs support that idea?
F: Instinct. I didn’t trust what I saw.
I: Why not?