The room was dark but for the light that shined directly on the creamy paper now creased over his lap. The phone had been silent all day, and before that there was nothing but crank calls from the curious and the rude, the drunken, the bored, and the unsound of mind—his usual correspondents. Still, he knew the patterns. There was a reason Maxwell Glaucous had come to the Northwest and settled in Seattle. He could feel all the ripples in the local human ocean, like the passages of tiny, sharp-prowed boats through the general swirl and stir of mismanaged destinies. Seven years of travel across the continent, driving endless miles beside his solitary and unlovely partner…
His eyelids slumped. He was slipping into his morning nap. He would awaken in a few minutes, refreshed and alert…but for now, there was only the drowse, an overwhelming need for a brief swim across Lethe. The buzzing in the bedroom, the silence of his own stuffy room, the soft comfort of a leather chair. He stared vaguely at the black phone on its stand, watery gray eyes turning in toward the bulbous nose, vision blurring…
Both eyes suddenly shot wide and his spine stiffened. Someone had brushed the front door to their apartment.
He could see or imagine knuckles lifted, poised—and then a sharp rap, followed by a quick, deep voice, like gravel rolling at the bottom of a muddy stream, “I know you’re in there, Max Glaucous! Open to me. Old times and old rules.”
Glaucous expected no visitors.
“Coming,” he said, and rose swiftly to his feet. Before answering, he rapped lightly on Penelope’s door. The buzzing stopped.
“Someone’s here, my darling,” he said. “Are we proper?”
CHAPTER 26
University District
“I don’t know you. I don’t know anyone by that name,” Fred Johnson said to the wasted, sick-looking man leaning on his porch.
“I understand,” Daniel said. “I know you, though—or someone a lot like you.” His voice was rough and shallow. He was exhausted after his hike from the university.
The former Charles Granger rose two inches taller than Fred Johnson, who stood about five-ten, including a shock of black hair arching back from a high forehead. Johnson looked up at his unexpected visitor with as much patience as Daniel could have expected from any man, under the circumstances.
“I need a few minutes to explain,” Daniel said. “You probably won’t believe me, so I’ll leave after I’m done, but I thought if anyone might understand, it would be you. I’m glad you’re still here. That’s pretty amazing, actually.”
“You looked me up in the phone book, right?”
“I went by the university,” Daniel said. “Maybe all physicists stay the same, in all possible worlds. Maybe physicists tie up the important threads.” He held out his long arms, pulled back dirty sleeves, and grinned, showing rotten teeth.
Johnson looked him over, trying to hide his disgust, and decided he was not a threat, just peculiar. “I don’t doa lot of physics,” he said. “Tell me what you need. A little money?”
“It’s not about money. It’s about knowledge. I know things you’ll want to know.”
Johnson snapped his fingers. “You’re the guy off the freeway. The beggar.” His expression reverted to contempt. “Don’t tell me you’re shaking us down in our houses.”
“I need someone to listen. Someone who might know what I’m talking about. You can help me figure out whether it’s going to happen—or more likely, when.”
Johnson’s cheeks were pinking. Impatient, irritated, more than a little concerned. Feeling protective of someone else in the house, someone important to him.
“Most people don’t know what the indicators are,” Daniel said. “But things in this strand are definitely going wrong.”
Johnson screwed up his face. “If you don’t want money, we’re done. I don’t have a lot of time.”
“None of us do, Fred.”
Johnson lowered his voice and glanced left, toward the kitchen. “Get off my porch.”
Daniel tried to read this reaction—the words were strong, but Johnson was not a violent man. Daniel knew he couldn’t afford to be punched in the face or hauled in by the cops. He wasn’t at all well. At the very least, he needed a hospital, a good doctor—and at the most—
He needed Fred.
A woman walked up behind Johnson, curious—younger, late twenties, with reddish-blond hair cut short, high cheeks, a long chin, fresh-looking, pretty. “Who’s come calling, honey?” she asked, and put both hands on Fred’s shoulder, sizing up Daniel.
Daniel blinked aside tears and tried desperately to focus. “Mary,” he said. “My God, you marriedhim. That’s different. That’s great.”
Her eyes changed instantly. “How do you know us?” she asked, voice hard. “Close the door, Fred.”
“Mary, it’s me, Daniel.” His knees buckled and he leaned on the doorjamb.
“Jesus,” she said. “He’s going to be sick.”
Sliding slowly, trying to hang on, Daniel said, “Just get me some water, let me rest. I know it’s crazy, I might be out of my head, but I know both of you.”
“I sure as hell don’t know you,” Mary said, but she went to fetch some water while Johnson helped prop Daniel up.
“Why’d you pick our porch, buddy?” Fred asked. “You don’t look good, and you sure as hell don’t smell good. We should just call an ambulance—or the cops.”
“No,” Daniel said, emphatic. “I’ve been walking all day. I’ll go away—after we talk, please.” He reached into his big jacket pocket and brought out the Bandle. He fanned the pages. “Look at this. Cryptids. Lazarids. So many. It won’t be long.”
Mary returned with a glass of water. Daniel drank quickly. She had curled her right hand into a fist and he couldn’t see a ring. “I won’t make a mess. Mary, I’m so happy to see you…are you two married?
Living together?”
“None of your business,” Mary said. “Who the hell are you?”
“I’m your brother. I’m Daniel.”
Mary’s face turned red and her brows wrinkled. Her eyes went flat. She was no longer pretty. “Get out of here,” she demanded. “Goddamn it, get off our porch.”
“You better move along, buddy,” Fred said. “What the lady says.”
“Something must have happened,” Daniel said, looking between them, his vision fogging. “What was it?
What happened to me?”
“If you mean my brother, he died when he was nineteen years old,” Mary said. “And good riddance, the bastard. I’m calling the police.”
CHAPTER 27
Mr. Whitlow had changed considerably across the long century. To the young and desperate Max Glaucous, he had once been friendly enough and kind in his stern way. In those faded brown days, Mr. Whitlow (Glaucous never learned his first name) had been a tidy but conservative dresser, slight in stature but with a good, strong voice; physically strong as well, for all his apparent middle years. And of course that club foot, which still didn’t seem to slow him down. Now Mr. Whitlow’s face appeared pinched and pale in the hallway’s yellow light, and his eyes loomed large and black as a moonless night. He wore a tight gray suit with a narrow collar, white cuffs, links studded with large garnets, narrow black shoes. He had cut his glossy black hair straight across, and the white flesh of his neck skinnied above an awkward and hastily knotted bow tie. He carried a fedora now rather than a bowler, and stood at the front door with an air of nervous submission, lips wormed into an angular smile that pushed up his high cheeks but somehow did not pinch his eyes, giving him the look of a ghost-train maniac.
“Do you remember me, Max?” he asked.
“Mr. Whitlow,” Glaucous said. “Please come in.”
His visitor did not enter, even as Glaucous stood back. Instead, his wide eyes slowly surveyed the room beyond.
It was Shank who had referred him to Mr. Whitlow, and Whitlow who introduced him to the Moth—the elusive blind man in the old empty manor in Borehamwood, outside London. The blind man had approved him for service to the Livid Mistress.