Almost strange enough to make her open the book that Conan Arthur Bidewell had given her, with instructions never to read it, or even to carry it in her hands for very long. Bidewell was an odd man but a compelling one—and he paid the clinic’s bills.
Five years’ worth.
Tonight was the fourth anniversary of their first meeting at the green warehouse down in Sodo. Green warehouse, green leather binding on her small old book, half hidden by textbooks and journals on a metal shelf.
She stared at its short, cracked leather spine, imprinted only with a number on the nub— 1298. A number, or a date.
What would she learn if she didread it?
Dr. Sangloss jerked loose from the book’s spell and punched in a number on her phone. A woman answered. “Ellen? Miriam. I’ve examined your young man. No doubts. You have his address, don’t you?…Not implying a thing, dear. I’m sure we’ll all feel motherly. Say hello to the Witches. I don’t think I’ll make it tonight. Might spook the poor fellow. Let me know what they think.”
CHAPTER 13
Wallingford
The living room windows were covered in plastic. Someone—perhaps the real owner, years before—had tried to remodel and given up. Lath and plaster had been pulled out, old paper-wrapped wiring lay in bent, ragged coils. The roof leaked and water warped the wooden floor, seeping down to flood the basement.
The house had been deserted long enough for a homeless beggar to find his way in and set himself up in crude comfort—no heat, no power, nothing but running water left on for the gardeners who no longer came. The beggar had added a few sticks of furniture and a mattress, probably snuck in with exhausting effort during the night.
When he could stand up without retching—for the first time in days—Daniel searched the house all over again.
And this time…
In a hole just behind the upstairs bathroom sink, he found a carton tied with string. He cut the string and poured out the contents. A battered wallet flopped on the cracked tile floor, driver’s license visible behind a yellowed plastic window. The photo confirmed that this body had once belonged to a man named Charles Granger, age 32 at the time the license was issued. Another shake tossed out sheets of typing paper, a black marker, and a blunted pencil.
A small, dense gray box, taped to the bottom, fell out last—and he knew this was what he’d been looking for all along.
His sum-runner. The sometime stone.
The box was the same, with the same sigil carved in bas-relief on the lid: a circular design with interlinked bands or hoops wrapped around a cross. How likely was that? Another connection between Daniel and Charles Granger. He did not try to open it—not yet. With a low whistle, he put it in his pocket, then flipped through the papers. Random scrawls, odd symbols—terrible handwriting, yet familiar, in its way.
Too close. Very spooky.
Where was Granger now, the previous occupant of this heap of a body—lost, pushed aside, bumped out of the nest? Just another victim. And what about all those other strands, all the world-lines he must have crossed—the myriad densely bundled fates between Daniel Patrick Iremonk and here?
No Daniel in this strand. Only someone living in his aunt’s old house, someone who writes things down in odd symbols—
The closest I could find.
Just notme. Why?
The box was the crucial connection. Had Charles Granger been a jaunter as well? Charles Granger is at the end of his rope. The box knows. It brought you here.
He riffled the papers, stuffed them back into the carton, then closed it up again. Outside, the wind picked up.
Daniel stood, joints popping and cracking. Something wasn’t right. Something wasn’t finished. He had found the box— a box—but Daniel Iremonk had never kept his sum-runner in a cardboard carton—too obvious.
He had hidden it behind the brick fireplace.
Daniel felt along the bricks and found a loose one near the baseboard. He scraped it back and forth, pulled it out, knelt down with a grimace, and reached into the opening. And found a secondbox.
As if working through instinct, he placed both boxes side by side. They were identical in appearance. He puzzled them open. The stones lay in their velvet-cushioned interiors, sharing the same orientation. He removed them and held them in his hands, inspecting their distant red eyes. They refused to twist—and refused to fit together. Two identical pieces of a puzzle. He returned the duplicate stone to its box, closed it, and dropped it into the cardboard carton, then covered it with Charles Granger’s papers.
Best to keep no more than one on his person, and hide the other—as a backup.
The sounds of traffic on the arterial that ran past the northern corner of the old house—a regular hum and wet swoosh—should have been soothing, like freshets down a watercourse. But Daniel could not find peace. He could not sleep. He lay twitching in the torn sleeping bag on the wooden floor in the middle of the rear bedroom. Little electric flashes raced through him, as if his heart were being tickled by the frayed end of a low-voltage cable. Things kept popping up in memory—impossible things he could never have personally witnessed. Each little jolt came with its own bill of lading, a sense of personal loss that left him weaker and more confused.
Even before he arrived here, Daniel had often felt as if he were a knot tying up all the loose rope-ends of time. Far too much responsibility.
Time does not rush along as a point; it smears out like the passage of a brush a minute or an hour or a week wide, sometimes a month—a brush made of fate-laden fibers, painting different pictures for different people.
Knowing this gave Daniel an advantage—he could feelhis way across the width of an hour, a week, a month. Anticipate something unpleasant? Make a left turn instead of a right, find a door opened instead of closed, elude bad fortune—and if something came up that seemed unavoidable, jaunt to a very close but slightly skewed, just slightly improved world—a strand without that particular impediment. That had been his method, until now.
He had made his way from fate to fortune to fate, closing his eyes and squeezinghimself loose…always joining up with alternate versions of himself, so little different that no one could tell there had been a change—a strange cuckoo landing in nests no doubt occupied by other cuckoos. Daniel never spent very long in one strand. He had started his killing early on—sacrificing others to enhance his fortune—desperate, as if he needed many more chances to get where he needed to be and do what he needed to do. It might have been those betrayals—those metaphysical murders—that had brought him low and thrust him into the middle of the Nasty Silent Party—that diseased, broken strand, surrounded by so many other rotting worlds.
An infinite supply of fortune had passed through his hands, and now, apparently, he had sucked the wellspring dry. He sometimes wondered if he had killed the entire universe. But no. There were worse things than Daniel Patrick Iremonk out there, waiting to get in. Perhaps the puzzle boxes had been there all along, unguarded—and Granger had found them, but didn’t know what they were or what they carried.
Poor kind of shepherd.
A pile of bottles had grown in a corner of the kitchen—Night Train, Colt 45, Wild Irish Rose. Even on Daniel’s home strand, those same brands and bottles had lined the shelves in corner markets, leering landmarks of the constancy of human pain and sin. Cheap booze, common to all strands…
His mind raced as much as this mind could race, a sluggish pile of gray matter poisoned by years of alcohol, drugs, and disease. The nipping, coiling snake in his gut. Daniel jerked up from the mattress, batting at his arms. His skin was convinced it was infested with tiny bugs. Punishment for sin? Bugs in your skin.