"Mckinley,.Robin.-.Sunshine" - читать интересную книгу автора (McKinley Robin)
I stood on the balcony, closed my eyes, and let the sun and the soft breeze move over me. Through me. I heardЧfeltЧthe leaves of my tree stir and rustle. My grandmother had taught me that if you handle magic, you have to clean up after yourself. Just like washing (or burning) your clothes or troweling spot remover on a sofa cushion.
I went back indoors to pick up the house key that shouldnТt be left a house key. I knelt on the floor inside the balcony door, in the sunlight, near enough the open door to smell the breeze from the garden.
It was so easy this time. I felt the change, felt the key slip from keyness to knifeness. It was like kneading dough, feeling the thing become what you want it to be under your hands, feeling it responding to you, feeling it transform itself as a result of your effort. Your power. Your knowledge.
I didnТt like it being easy.
But I liked having my knife back. It lay in my hand, looking like it always had. УWelcome back, friend,Ф I murmured, and refused to feel silly for talking to a jackknife. Maybe I was talking to myself too.
Then I put it in my pocket and went to look for incense. I never use incense in my life as a coffeehouse bakerЧI much prefer the smell of fresh breadЧbut it was one of those things that people who need to give you something but havenТt a clue who you are give you. My aunt Edna, my motherТs other sister, every year at one solstice or another, gives me a packet of the current hot fashion in incense. So there was probably some lurking in the back of a cupboard somewhere. There was. I lit a wand of World Harmonics Jasmine and put it in a glass and said the words my grandmother had taught me. I didnТt have to remember them, they were right there, like my tree.
Then I called the coffeehouse to tell them I was back, and all hell broke loose. Especially after Mom belted out to my apartment when I explained I didnТt have a car any more, to pick me up, and got her first look at me.
I wonТt go into a lot about that. It was not one of our finest mother-daughter moments.
I did go to the doctor because everybody said I had to. The doctor said there wasnТt much wrong with me but minor dehydration and exhaustion, gave me a tetanus shot, and some cream to put on both my feet and my breast. He asked me how IТd got the cut on my breast because as he put it, in that portentously unruffled and infuriating way of doctors, УIt looks a bit nasty.Ф But I hadnТt decided how much I was going to tell anyone, and having had everyone who had seen me so far freaking out (except the doctor, who was doing portentously unruffled like a kick to the head) wasnТt helping. So I said I didnТt remember. He said Уmm hmmФ and put some stitches in so it would heal neatly, muttered something about post-traumatic shock syndrome, offered me a reference to someone who could talk to me about remembering and not remembering, and sent me away. Mel had brought me. He borrowed CharlieТs car so I didnТt have to ride pillion on a motorcycle. (I hadnТt known Mel could drive a car. He drove his motorcycles in all weather, including heavy snow and thunderstorms.) And he brought me back. To the coffeehouse. The thought of going back to my apartment was only fleetingly tempting. I wanted to return to my life, and my life, for better or worse, was in the coffeehouse bakery. Also, I wanted to get the freaking out over with so that I didnТt have to keep coming back to it, and I knew Mom wasnТt through yet. Charlie had nearly had to tie her up to let Mel take me to the doctor. Mom is a bit prone to overreacting. But Mel, when he first saw me, turned haggard, and his eyes seemed to go about a million miles deep, and I suddenly felt I knew what he was going to look like when he was ninety. And he didnТt say anything at all, which was probably worse than the noise everyone else was making.
Mom tried to insist that I stay at the houseЧmove back in with her and Charlie and my brothers. I said that I would do nothing of the kind. I meant it, but I was a little hindered by the fact that I no longer had a car. (They never did find my car. I had liked that car.) That afternoon, after talking to the doctor and about forty-seven kinds of cop, Mom and I had a big shouting match that I didnТt have the strength for, and I burst into tears and said that I would walk home if I had to and then Mom started weeping too and it was all pretty ghastly. Charlie at this point reminded Mom in a reasonable facsimile of his normal voice (he kept starting to pat my shoulder and then stopping because IТd told him, truthfully, that I was sore all over) that there was no longer a bedroom for me: the spare bedroom and den had disappeared when Charlie knocked all the downstairs walls out, and Kenny had moved out of the boysТ bedroom into my old bedroom upstairs. This only made Mom cry harder.
Then Mel, who had been left more or less singlehanded to run the coffeehouse while all the drama went on in the office, began collaring the staff who had crammed into the office door to watch and be a kind of Greek chorus of horror, and one by one heaving them physically toward what they ought to be doing, like minding the customers, before they all came back to see what was going on too, which, given CharlieТs kind of customers, they would be quite capable of. When heТd forged his way through to me, he handed Charlie the spatula he was still holding in his other hand, like the relay runner handing on the torch at Thermopylae, and said, УCan you hold the kitchen a minute?Ф and hustled me off to the bakery. My bakery. Just standing in my own domain again, where I was Queen of the Cinnamon Roll, the Bran Muffin, the Orange-Date Tea BreadЧthe Caramel Cataclysm and the Rocky Road AvalancheЧmade me feel better. I had to cancel the immediate impulse to put on a clean apron and check my flour supply. It was far too clean in here for a ThursdayЕ
УNobodyТs been in here while youТve been gone. We gave Paulie the time off.Ф
Paulie was my new apprentice. I had stopped crying for the moment but this made my aching eyes fill up again. УOhЕФ
УHey, we didnТt know what to do. No Carthaginian idea.Ф Mel sounded grim but studiedly calm. For the first time I had some glimpse of what it must have been like for everybody here when I disappeared. I wasnТt the disappearing kind. They would have feared the worst. It was the right response. And given what could have happened, I probably looked a lot worse than I was, so everybody was taking one look at me and fitting this vision against what their dreams had been churning out the last two days.
УSweetheartЕФ
I stiffened.
УHey. Sheer. This is me, okay? I saw you not taking the name the doctor wanted to give you about someone to talk to. You donТt have to talk to me unless you want to. Or anyone else, including Charlie and your mom. But if you tell me what you do want, IТll help you make it happen. If youТll let me.Ф
Thanks to all the gods and angels for Mel. I couldnТt explain that while yes, IТd always been a bit solitary, a bit disinclined to talk about what mattered to me, about what I was thinking about, it was crucial that I be able to go home, to my home, my private space, now. Alone. Where I didnТt have to lie.
I hadnТt forgotten nearly as much as I was pretending I had.
Mind you, IТd forgotten a lot. Post-traumatic whatsit, like the doctor said. The cops mentioned post-traumatic whatsit too. I had to check in with the cops because Mom and Charlie had, of course, reported me missing. I said that IТd driven out to the lake Monday night and didnТt remember anything after that. No, I didnТt remember where IТd been. No, I didnТt remember how IТd got home two days later. No, I didnТt remember why I was so beat up. Mel went with me for that too, even though he was pretty allergic to cops. (Charlie, trying to make a joke, said that he hadnТt done so much cooking for years, and did I want Mel to take me anywhere else? Florida? The Catskills?) And the cop shrink they made me talk to had to go into it again. The gist is that you only remember what you can bear to remember. If youТre lucky, as you get stronger, you can bear to remember a little more, and eventually you get round to remembering all of it and by remembering it then it canТt mess up your life. ThatТs the theory. Fat lot they know.
I didnТt say УvampiresФ to anyone, and I sure remembered that much. If I had said it, SOF wouldnТt have just talked to me, theyТdСve kept me. People donТt escape from vampires. I wasnТt going to think about how IТd escaped from vampiresЧlet alone tell SOF about itЧso letТs just pretend I hadnТt escaped from vampires. Post-traumatic shock, phooey. Seemed to me the trauma was trotting right along with me, like a dog on a leash with its owner. I was the dog.
I had to talk to SOF, because anything mysterious might be about the Others, and SOF were the Other police. But I told them I didnТt remember anything too. By the time I talked to SOF I was getting good at saying I didnТt remember. I could look Сem in the eye and say it like I meant it. They were cleverer about questioning me. They asked me stuff like what the lake had looked like that night, where exactly IТd sat on the porch of the cabin. They werenТt trying to trick me; they were trying to help me remember, possibly to our mutual benefit, trying to help me find a way in to remembering. I pretended there was no door, or if there was one, it had six locks and four bolts and a steel bar and it had been bricked over years ago.
It was easier, saying I didnТt remember. I walled it all out, including everybodyТs insistent, well-meaning concern. And it turned out to be easyЧa little too easyЧto burst into tears if anyone tried to go on asking me questions. Some people are mean drunks: IТm a mean weeper.
The first days started passing and became the first week. The bruises were fading and the scratches skinned over, and I began to look less like hell on earth. On the second Monday movies night at the SeddonsТ after my return, people began to make eye contact with me again without looking like it was costing them.
Charlie found someone who could loan me a car till I could replace the one they never found, and then found another one when the first one had to go back. The insurance took forever to cough up but it did at last. Their agent wanted to complain about my not remembering exactly what had happened, but he was promptly inundated by people from CharlieТs, staff and regulars, offering to be character references, the doctor IТd seen and the cop shrink IТd seen said I was genuine, and then Mom started writing letters. The company might have held out against the rest, but no one resists Mom for long when she starts one of her letter-writing campaigns.
During borrowed-car gaps Mel gave me a lift on his motorcycle of the week (favors donТt get much more serious than giving someone a ride at four a.m.), and then I started using KennyТs bicycle. Kenny was at an age when bicycles are deeply uncool and he didnТt miss it. Downtown where the coffeehouse is is a drag on a bike, cars and buses first run you off the road and then leave you asphyxiating in their wake, but itТs nice out near YolandeТs and bicycling helped make me tired enough to sleep through the nights. Although it meant getting up at three-thirty to get in in time to make cinnamon rolls. Which is ridiculous. Also, Mom was having kittens about my riding a bike after dark (or before sunup), and she was perhaps not entirely wrong about this, even if she didnТt know why, and even though there was no record of anyone ever being snatched off a bike in New Arcadia. There was no record of suckers at the lake either. So I did buy another car. The Wreck. It ran. I bought it from a friend of MelТs who liked tinkering with cars the way Mel liked tinkering with motorcycles, and the friend guaranteed it would run, just so long as I didnТt want anything fancy like a third gear that was there all the time, or a top speed of over forty. It suited me fine. I didnТt feel like getting attached to another car, and the sporadic absence of third gear was an interesting diversion.
The doctor took the stitches out of my breast. My feet healed. Life started to look superficially normal again. I took a deep breath and asked Paulie how heТd like to get up at four in the morning once a week to make cinnamon rolls. He was delighted. Another head case joins the inner cadre at CharlieТs. He chose Thursday. I now had two mornings a week I didnТt have to get up before sunrise. Theoretically. I didnТt tell him what if he was paying attention he already knew, that the coffeehouse schedule was a thing that happened on paper and never quite worked out that way. But letting him think he got to choose should be good for morale. His morale. And even an unpredictable series of fours in the morning I didnТt have to get up at was going to be good for my morale.
Aimil and I started going to junk and old-books fairs again. And when I went hiking with Mel we didnТt go out to the lake. Not being able to decide what to tell anyone about anything had become the habit of not telling anybody anything. The funny thing was that the nearest I came to telling anyone was Yolande. There was something about the way she put me in a chair and made pots of tea and sat with me and talked about the weather or the latest civic scandal or some book we had both read, and not only didnТt ask me anything but didnТt appear to be suppressing the desire to ask me anything either.
The second nearest I came was one night with Mel, when I woke up out of one of the nightmares, and was out of bed and across the room before I had registered that the body I had been in bed withЧ had had my head on the chest ofЧhad a heartbeat. Mel didnТt say anything stupid. He sat up slowly, and turned the light on slowly, and made me a cup of tea slowly. By that time I was no longer twitching away from every shadow but I was too pumped with sick adrenaline to sleep. Mel took me downstairs and put a paintbrush in my hand. Every now and then he got talked into doing a custom job on one of the bikes heТd rescued. I had laid down primer and first coats for him a few times, and buffed finishes, but thatТs all. That night he had me filling in the outline of tiny green oak leaves. When I had to stop and get ready to report for cinnamon roll duty I felt almost normal again. No, not normal. Something else. I felt as if IТd accidentally re-entered my grandmotherТs world, where I didnТt want to go. But if that was where I had been, it had done me good. I wondered who the bike was for, why they wanted an oak tree. Mel would never do the standard screaming-demon thunderbolt-superhero sort of thing, all jaw and biceps and skeggy-looking flames, and one of the few little dumb things that would ruffle that calm of his was the sight of a bike decorated with a flying sorcerer, but a tree was aЕwell, a funny symbol for something with wheels that was built to go lickety-split. Or look at it another way. The main symbolism around trees is about their incorruptibility, right? Their immunity to all dark magic. This is not something you expect your average biker to be deeply interested in.
I felt a little breezeЧMel had opened a windowЧheard leaves rustle. It hadnТt occurred to me that my secret tree might be, say, an oak, or an ash, a beech, some particular kind of tree that related to a tree I might find in an ordinary landscape. I didnТt want my grandmotherТs world to have anything to do with this one. I didnТt want what had happened to me at the lake to have anything to do with this world, this ordinary landscape. I laid my paintbrush down and went and stood with Mel by the open window.
After the first week or two of armed and sizzling silence after the argument, and all messages passed through pacifist intermediaries, Mom had started giving me charms. SheТd turn up at the coffeehouse at about eight in the morning with another charm done up in the standard charm-sellerТs twist of brown paper. I didnТt want them, but I took them, and I didnТt argue with her. I didnТt say anything at all except (sometimes) thank you. Mom and I hadnТt gone in for light conversation in years, since it never stayed light, between us. I did things with the charms like wrap them around the telephone at home, to soften any bad news it might be bringing me, or drape them round my combox screen, ditto. This kind of abuse wears charms out fast. IТm not a big fan of charmsЧbarring the basic wards, which I admit only a fool would dispense with, fetishes, refuges, whammies, talismans, amulets, festoons, or any of the rest, I can do without Сem. They take up too much psychic space, and the sooner these new ones crashed and burned the sooner theyТd stop bugging me. But Mom was trying to behave herself, and the charms seemed to relieve her feelings. Once I had a car again I started stuffing them in the glove compartment. They didnТt like it, but charms arenТt built to quarrel with you.
The mark on my breast, which appeared to have closed over, cracked open again, and oozed. It was nearing high summer by then and I, who generally wore as little as decency allowed because it got so hot in the bakery, was suddenly wearing stranglingly high-necked T-shirts. You canТt ooze in a public bakery. I went back to the doctor and he said УhmmФ and had I remembered yet how IТd gotten the cut in the first place. I said I hadnТt. He gave me a different cream for it and sent me home again. It seemed to heal for a while and then cracked open again. I grew clever about taping gauze over it and ripping the armholes out of my high-necked shirts and wearing lurid multicolored brasЧfortunately there was a vogue on for lurid multicolored brasЧso it looked like I was merely making a somewhat unfortunate fashion statement. Mel knew better, of course, and if it hadnТt been for him I would have stopped going to the doctor, but Mel was a stubborn bastard when he wanted to be and he wanted to be about this, drat him. So I had to go back again. The doctor was starting to worry by now, and wanted to send me to a specialist. A specialist in what, I wanted to say, but I didnТt dare. I was afraid IТd give something away, that my guilty conscience would start oozing through the cracks somehow, like blood and lymph kept oozing through the crack in my skin. I refused to see a specialist.
Some cop or other came by the coffeehouse at least once a week Уto see how I was doing.Ф Any of our marginally half-alert regulars knew the Cinnamon Roll Queen and chief baker had been absent a few days under mysterious circumstances and that whatever had happened to her was still casting a pall over the entire staff at CharlieТs. That was everybody. And our SOF regulars are better than half alert or they wouldnТt be working for SOF. So I had cops coming in and our SOFs watching the cops and the cops watching our SOFs. It should have been funny. It wasnТt. I think Pat and Jesse actually suspected the truth, although I donТt see how they could have. Maybe they thought it was ghouls or something, although ghouls donТt generally have the foresight to, like, store a future meal. But something had happened and the law enforcement guys wanted to get out there and enforce something. They werenТt fussy. If it was people, the cops were happy to do it. If it wasnТt people, SOF was happy to do it. But I was supposed to choose my dancing partner and I wouldnТt, and this was making the troops restless.
I did notice the difference between the people who were really bothered for me, or for the sake of the society they were paid a salary to keep safe, and the people who wanted to know more because it was like live TV or those cheesy mags with headlines like I ATE MY ALIEN BABY. Fried, with a side salad and a beer.
The most serious drawback to the telling-nothing approach is that it made that much more of a mystery of what had happened, and the nature of gossip abhors a vacuum of the unexplained. This meant that soon everybody УknewФ that whatever had happened did indeed involve the Others, because that made a better story. I think they would have liked to assume that it involved the Darkest Others, because that made the best story of all, except that, of course, I was still here, and nobody escaped from vampires.
Nobody escaped from vampires.
I didnТt know if the everybody who knew this included SOF or not, but I could hardly ask.
* * *
Meanwhile there were the nightmares. There continued, relentlessly, to be the nightmares. They werenТt getting any better or easier or rarer. ThereТs not that much to tell about them because nightmares are nightmares on account of the way they feel, not necessarily by the mayhem and the body count. These felt bad. Of course they always had vampires in them. Sometimes I was being stared at by dozens of eyes, eyes that I mustnТt look into, except that wherever I looked there were more eyes, and I couldnТt shut my own. Sometimes there was just the knowledge that I was in a horrible place, that I was being contaminated by the horrible place, that even if I seemed to get out of it I would take it with me. The nightmares also always had blood in them, one way or another. Once I thought I had woken up, and my bed was floating in blood. Once I was wearing the cranberry-red dress and it was made of blood. But the worst ones were when I was a vampire myself. I had blood in my mouth and my heart didnТt beat and I had strange awful thoughts about stuff IТd never thought about, that in the dream I would think I couldnТt think about because I was human, and then IТd remember I wasnТt human, I was a vampire. As a vampire I knew the world differently.
I told myself that those two days at the lake were just something that had happened. ThatТs all. The dreams were like the wound on my breast: my mind was wounded too. The bruises and scratches were the superficial stuff: of course they healed quickly. And everybody dreams about vampires; we grow up dreaming about them. TheyТre the first and worst monster that lives under everybodyТs bed. You do get mad Weres or a demon thatТs tired of passing for human and not being able to do the less attractive demon things, but mostly itТs vampires.
I never dreamed aboutЕThe funny not ha-ha thing was how hard I was trying to forget about him too. HeТd saved my life, sure, but heТd destroyed my world view in the process. The only good vampire was a staked and burned vampire, right? So what if heТd shown a little enlightened self-interest about meЧas well as having a sense of honor straight out of some nineteenth-century melodrama with dueling pistols and guys who said things like Уbegone varlet,Ф which was how IТd lived long enough to present him with an opportunity to display enlightened self-interest. He was still a vampire. And everybody heТdЕmy brain wouldnТt go thereЕwas still dead. To put it another way: the loathly lady was still a loathly lady, she hadnТt been cured by whatever, and there was no reason to suppose she wasnТt going to go on eating huntsmen and their horses and hounds, and probably the occasional knight who didnТt give her the right answers as well.
I didnТt think there was a word for a human so sicko as to rescue a vampire, so he could go on being a vampire, because no one had ever done it. Before.
When I woke up out of one of these nightmares I didnТt dare go back to sleep again. And they kept coming. So after a few weeks I segued from being flipped out and exhausted by what had happened to being flipped out and exhausted from being flipped out and exhausted.
During this first time in my life I didnТt want to read lots of news reports about Other activity, there seemed to be more of them around.
Some of it was okay. There was another long heated debateЧas a result of some statistical review stating that the numbers of those afflicted were risingЧabout whether incubi or succubi were living or undead, which is an old argument but no one has ever settled it. The obstacle to scientific study is that the moment the psychic connection is cut your object of investigation disintegrates, and by seizing one of the things for scientific study you are ipso facto severing the link. At least until the global council decides itТs okay to keep a human being as a thing-thrall, which is at present even for purposes of pure research highly illegal, although the official language talks about corporeal and noncorporeal subjugation. The reason itТs such a hot topic is that while incubi and succubi are a relatively small problem, some people think that finding out how they work would give us a handle on vampires, which is absolutely number one on everyoneТs list about Others, and the medical guys can cure someone who has been a thing-thrall, which isnТt an option with vampire dinners. Well, usually they can cure someone who has been a thing-thrall, if they havenТt been one for too long.
There was a project drawn up not too long ago with a list of volunteers to be thing-thralls but that never got off the ground, maybe partly because the Сubis like choosing their own prey and bait on a string doesnТt interest them, but mainly because there was this huge public outcry against it. Mind you, you have to wonder about the volunteers. СUbis may be a bigger problem than anybody knows because thing-thralls are usually having a very good time and itТs their loving friends and families (sometimes their pissed-off colleagues) that start to wonder why theyТre sleeping twelve or fourteen hours a day and spending the rest of the time looking like they just had amazingly terrific sex. Nobody knows whether thing-thralls really are having sex with their things either, or whether they only think they are. But even the best sex your nerve endings can be made to imagine theyТre having has to be balanced against the fact that your IQ tends to drop about one point for every month youТre a thing-thrall. The cleverer ubis cut and run before the brain drain gets obvious, and a lot of people arenТt using their brains to begin with and donТt miss them. But sometimes itТs too late for the thrall to have any future more intellectually demanding than night shift shelf restocker. There is a bagger I know at our local Mega Food who had been New ArcadiaТs top criminal defense lawyer before an Тubi got him. I used to read the reports of his courtroom antics and thought being a thing-thrall had improved his personality beyond recognition, but it had knocked hell out of his career prospects.
There was a series of articles about how many different kinds of Weres there are, another favorite topic. Wolves are the famous one, of course, but theyТre actually comparatively rare. There are probably more were-chickens than there are were-wolves, which if youТre asking me explains why comparatively few Weres go rogue as against, say, how many demons. And possibly why the black market in anti-Change drugs is so slick, although the idea of black marketeers with either a sense of humor or of compassion is maybe stretching it a little. More likely the were-chickens will pay anything for the drugs, and do.
But there are were-pumas, for example, and were-bears. Were-coyotes are enough of a scourge that the SOFs go after them and do a horrible sort of mop-up about once a year. Were-raccoons are nasty little beggars and were-skunks are, well, beyond a nightmare. Get a were-skunk mad at you and your life isnТt worth living. ThereТs a special flying SOF unit for were-skunks. Every city over about a hundred thousand has a SOF were-rat unit, speaking of horrible mop-ups. New Arcadia has one. But according to Pat and Jesse you can stay one jump ahead (so to speak) of all the Weres, even the rats, as long as you donТt get careless. Nobody ever stays a jump ahead of vampires.
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