CHAPTER NINE
I’M NOT OFTEN PRONE to nightmares. I usually don’t remember my dreams at all. This one, however, was a bad one.
I chase someone. I run through back alleys and scrap yards piled with engine blocks and old suits of plate mail. I run through the ruins of old steel mills and find myself at the Magetech complex, a maze of mirrored glass.
I hear a muffled voice calling for me . . .
“Dad?”
“Sarah!” I scream at the mirrored glass, and pound at the doors.
In front of me, the building implodes. It shatters as if there’s no substance to it other than the mirrored glass skin. Shards fall and swirl around me, like a lethal snowstorm, flying daggers all reflecting my daughter’s face.
“Sarah!” I call again, feeling my flesh cut to ribbons.
The shards swirl into a glass vortex, a chromed tornado falling into a spherical void that becomes the twin of the Portal itself.
I take a step forward, naked, bleeding and sliding on my own blood.
I am thrown back as a quartet of horsemen erupts from the Portal. Upon the pale horse that tramples me, I see a skeleton wrapped with raw flesh stitched together with steel wires.
The figure of death leans toward me, opens its mouth, and makes an electronic beeping sound.
Waking up didn’t make the beeping go away.
I kicked off the covers, completely disoriented as to time and place. Three things managed to sink in the first ten seconds. I was in my own bed, my phone was ringing, and I couldn’t remember how I’d gotten here.
I grabbed the phone, hoping for some clue to how I got back here.
No such luck.
“How could you put her up to this?” I could tell it was bad. Margaret had already skipped two preliminary octaves in the conversation and was a just a few sentences away from dog-whistle pissed.
Despite my disorientation, something about talking to my ex made it very easy to slide right into the argument. “You know I didn’t put our daughter up to anything.”
“You didn’t tell her not to apply to those places.”
“In case you haven’t noticed, you’re living a few thousand miles away—”
“There’s a reason for that.”
“—and when the subject came up, I told her to tell you about it.”
“And make me the bad guy? That isn’t fair, and you know it!”
I sighed. I try hard to be a good long-distance father, and I’ve done my best to keep Sarah from playing us off against each other. But somehow, that never seemed good enough for Margaret.
“Damn it, Kline, what am I supposed to do?”
“You’re supposed to be her goddamn mother.” I must have really been stressed out, because I was harsh enough to actually leave Margaret speechless. “You’re the parent, you set the boundaries. You are the bad guy, by definition.”
“I just want some support.”
“What the hell do you think I’ve given you? Do you have any idea how often she tries to get me to tell her that you’re being stupid and unreasonable? How many times I’ve told her you’re the boss, and I’m not going to second-guess you. I’m not there—”
“You should have told her that she shouldn’t have applied—”
“I told her she shouldn’t have lied to you.”
“You should have never let her fly up there.”
“I shouldn’t have let her?” My hand was trembling and my teeth were clenched so tight that my voice could barely come out.
“Kline?”
“I gave you everything you asked for, the divorce, custody, the nodding assent of every stupid soft-headed hysterical parenting decision you ever made—But I am not going to tell my daughter that I don’t want to see her.”
“That’s not what I’m asking—”
“What, then? What are you asking? I’ll tell you right now that there’s nothing I’m going to tell her that will keep her from resenting our breakup.”
“That’s not what this is about!”
“So you’ve talked to her?”
“I’ve told her—”
“I know exactly what you’ve told her. Did you ask her anything? Like why she feels she has no chance discussing this with you?”
“This isn’t a negotiation! She knows how I feel about this, and she went ahead anyway.”
“Went ahead and what, Margaret?”
“You know what she did. She went behind my back—”
“—and was accepted into Kent State University.”
She was quiet for a moment.
“You know how most parents I know find out about their kids going behind their back? A call from the cops. I want to know if you’d be coming down nearly as hard on her if that had happened. She applied to a college—you want to know how many parents would give anything to see that kind of rebellion in their kids?”
“Stop it! You don’t understand.”
I took a few breaths and released my grip on the phone. It was the first time in a few years that I had really lost my temper and let loose on Margaret, and it made me feel like an asshole.
Not that I was completely pure in this relationship. In my more self-aware moments I knew that a lot of my identity as a parent was tied up in being the reasonable one—an easy role when you’re nowhere near the teenage epicenter.
“I’m sorry. I’m a little stressed out.”
“A little?”
“She did wrong. I know it, and she knows it.”
“What about her trip? She’s coming to see you. She’s been looking forward to this for a year.”
My daughter’s voice from my nightmare was ringing in my ears. “They’re refundable tickets, aren’t they?”
“I can’t just cancel it.”
“No, that would be a bit too much. But you can reschedule it, can’t you?”
“You mean ground her for a month?”
“And send her over in January.”
“You’d be willing to give up the holidays?”
I sighed. “I hate to say this, but it might actually work out better with my job.”
“Great.” Somehow she was able to subliminally insert the entire history of our divorce in that one word.
“Let me know if you have any trouble changing the dates. I’ll chip in any difference in the airfare.”
“Thanks, but we have a good travel agent. I don’t think it will be a problem.”
“She’s a good girl,” I told her.
“I know.”
“Tell her I love her.”
“I will.”
I hung up, feeling a mixture of relief and disappointment. I really had been looking forward to showing Sarah around the local tourist traps. But the nightmare image of zombie-boy was fresh in my head, and for once, Margaret’s fears about mana-infested Northeast Ohio seemed perfectly reasonable.
Not to mention, I was still trying to figure out what day and time it was. I stumbled out into my living room, still holding my phone.
I squinted at daylight streaming in my windows. The angle of the sun made it early evening. I glanced in the kitchen and the clock on my microwave read 4:30 PM.
I sat down, shaking my head. I never slept during the day and waking up twelve hours off my normal schedule threw my whole equilibrium out of balance. I had no idea if I’d been unconscious for four hours, or twenty-four. My last conscious memory before waking up was talking to the COO of Magetech, Simon Lucas.
I checked my phone messages.
First call at 12:45, shortly after my interview with Lucas. “Hello, Mr. Maxwell? This is Nora Abrams at Magetech. Mr. Lucas wanted me to call and make sure you made it home all right. You were suffering a bad reaction, and we just wanted to check up on you.”
“A bad reaction?” I muttered. “To what?”
At 2:00, Sarah had called. “Dad, I told her. She went ballistic, just like I told you she would. I just know she’s going to cancel my trip up there. Call me or I don’t know what I’m going to do.”
My cell phone rang.
I usually turn the cell off when I come home. I try to keep the cell for work, and the landline for my personal life. Not that it works particularly well.
Probably I wasn’t in any state to remember to kill it when I came home, if I was having blackouts. Christ, what happened to me?
I hung up the landline and answered the cell phone, mostly because my argument with Margaret was still running through my head at that point and I was half-convinced that it was my ex or my daughter trying the other phone because I had the home line tied up.
I wasn’t thinking very clearly. Otherwise I would have looked at the caller ID.
“Maxwell?”
“Hello?” Male voice, odd accent . . . I shifted mental gears when I realized who it was. “Dr. Kawata?”
“Yeah, I ran those tests like you wanted me to. You need to tell me what the hell’s going on here.”
“What do you mean?”
“Oh, you want a list? I put that sample in the county’s brand-new spectrometer. The one that’s supposed to filter out all that damn background noise, and the bastard doesn’t work. Readings as crazy as anything on the old equipment. I ran it a dozen times to average it all out, and you know what I got?”
“What?”
“Run-of-the-mill sodium chloride.”
“Salt?”
“Salt. Plain old salt, crushed fine with a few trace mineral impurities.”
“Shit. Why would someone send me salt of all things?”
“That’s not the question, Maxwell.”
“There’s more?”
“Yeah, there’s more. I want to know why I just spent two hours being questioned by the FBI about your little package.”
“What?”
“What did you get me into, Maxwell? I’m a civil servant, I got a pension, I don’t need to be mixed up in this type of crap.”
I shook my head. I hadn’t expected the FBI to catch up with this so quickly. “I’m sorry. I think the feds were investigating the person who probably sent that to me. I didn’t mean to get you involved with anything.”
“Well, you find any other mystery powders, have someone else look at it. I like my job too much.”
“What did the Feds want?”
“Why don’t you ask them? I’m sure they’ll be talking to you.”
Dr. Kawata hung up.
“Salt?”
I got dressed, trying to remember my interview with Lucas. I couldn’t remember anything past dropping the water glass. However, the sense of unease around the Magetech complex still clung to me like the stale smoke around Columbia Jennings’ office. Every time I thought of Lucas, I felt something sour in the pit of my stomach.
There was something twisted about the guy—and my feelings about him made no objective logical sense whatsoever. Anyone looking at a transcript of my conversation with him wouldn’t see anything but a very cooperative and open interview subject. I knew, because I had that transcript. My notebook was covered with my handwriting. Notes I had no memory of jotting down
The guy had no problem answering every question I had, in detail.
“Maybe I was asking the wrong questions?”
The guy was way too open. He was telling me things about Mazurich’s history with Magetech that no sane executive should be stating on the record to a political reporter.
I apparently had a more detailed conversation with Mr. Lucas than I remembered.
However, the highlights were clear from the prelude I could recall. I had conflict of interest in spades, and dollar amounts with enough zeros to give Gregory Washington’s creative auditors an orgasm. The fact that Mazurich’s assets were news to me meant that they were never publicly disclosed.
I flipped through my notes and saw a road map of Mazurich’s secret finances, complete with quotes from Lucas that were marked as being on the record.
“What the hell?”
Lucas was giving me exactly what I should want.
For almost every line, I could think of at least two means of independent verification. With a few hours and a few phone calls, the right questions would have this story ironclad. I could easily reconfirm any quotes with Lucas before running the piece.
And I had a gut feeling that it was all completely accurate.
But that did nothing to dispel the sick sense of wrongness I felt about it all, and about Lucas in particular.
Stories aren’t just handed out like that. And it was almost as if Lucas was intentionally sacrificing Mazurich, the founding father of his company. At the same time, he was allowing a PR catastrophe for Magetech. If I ran with this, people would call for hearings and investigations and . . .
It didn’t make sense.
“This is why he killed himself.”
Could it be a smoke screen? Throw something big at the reporter so he doesn’t ask the really troublesome questions?
There was not a single thing in my notes about dwarves. Or zombies.
Or salt.
“Nina Johannessen, Cleveland Press.”
I sat down on my couch, phone in one hand, cold beer in the other. I pressed the bottle to my forehead and said, “Nina—”
“Kline? Are you okay? You haven’t been at the office.”
“I’ve been working.”
“Something’s wrong.”
I hesitated, I wasn’t sure if I wanted to go into something like unexpected blackouts with her. Instead, I changed the subject. “You told me you would look into some things for me?”
“Yes.” I heard rustling in the background. “I’ve actually tracked down rumors of dwarven magi. Nothing concrete, but from the sound of it there might actually be that unfocused charm or fetish we were speculating about.”
“What about zombies?”
“Have you heard any stories about a company named Magetech?”
I sat up, almost spilling my beer. “What?”
“Magetech, they have the patents on most Portal-adapted consumer electronics—”
“I know who they are.”
“Well, they’ve been trying to come up with fusions of magic and industrial technology for years.”
“What? Are you saying my zombie—?”
“I can’t find anything matching your description, but there’re stories about Magetech hiring dark magi, necromancers, real left-hand path people for some type of black projects lab.”
“The kind of people who might be reanimating corpses?”
“Your zombie was too decomposed and too active to be an efficient use of mana, unless the metallic components were some sort of superstructure. And the investment in time and energy to create that wouldn’t make sense, unless—”
“Someone was mass-producing it?” I shook my head. “Christ, there’re more of those out there?”
“It could be an R&D project, or I could be drawing the wrong conclusions.”
I shook my head. “No, it makes sense. If this thing was unique, why risk it on a simple B&E?”
There was a long pause on the other end of the phone. I got an uneasy feeling. “Nina, what aren’t you telling me?”
“I don’t know what . . .”
“Please, I smell bullshit for a living. What is it? Did you have another vision?”
Silence. I thought of my dream. The undead rider rising out of the shards of the Magetech complex.
“Is that how you thought to look into Magetech in the first place?”
“You know?”
I looked at the bottle, sweating in my hand. It was shaking. I felt a sick dread growing in my gut.
“What did you see?” I asked, “What did you hear?”
“The Oracle is sometimes unclear—”
“I saw it, damn it!” I slammed the bottle on the table in front of me. “I saw Death ride off your tarot card right out of the Magetech complex. I heard my daughter.”
“I’m so sorry, Kline. I didn’t want to upset—”
“My daughter, Nina. Did you see her in your visions?”
A long painful pause. “Yes.”
“Don’t make me pull this out of you.”
Her voice was shaking. “It could all be symbolic—”
“Cut the crap and tell me.”
“I saw the Devil,” she said, near tears, “and your daughter was in his hand.”