7.10
The sudden shifts in weather had made for some spectacular changes in the environment. Ice had melted and refrozen into spiky groupings on branches, tree branches hung low, and a mist hung over much of the area.
The factory loomed before us.
“This is it?” Ty asked, as if we hadn’t been staring at it in silence for several minutes.
“Yeah,” I said. “I don’t expect or want you guys to go inside. It’s as bad or worse than anything we’ve run into so far.”
“Brr,” Tiff said, rubbing her arms through her coat. “I get a bad feeling, standing here.”
“That’s not a bad thing,” I said. “You should, and that’s the kind of instinct I feel like you should hone.”
“Uh huh,” she said.
“How do we do this?” Alexis asked.
“Carefully,” I said.
Ty smirked. “I think I was five the first and last time I found a line like that funny.”
“It’s not supposed to be funny,” Rose said.
“That’s good then,” Ty said. “Because it wasn’t.”
“It eats existence?” Alexis asked.
“It eats your hand,” I said, “Then as far as you and the rest of the world are concerned, you don’t have a hand, and you never did. The past doesn’t get rewritten, but your brain will do its best to make sense of it, filling in the gaps.”
“What if it can’t?” Tiff asked. “Make sense of it, I mean.”
“Might be that you just don’t make sense of it. It eats away at you, this thing that’s wrong in your understanding of the world. You might go crazy,” I said.
“No offense,” Tiff said, “But I’m not going to argue over you not wanting us to go inside.”
“I don’t want to go inside,” I said, “But this needs doing, and I said I would.”
“I like seeing you with more conviction in what you’re doing,” Alexis said. “I just wish it wasn’t with something this dangerous.”
“You and me both,” I said.
She fidgeted, then tossed her cigarette aside and started on another.
Alexis was smoking far more than she had before my bathroom mirror had broken and I’d made my trip to Jacob’s Bell.
I didn’t begrudge her the vice. Smoking was ugly to me, but sometimes I liked a bit of ugliness for contrast. Ty had a set of knives that he’d made together with a friend some time before I’d met him, reforging them out of scrap metal – the blades themselves were nice enough, but the backs of the knives, the parts furthest from the blades, hadn’t been polished. They still had a gritty and raw sort of texture from whatever chunk of car frame or furniture they’d been taken from.
I liked those knives. They were crap for actual use, apparently, an early experiment on Ty’s part with too low a concentration of something or other, but they were beautiful.
Alexis was the same way, kind of. Not in terms of being crappy. The other part.
My hands clenched the spine of Black Lamb’s Blood. The pages we’d torn out were now set in place, corners sticking out where the angle didn’t fit a hundred percent. I’d finished it on the drive over, after an evening and morning spent reading it off and on, going between it and a few books Rose had picked out and propped up by a mirror. I might have gotten even more reading done, but we’d started feeling restless, electing to move out and get something concrete done, and Black Lamb’s Blood was the only physical text I could read in the car.
Too much to do.
Pauz was out there. I fully intended to find and recapture him.
Things were moving behind the scenes, factions moving against one another, and I was staying largely out of it, hands off, while the locals decided what they’d do.
There was still Jacob’s Bell to handle, the inheritance, the families there, and the resentment. Laird was dead, and he’d died by my hand.
Then there was this. One was the simplest and most pressing tasks of them all. All the more important because of how easy it was to convince myself to ignore it. The oblivion demon. We were scouting the location, considering what needed to be done.
“I’m thinking,” Rose said, very carefully, “That the graffiti surrounding the building is important.”
I looked at the graffiti that extended around the base of the building. There was a lot of it, covering every surface that was in reach, or in reach of something that could be climbed. Some was simple, letters spelling out some acronym or slang word I didn’t know. Some was elaborate, with stylized letters, gradients and sharp edges.
“A binding?” Alexis asked.
“Maybe,” Rose said. “Maybe there is graffiti largely hidden in the midst of all that. But that might be a reason the demon is staying inside the building, and it doesn’t have anything to do with the demon’s origin point or egg or whatever it is.”
“Hey,” Ty said, “That’s fantastic. We can just ignore it, and it’s stuck there, right?”
“People are going inside,” I said. “Someone drew the binding and they aren’t around anymore, so they might have gone inside, only to be eaten. The building was built in 1910, and it’s only been vacant for forty years or so, but if you compare it to other buildings that have been abandoned just as long, it looks like it’s in worse shape. It’s degrading. You can’t see it from here, but a portion of the roof has already collapsed.”
“The binding isn’t perfect,” Rose said. “It’s radiating out, eating at its environment.”
I nodded.
Tiff craned her head. “It’s not as isolated as I thought it would be. There’s a park nearby.”