“Somebody poke me when you start speaking English again,” Eye said.
“Sorry. It’s complicated.” I glanced up from the page, to Rachael. “And then there’s our boozing, belching ‘Son of Drake.’ He lost it when I played ‘Night On Bald Mountain.’ I wish I knew what was up with that song. All he said was, ‘Heard it enough then, still hear it in my fucking sleep.’”
“So Grace played the song a lot after he came back from Russia,” Rachael said.
“Yeah, but why? Lucas knew more about the song than we did. We should call…”
I reached for my cell phone, but Rachael shook her head. She pulled her Blackberry from her hip pocket.
“We don’t need that bouncing Red Bull commercial,” she said. “Besides, you don’t want to interrupt his date with ‘exotic chica.’ Let your chica handle this.”
Eye watched us, bemused.
“Still waiting for that poke,” she said.
Rachael’s thumbs tak-takked on the Blackberry’s keypad, accessing the internet. As she did this, my pencil etched vague, shaded shapes in the Moleskine pad. My hand was suddenly itchy, wanting to tell a story. I rode shotgun, watching it do its thing, finding the image as it moved.
I drew two curved lines near the center of the page. They looked like the beginnings of wings—or fluid, jointless arms. I teased the lines with crosshatchings, wondering where the pencil would go next.
“God bless wireless networks, Wikipedia and Google,” Rachael said. “‘Night on Bald Mountain.’ Composed by Modest Mussorgsky. Song’s best known for, yep, Fantasia. Lemme cross-ref with Fantasia.”
On my page, new lines slipped down from the top endpoints of the curves. These, too, arced toward the center of the page. Ah.
These weren’t animal wings. They were horns. I kept going.
So did Rachael.
“Looks like Disney called this character ‘Chernabog.’ But the critter’s better known as Chernobog, with an o… as in, ‘oh what a difference a vowel makes to the copyright office.’ Here’s the skinny. Comes from pre-Christian Slavic mythology. Nocturnal demon, tormentor of souls, a ‘dark and cursed creature.’”
“Putting the poke on layaway,” Eye announced. “I give up.”
I barely heard them. My pencil was screaming across the page.
Rachael, from faraway:… also a bringer of grief, darkness, evil and death. Now here’s a job title for you: ‘Chernobog, Servant of the Black’… .
The pencil lead snapped in my hand. Still staring past my sketch, I dropped the pencil, groped for another.
…brought forth by black magic…
Found it. Continued.
… curse lifted when the karmic scales are re-balanced…
“Z,” Eye said, grimacing, “beloved, I got no love for whatever you’re drawing.”
I blinked, and gazed, a bit repulsed, at what I’d sketched so far. It resembled the head of an emaciated bear, with black swirling holes where its eyes should be. Instead of ears, hideously long horns sprouted from its skull. Spit—or blood, it was unclear—oozed from its snarling fangs.
It was a gut-churning sight, but I wasn’t embarrassed of the image, as I’d been with Annie Jackson under Primorus Maximus. My tribe was initiated. I shrugged.
“This is how it is,” I said. They exchanged a look and nodded. “So, Rache. Cherno—”
I cut myself off, still staring at the black bear-monster. Something flickered in its eyes, in my mind.
“Chernobog,” I said. “I know that.”
And I did, I was certain of it. Had Lucas said the demon’s name last night, as he’d listened to Drake’s song? No. This detail, this hook in my brain, felt a bit older than that. I hit my rewind in my mind, eager to remember.
“Night On Bald Mountain.” Chernobog, Black God of Death. Obviously, it was an allusion to Drake’s monster, much like this new sketch. The Black, aka the Dark Man, aka The Inkstain, aka…
“He’s called it Chernobog before,” I told them. “It was in his admittance report, from a past psyche evaluation.”
They looked at me, their eyes anticipating.
“And?” Eye asked.
And…
I dropped the pencil onto the table, exasperated. “Fuck if I know.”
I sighed, cupping my hands over my eyebrows, conjuring tunnel-vision on the sketch. The beast’s eyes howled. Madness defied the microscope.
“It’s more Sisyphean bullshit,” I snapped. “Questions, answers, more goddamned questions, and here I am, waving from the bottom of the hill again. Pisses me off, man. Why? Why did Peterson pick me?”
“Oh hell,” Rachael said. “You know why.”
I rubbed my eyes. “I honestly don’t, not anymore.”
Eye raised her beer. “The aforementioned world-rocking,” she said, and drank.
I coaxed a feeble smile for her.
“Z, if you really want to ask ‘why,’ I’ve got a better one for you,” Rachael said. “Why is NYPD going all out for this guy? They’re rooting through homicide cases that are ten years old. Those are cold cases, babe. Why the arctic excavation? Why now?”
“Oh, that’s easy,” Eye said. Her brown eyes met mine. “Your dad, and mine.”
“My… huh?”
“Well sure,” she replied. “It’s all because of your dad’s ex. The lady who died, your patient’s psychiatrist.”
Rachael took a sip of her Klass’ Bitterest. “Sophronia Poole.”
Eye peered at me. “I’m a little surprised you didn’t know about this, Z. My dad’s been working on it for, what, two years now? All done during his off-time, once it went cold. It was a personal favor for an old friend—your dad. Heh. You know a little about that, pinging someone in the NYPD for help.”
I nodded. It was handy, having a contact on the inside—and William V. Taylor, Manhattan District Attorney, had asked his friend Eustacio Jean-Phillipe to keep the case on life support. And the Homicide Division’s deputy chief had done just that. I imagined how meticulous Papa-Jean must’ve been to discover Richard Drake—and then piece together the horrors my patient had fled.
How many hours of personal time? Dozens? Hundreds?
What’s dead’s buried, I heard Daniel Drake say. You’d be right to leave it alone.
“I never knew about her,” I said.
“You’re kidding,” Eye said. “There was an entire room in my father’s house dedicated to her. Well her, at first. By the end, it was mostly about your blind man. Did you know he had a crush on her?”
I thought of the appointment card in Drake’s wallet and nodded. He’d “made” Sophronia Poole during their sessions, had taken notes on what things she liked: sunflowers, Jeffrey Deaver novels, spider rolls, my father. He’d planned to woo her.
And then her heart had been carved out her chest, taking my father’s heart with it. That final murder had crushed Drake’s heart, too—and his mind. He’d fallen for Sophronia, in the way patients experiencing transference sometimes do. She was his savior, an angel, an object of affection and desire. Love? Had he fallen in a kind of love with her?
Perhaps. She’d been someone he cared about. He’d gone blind after that.
My eyes fell back to the page. Chernobog glared back with its sightless eyes. The Black. Whirling circles, spirals, hypnotizing, look into my eyes.
Eyes.
Eye
I groped for my pencil. Yes, something. Something finally.
Eye for eye.
I leaned into the page… and the pencil was a living thing in my hand again, sending a transmission and I was listening, tune in, Zach, can you read me, read between my lines, yank words from my curves, from my scratches? there’s something scratching at your door