Chapter 52

 

Jared

 

 

It was summer; days were hot, and tonight the heat seemed even more oppressive. Cara and Jared both liked windows open, fresh air through the bedroom, but the heavy heat was uncomfortable; they reluctantly left Climate Control on and the windows closed when they went to bed. So if there was any noise outside Jared was unaware of it. He slept deeply, dreamless, Cara a familiar and beloved warmth in his arms, until someone shook his shoulder hard and he woke with a start and stared up at the white-haired woman bending over the bed.

"Maud, what the hell are you doing in our bedroom?" he said, and Cara came awake and started to sit up and then remembering, apparently, what she wasn't wearing, grabbed for the sheet. He was ahead of her; he was already pulling the nearest blanket over both of them.

"I apologize for intruding," said Maud, sounding rather grim, "but we have a problem next door. I can't locate Chazaerte, and Zarei left this morning, and I can't deal with it alone."

"Sofi?" asked Cara.

"Mimi and Clyde," said Maud.

"What's the matter?" demanded Jared.

"The enemies in their basement," said Maud, "are escaping."

Cara slid under the blanket to the side of the bed and grabbed at her clothes on the armchair; Jared fished for his jeans on the floor and then paused, looking at Maud. She rolled her eyes. "As if I haven't seen you naked, Jared Ramirez," she said, and stomped out of the bedroom to the living room.

"Not nice, Mother," Cara shouted after her. Jared got his jeans on and located his shoes and Cara stepped into her white pants and felt for a shirt and came up with his black T-shirt instead and pulled it on; it reached to her knees, hung loose over her shoulders, making her look small and fragile.

She was off into the living room before Jared had got his second shoe on; he followed as fast as he could, pulling on the blue T-shirt as he went. Maud was at the door; she opened it as soon as she saw them coming, and led the way across the lawn. Clyde and Mimi's house was dark, with some interior light showing a muted glow, but even with their windows closed against the hot heavy night Jared heard a yell, he thought from Mimi, and an ominous crash. Maud burst into a run and he and Cara ran after her. He hit the porch and slammed his thumb onto the pad and the door lock popped and he thrust the door open.

The night lights came up in the living room and the kitchen as they went past the sensors. The basement door was open, and the lights down there were on full; Jared could hear a voice with a hectoring tone, although he couldn't make out the words, and he could hear a sound he had never expected to hear in this quiet place, the lethal zinging sound of a beam pistol on high power.

"Stay where you are, you son of a bitch, or I'll fry you!" screamed Mimi, somewhere in the middle of the basement.

Jared got to the door before either Maud or Cara and ran down the steps.

All of the basement lights were on, showing the laundry appliance and the table with the gardening tools and the shelves of canned and vacuum packed food. On the tiled floor at the bottom of the stairs lay Clyde, on his back, eyes closed, sprawled in an awkward position with blood oozing from a scalp wound. He was in his ratty old tartan bathrobe and there was a one-handled rolling pin dropped just out of the reach of his right hand. Over him crouched Mimi, in her pink robe and one fuzzy slipper, the other one upside down on the step second from the bottom; she was clutching her beam pistol in both hands and aiming at the open door to the area where they stored the D'ubian It.

In this open doorway stood the It, orange foam dripping from its mouth, eyes fixed warily on Mimi. As Jared reached the step with the bedroom slipper, it turned its head toward him.

"Don't move," Mimi screamed at it, lifting the pistol, and Maud shoved past Jared and grabbed the pistol with both of her hands.

"Don't shoot it; you'll release it!" she shouted, and Mimi yanked the pistol away from her and Maud closed her hands on Mimi's wrists, trying to pull the pistol up and off its target.

"It knocked Clyde down the stairs!" cried Mimi, and Jared picked up one of the larger empty canning jars, into which the It might be jammed somehow; he did not much care if it were comfortable. He started toward the door.

Moronic bitch! snapped the It, dripping foam, and it stuck out a long grey pointed tongue at Mimi, and Cara sprang forward from behind Jared with Clyde's one-handled rolling pin; she swung it at the creature's head like a baseball bat, and knocked it sideways against the thick insulated door. It said, "Awk!" and slumped to the floor.

You ugly little bitch, said a man's voice inside the partitioned space. What makes you think you're gonna get off with that? I get my hands on you, you're regret it, you filthy whore –

Jared reached the doorway a second too late; Cara was already inside the room, with her improvised bat raised; he had just time to see something warty and green and multi-legged and about the size of a large rat crouching on the scarred table, and then she swung the rolling pin again and the thing hit the wall and fell to the floor with a sort of squawk, and ceased to move.

The D'ubian It, on the other hand, was beginning to stir; Jared grabbed it by the tail and jammed it into the jar and screwed down the top, not much caring if there was enough air in there or not, and leaving the jar on the floor he ducked back into the main part of the basement and got the big foamstone flower pot under the table; it had a hole in the bottom for drainage, but it was too small for the green warty thing to get out that way. At best it might get one leg through the hole. And the pot was heavy; he didn't think the thing could lift it.

He had never seen anything exactly like that creature; it looked like an unwholesome cross between a spider and a toad. He rolled the pot over to it, and dropped it upside down over all eight legs.

He swept a glance across the table. The screen mesh cover Issio had improvised over the aquarium was ripped loose at one corner, leaving just enough space for the D'ubian thing to get out past one of the silver axes. Beside the aquarium he saw a pile of shattered glass with a silver chain draped over it and bits of dead twigs poking through it; he looked at it without comprehension. It could have been the fly's jar, but the fly was in Issio's basement.

Cara was already back in the main part of the basement, still holding the rolling pin, and Maud and Mimi were still fighting over the beam pistol. Mimi, who had a strange wild look in her eyes, did not seem to notice that the D'ubian It was under control, or didn't feel it made any difference. Jared bent over Clyde and was relieved to feel a pulse in his throat, not as strong or as regular as he might have liked, but it was still there; he looked up to see that the pistol was aimed in the general direction of his chest, jittering back and forth as Mimi's hands shook, and Maud tried to pull it away.

"Call an ambulance, sweetheart," he said to Cara, and leaned over Clyde to grip Mimi and begin, finger by finger, to pry the beam pistol out of her hands while Maud gripped it.

"It knocked Clyde down the stairs!" Mimi said.

"Yes, I know," said Jared, "but we've trapped it, and it's all right now. Can you give me the pistol?"

"It knocked Clyde down the stairs!"

Jared got one of her hands off the pistol and Maud seized the hand and held on, and he carefully aimed the pistol away from his chest and began to work on her other hand, starting with the finger on the trigger button. Cara spoke urgently into her phone; she must have had it in her pocket.

Mimi's other hand came loose, and Jared put the pistol out of her reach onto the Begin Cycle chute of the laundry appliance, and grabbed up a towel from the Cycle Finished chute and pressed it against Clyde's head wound, holding his head steady with his other hand; he didn't like the way Clyde was sprawled there, and he was afraid to move him; he would bet his last credit that there were bones broken.

"It knocked Clyde down the stairs!" cried Mimi, and reared up and Maud hung on, preventing her from charging the jar on the floor. Cara arrived at Clyde's side and took hold of the towel and Jared stood up and put his arms around Mimi. She struggled briefly and then subsided.

"Is he breathing?" Cara asked the company in general, holding the towel and Clyde's head.

"There's a pulse," said Jared, and Mimi made a lunge for the pistol and he held on, lifting her diminutive form off the floor; her second slipper sailed across the room and landed on the table beside a bag marked "Grass Seed."

"The ambulance is coming," said Cara, and then she reached up and grabbed Maud's arm and pulled her down beside Clyde. 'Hold this," she said, handing her the towel, and jumped up and headed up the stairs.

"Where are you going?" said Maud.

"The Bahtan house," Cara shouted back, and reached the top of the stairs; her footsteps thudded across the floor and the front door slammed open.

Mimi subsided, making a sobbing noise, and Jared held her; she was shaking violently. Maud pressed the towel into place on Clyde's head. The D'ubian It scrabbled weakly in the jar and slumped down again. "Cara handles emergencies well," remarked Maud.

"Yes, she does," agreed Jared. "I imagine, with Dr. Lindstrom on her hands, she had to learn how."

The briefest of silences. "Yes, the woman turned out to be difficult," said Maud, very quietly.

The door upstairs opened; footsteps thundered across the floor. Ollie and Evvie raced down the basement stairs, Evvie clutching a bag, and Cara leaned around the door frame. "I'll wait for the ambulance," she called, and Mimi made another lunge and Jared held on.

"I will wait with Cara," Sofi said, somewhere behind Cara, and Jared felt Gina's mind brush his, looking through his eyes at Clyde, looking at Mimi, looking, with a sort of wincing, toward the room at the end of the basement where the Its had been secured.

Stay with Sofi, honey, he told her, but he did not object to the sight of Issio coming rapidly down the stairs. Did we wake you? he asked.

The situation woke us, said Issio, pausing to take in the scene. That thing escaped? How did this happen?

Mimi plunged and struggled against Jared's arms, trying again to reach the beam pistol. "It's all right," he said to her. "We're all here; it's all right. We're going to take care of Clyde. Ollie and Evvie are with him, and the ambulance is on its way, and it's all right."

He didn't think she heard him, or took in what he was saying.

Ollie and Evvie knelt beside Clyde and Maud got up, relinquishing the towel. "Should we take her upstairs?" she said, looking doubtfully at Mimi.

"She needs to be with Clyde," said Jared, trying to make his grip a comforting embrace. "Go see if those things in the other room are secure." Maud regarded the D'ubian It dubiously, but she walked with caution past the jar and looked toward the overturned flower pot.

"I don't hear it moving," she reported.

"We're going to need something bigger for it," said Jared, thinking how the problem had escalated. The fly had gone nicely into the specimen jar, but they had needed the aquarium for the D'ubian It, and this new creature was even bigger. He wondered if Issio knew where they could get a cage for it, something that would hold a small mammal, he supposed. Not that it looked mammalian. He wondered what exactly it was, and where it had come from; it had, now he thought about it, sounded vaguely familiar.

"Oh, hell," he said, connection snapping into place. "Eugene McIntosh!"

"McIntosh?" said Maud, and then apparently made the connection herself. "Damn. You're right. The thing from Linden's World. The Fathervoice. And it got to Haivran somehow."

"Somehow? They don't travel like you do?"

"No, of course not, do you see a traveler on any of them?" she asked, flipping the pendant on her breast. "They have to go through space, like the rest of you. What is all this broken glass here on the table?"

Ollie, holding Clyde's head steady while Evvie's hands delicately felt his body for broken bones, looked up. "Is the fly there?" she asked.

"The fly?" said Jared. "Don't you have her, Issio?"

"We put the fly in here," said Issio, peering with caution through the hole in the bottom of the upturned flower pot. "Sofi felt life last Thursday; it seemed unwise to allow the fly to remain within reach of her. I do not know what it could do," he added, "but it seemed unwise. Clyde took it."

"Oh, hell," said Jared again, and shared with Issio the sight of the pile of broken glass, with Sofi's silver chain on top.

Issio swore in the darkest Zamuaon and went to look for himself. "There is no jar," he reported. "There is no fly. She has escaped."

"This thing," said Maud, looking much shaken, "this Linden's World Fathervoice, must have sneaked in here somehow and let the nuntulpo out and – but where is the fly? Dear god, now there are three of them here."

She looked up toward the ceiling; Jared found himself looking suspiciously at the corners of the basement, and Issio peered behind the laundry appliance, but it was hopeless, of course. The fly was so small she could hide anywhere; she could sneak out, he thought, through any crack, the opening of a door or a window. They would never see her, never find her unless she had something to say. She had had a lot to say for the past months. By now, she might have been talked out.

"And the thing from Linden's world," said Jared, and Issio peered again into the hole in the flower pot, and looked at the picture in Jared's mind.

"It is a creature native to Linden's World," he said. "Available, one supposes, for use by the It. This is what happens, is it not? These beings, you said, using flies and other pests?"

"Yes, so we think," said Maud.

Our stuff, said Gina, outside on the porch with Cara and Sofi. The housekeeper boxed up our stuff and sent it. Could it have got into the box? What is it, anyway?

I believe it is called a stoad, said Issio, so named by early Earthian settlers. He sent Jared's picture to Gina, who regarded it thoughtfully and agreed; this was what they had called the creature, commonly found in the fields around their house, where it hunted and killed the small vermin in the crop rows.

Her eye was caught by the lights in the sky, and Cara ran across the kitchen and leaned in the open basement door. "The ambulance is coming; I see it above the woods. I'll go out and meet it. How's Clyde?"

"Not good, but still alive," said Ollie, sounding quite cheerful, and Cara vanished again.

Thinking of the fly, Jared held on to Mimi and hoped the ambulance would hurry.