She screams, laughs, shouts out words in garbled Vietnamese, then other languages that sound unfamiliar, vaguely inhuman. The black presence shoots from the corner and meets her in the middle of the room, impacting with a dull thud that reverberates through my bones. The medium stumbles, and Clotilde is at her side, lifting her, holding up her arms, as she begins to wail. It’s a terrible sound, a familiar sound. I heard the same screams that night in Laos. She laughs again, a short, barking mess, then screams so forcefully it seems to tear her vocal cords, tapering off with a wet rasp. She shakes off Clotilde, and the larger woman is flung into a dresser.
I jump to my feet and go to Clotilde, maybe as much to help her as to find safety in numbers. The girl is already there with her and I can’t seem to reach either of them, as the room keeps expanding in random and sudden directions, unfolding into confusing angles. Behind me, the naked woman crouches down, her voice a broken growl, collapsing with her. She snarls and coughs, expelling yellow mucus from her mouth, letting it run unchecked down her chin.
Then she goes silent. Her black eyes roll back into her head again and return entirely white as she rises to her feet, scanning the faces in the room while the mouth works, the nose sniffs. She begins to slowly spin on the very tips of her toes, nails digging into the rug, cutting through it to the hardwood below as she rotates like a nightmare ballerina.
She revolves on her tiny axis, knocking over the table and scattering the simple offerings, those white eyes searching each face, before finding me. She stops. One of her hands rises, then the other. Her fingers bend, squeeze tightly together, forming into a fist, then a shape resembling paws.
The invisible wire is cut and she breaks down into a crouch, heaving, sucking in huge gasps of air, her nose flaring. She drops onto her haunches like a dog, mouth open. Sounds leak out from deep down inside her that don’t sound human, or even like an animal. She cocks her head to one side, then the other, and a long stream of words in Vietnamese pushes through—slow and low in register at first, then speeding up, rising in pitch, until it is a pure scream of sound constructed of rapidly blended words.
I lean back, as if that will protect me, but the sound pierces the center of me like a blade. This is a sharp pain, hurting the ears and the organs, not the dull mental rending of the last night with Chapel above the river valley.
Just as I reach my limit of agony, feeling a new seam of madness open up inside, the sound cuts off, and she collapses on the rug. She lands heavily and awkwardly, like a dropped deer, nothing catching her fall. Things break inside her, or maybe just return to how they should be, which might be worse.
Clotilde goes to her, pulls back her eyelids, presses two fingers to her neck.
“Is she dead?” I whisper, my head ringing, the chambers of my heart flexing to steady themselves. I feel turned inside out.
“Close.”
“Will she die… because of this?”
“I-I do not know,” Clotilde says, a spooked expression on her face. Something that I imagine is very unfamiliar to her, the way she wears it. “I do not know what this is.”
“I hope I… If I caused…”
“What is one more?” Her look is challenging, fear twisting to loathing. She is resentful that I’m here, angry about what I’ve done now that she knows, and requiring the type of services that can kill one of her seers. “Wait downstairs,” she says coldly, and returns to tending to the woman on the floor, covering her with the discarded robe.
I walk to the door and look back at the girl I came with, the girl who showed up at the doorway of the Night Man and saved his life, asking for a simple favor that he wouldn’t grant because he’s a selfish, craven motherfucker. She saved my life twice, maybe three times, and I don’t know her name. I never asked, and she never offered. Because she’s not like me. She’s not a selfish, craven motherfucker. I am ashamed that I don’t know her name and don’t know her but want her to leave with me. I need someone on my side.
She doesn’t look at me, her head turned away, focused on those deeper shadows in the room, where the black thing stood up. She is rocking slightly, humming a tune I don’t recognize.
I leave the room, alone. I never see her again.
I wait downstairs, looking out the front door, at the mist swirling outside the house, obscuring the rest of the Floating City that waits beyond. The rain has stopped, or maybe it never rained at all. I might have spent a year in this house.
Clotilde stands at the foot of the stairs, her hands folded in front of her. I didn’t hear her descend.
“What is it?” I say, not turning around but seeing her with my new set of eyes now starting to age. They’re getting tired. The foyer is full of people waiting, but they seem like furniture to me, part of the house without eyes or ears. I’m back inside myself again, utterly alone in crowded room.
“It is not a dog,” she says.
“I know that.”
“It takes the shape of a dog.”
“Why?” I say. “Why does it look like that?”
“To…scare you,” Clotilde says, finding the right word in English, realizing that it doesn’t do the meaning any justice.
“If it’s not that, not a dog, then what is it? What is it really?”
“Un furieux,” Clotilde says.
“A Furious One.” I turn around. “I don’t understand.”
“It is one who is angry,” Clotilde says. “With you.”
“Why is it angry with me?”
“You know the reason.”
“I don’t. I don’t,” I say, approaching her, wanting to grab her and make her understand. I stop several feet away, never trusting my hands anymore. “I wouldn’t be here if I did.”
“You do, you just refuse to…admit.”
“Whatever I did, let me apologize. I’ll apologize…” I look up the staircase, address the ceiling and the floors above, filled with dusty, heavy air scented with mildew and incense and rotting flowers. “I’m sorry!”
“You cannot apologize. That will not work, and will not change anything. It will not…” She gestures with her hands, needing help with an abstraction. “Move the particles, no?”
“Move the particles?”
“You can only return what you have stolen,” she says, refolding her hands.
“I haven’t stolen anything. I don’t have anything. You think I have anything? I don’t have shit in this world.”
Clotilde’s face gives away nothing. “The Furious One thinks otherwise.”
I collapse to the floor, holding the side of my face, feeling a little bit more of sanity slip into my fingers. “I don’t understand. I don’t understand any of this.”
Clotilde sits on her knees and places a hand on my shoulder. “It is a Wandering Soul, this Furious One. It cries out to be buried in the ground of its ancestors.”
“I don’t… I don’t…” But I do. I know now. But it’s impossible. All of it. I hear the River roaring underneath me. It clogs my ears, blotting out her voice. The English makes no sense. She realizes this, and comes to me in French, taking me back to the bayou.
“Avez-vous tué…les gens au Vietnam?”
I nod my head.
“Beaucoup?”
I shake my head.
“Combien?”
I hold up one finger.
“Avez-vous tué cet homme dans son village? Sur le terrain de sa famille?”
I shake my head.
“Si ses restes retournaient au village?”
I shake my head.
“Comment le savez-vous avec certitude?”