CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

 

 

Kimberly's lover had been hung to drain in the apartment's tiny, paint-stripped bathtub. In the meantime, Peter set to moving furniture.

He needed a space big enough to draw on. The queen's instructions - more a blast of images, a series of blueprints strobed into his brain - weren't exact, but he knew he would have to get his hands dirty. Fingerpaint, if he couldn't find a brush. Trace geometric shapes, harsh angles that hurt the eyes.

Peter had never been one for trigonometry in school, but he understood the power of math and shapes. He'd always admired illustrations by Escher, woodblock carvings of twisted spaces folding inward, inverting gravity and time as easily as crumpling paper.

The queen operated on similar rules. He didn't know how he knew, only that the knowledge was deep inside him. One of the queen's many gifts.

Now, as he piled the last of the furniture into the blood-spattered bedroom and admired the empty space he'd created in the dining room, he thought it was time to take that gift and use it to crumple the world.

In the bathroom, the dead man had stopped dripping. His face was a mask of gore but the bathtub was an inch deep in blood - more than enough, Peter figured. He found tools in the kitchen - a mixing jug, a pastry brush - and began his work.

Only a few days before, his wife and her lover had whispered secrets in this broken-down New York apartment. Drawn fingertips across the backs of each others' hands. Fought and grumbled and made up again, like a married couple did. Like Peter and Kimberly had once done.

Now it was a ruin of red. He closed his eyes, saw the runes and patterns the queen had given him, then traced their shapes across the floor and up the walls. He turned the cabinets slick, let the red soak into the floorboards.

He stood back to admire his handiwork. A series of concentric circles studded at the north and south poles with inscriptions in a language he didn't understand. Runes and symbols like crawling spiders. Squares nested inside octagons nested inside rings of triangles, like a madman's spirograph.

The patterns that would open a doorway back to Rustwood.

But something was wrong. He couldn't feel any hum, any vibration of life in what he'd painted. No echo of the queen coming through.

No doorway.

"Did I do something wrong?" He didn't know whether he was asking himself or asking the queen, hoping she'd respond. He circled the room, squinted down at his work. Not a line or spatter out of place.

Unless he'd misremembered, or received a broken transmission. He was so far from the queen, and so much could go wrong. He raised his face to the ceiling.

"Help me," he said. "Are you there? I need help. I can't do what you asked me to do."

No reply. Had he expected one? The queen didn't come when called. She didn't obey. She was obeyed.

"Please!" Nothing. He checked the runes again. Closed his eyes and compared what he'd drawn to that flash of light, of instruction.

Something was missing.

Make a doorway, she'd said.

Blood

A doorway of blood

Doorways came in all sizes. Some were big enough to step through. Some just large enough to let a whisper pass.

Peter Archer looked down at his wrists, where the bone-blades sat beneath the surface, two long bulges ending just below the palm.

Did he still bleed? He'd never thought to check. But it made sense, after all. He needed to speak with the queen, and while it took a lot of blood to open a door wide, it would only take a little to stretch a line between himself and his regent. But some other dead man's blood wouldn't do. He was the one making the call.

A knife in the kitchen? No, too far away. All he knew about this doorway was that it could open at any moment. Better to open communications here, where he stood.

All that left him was his teeth.

He lowered his mouth to his wrist, and, tentatively, bit into the soft skin where the bone-blades pushed outward. There was no pain. Only a swelling heat, like he'd felt on long nights curled around his wife, their child cupped in her arms and her in his, the three Archers pressed together, soft and loving and cushioning against the dark.

For one moment, as his teeth closed around muscle, he felt alive.

Then came the pain, the first pain he'd felt in weeks. A throbbing in his bones, a pulse of fire rocketing into his elbow and fingertips. He gasped as blood swelled and ran over his palm, dripping between his knuckles, thick and sluggish like motor oil.

The first drop hit the floorboards. It didn't splash. It thudded.

And with that mercury-thick thud came a ringing echo, like chimes in a gentle breeze. A tune rising in the distance, a whistle growing louder in his head, louder still, until it clacked his teeth together and sent him to his knees.

His eyes bulged as the voice returned. Not a whisper this time, not a murmur barely heard across a great distance. This was a roar, the sound of stadiums collapsing, of buses full of schoolchildren ploughing into concrete barriers.

It said, My servant.

"Queen..." He forced the word through gritted teeth. "I brought... you blood. Can I come back?"

The queen's command was simple, growling low through his bones.

More.

"More blood?"

More!

"More people?"

Now, a low purr of contentment. Many more. Bring them all through.

He didn't understand, not yet. But somehow, Peter Archer knew he would, in time.