Chapter #22Catilindria Comes to Oswego by: Seuzz   Moonlight filters through the bare branches of the forest as pick your way through it. You make no effort to muffle the sound of your passage, and the dry leaves swish and the brittle twigs crack beneath your tread. It's not that you don't care whether you are heard. It's just that you've learned through long experience that, whether you are careful or not, there is bound to be an adventure at the other end of a journey.
It's not really a forest you are traversing, just an incursion made by the surrounding woodland into the outskirts of the town. You could just as easily have approached your destination via the road, but a surprise descent through the woods is more your style. You follow the bend of the hill, and soon your destination looms over the trees.
The long-abandoned State Hospital for the Criminally Insane is a gaunt, looming shadow in the night. But even under a noon-time sun the dark stonework—unbroken even by windows—grimly deflects the gaze. At night, the walls are an obsidian nightmare. The nightmare deepens when you think you hear a scream echoing from inside it.
You linger for a few moments under the eaves of the forest, then tramp across the open space toward the tower that rears an ugly crown over a wing of the old hospital. "Shackelford!" you hiss into the night. "Shackelford!" But there's no reply.
You're puzzling at his absence when footsteps sound on dry grass, and a heavy, bulky shadow rounds the corner of the tower, almost bumping into you. Even in the dark, you can tell it's not the man you were supposed to meet here.
He stops short, and in a gruff voice demands, "Who the hell are you?"
But before you can answer, he grabs at his belt, and the moonlight gleams off a pistol.
Did your hand twitch in sympathy? Maybe, but maybe not. At any rate, he fumbles the gun, trips as he lunges to catch it, and nearly falls into your open arms. Behind him, another figure looms, and when the pistol hits the ground and fires, the other man yelps, spins, and falls onto his ass.
Your assailant grabs at your jacket and you grab at his head. Your fingertips find warm, exposed flesh, and he sinks into stupor.
"Fuck!" the other man shouts, and thrashes on the grass. "Shit!"
"You okay there?" you ask.
"Goddamn it, what do you think!" he roars. "My arm!" He scrambles away as you bend toward him. "Son of a bitch! Rocheford!" he hollers.
Footsteps clatter on nearby pavement, and after finding the bare cheek of the wounded man and putting him to sleep, you turn and trot around the corner of the hospital. In the parking lot, headlamps blaze and an engine roars to life. The beams sweep across you as, on squealing tires, the car peels out of the parking lot, sideswiping three other cars in its flight. Hands on your hips, you watch the brake lamps wobble as it spins out into the street and races away.
Dang, you think to yourself. Bradley and his guys must've really been on edge to scatter so easily. Catilindria is an effective ally in the fight against miscreants, but even he isn't usually this quick at it.
It's the Keyserling legacy that's brought you to upstate New York. Aubrey Blackwell had not slept long, much to everyone's surprise; even Charles had seemed slightly taken aback at his early stirring. But peace and contentment had shown in his eyes, and a shy smile had enwreathed his face as he'd taken your hand. "My dear boy, how delightful to see you again," he'd said, and he seemed to mean it.
There'd been a very long talk afterward, about the Keyserlings and the Shabblemans and two cities in upstate New York, and two old women who had died the same day. Blackwell hadn't held anything back, but under your unwinking gaze he had stammered it all out very quickly. At Charles's suggestion, you'd gone out to look around. Your attention had quickly settled on the old abandoned asylum, where a woman named Emily Lavoisier and had lived and died in obscurity for more than seventy years.
You'd been been on your way into an old diner on Bridge Street in Oswego when you bumped into Ben Shackelford. Literally, for you had collided chest-first with him as he was coming out. You'd had your case filesin your hand, and he'd bent to help you pick them up when they scattered all over the sidewalk. "You interested in the old asylum, huh?" he'd said as he picked up a magazine clipping on the old place. His eyes brightened when you told him you were a magazine writer looking for a story to write up and sell. "Those are spooky places," he'd said, "especially when there's cults operating inside them." Naturally, you'd asked him what he meant. "You want a story?" he'd replied. "Buy me a second breakfast and I'll give you one."
Matt Medoff—the alias you've been working from under—has a friendly face and manner, so Shackelford had no reason to hold back. But he told you rather more than he intended, for you have a way of asking random questions that provoke highly revelatory answers. He hadn't meant to admit, for instance, that he was an undercover cop, and that he was trying to use you to stir up a little mischief in a way that could expose a ring of drug-dealers without blowing his own cover. He also didn't mean to admit that he was pretending to a double-agent working with the drug-dealers when (he insisted) he was actually a triple-agent working for the Feds. And he shocked himself further by accidentally confessing that he'd taken rather more money in payoffs from the criminals than he had turned over to his law enforcement handlers. He was pale and sweaty and extremely nervous when you parted, and you watched with amusement from your table as he tried for several minutes to unlock the door to a car that wasn't his.
But he had agreed to meet you here, at the asylum, at this hour, to take you in to look over the gang's base of operations. But then he didn't turn up, and these men—members of the gang—did.
Well, that's the occupational risk of working with Catilindria. He is very good at upsetting plans, your own included.
To get a better lead on what's going on, you lean over to copy the imago, including the memories, of first one and then the other of the two men who tried catching you just now. You review them as you peel the jacket off the wounded man, and with strips torn from his shirt bind up his arm with a makeshift tourniquet. That would have been Rocheford who ran off, you muse to yourself. Little chickenshit. He was the last one inside the asylum, for Ellenburger didn't even bother to show up.
And as you're wondering how to round up those two, Bradley's cell phone chimes. You swap into his imago as you lift his phone to your ear. "What?" you gruffly demand in the voice of the gang leader.
"The fuck is going on?" Ellenburger asks. "I just got a call from Rocheford—"
"Where the fuck are you?" you scream. "You were supposed to be out here an hour ago!"
"You told me to be out there at ten!" he protests.
"I told you to be out here at seven! Why the fuck would I want you out here at goddamned fucking ten?" An angry spray of spit shoots from your mouth, and only your own native control restrains you from hurling the phone at the stone wall of the asylum.
"Is everything okay out there?" Ellenburger squeals. "Rocheford called me and he said there were shots."
"I dropped my fucking piece, okay? The safety was off or something. Where's Rocheford now?"
"I don't know! He just called and—"
"Never the fuck mind. Call him, and the two of you get over to the Sleepy Bear." That's the motel where you and Rick Bredon are staying.
"Why?"
"Don't. Fucking. Argue. You are in the deepest of deep shit with me, Ellenburger. If you don't want me dropping another cocked piece and accidentally shooting you in the face, get your fucking ass over to the Sleepy Bear and check into a room with Rocheford. I'll be there in thirty. Assuming there's not another glorious cock up between now and then." You close the connection and drop the phone to the ground.
You're just starting to peel the clothes off Bradley when headlights sweep into the parking lot. You squint and watch as the car idles for a minute, then cuts out. A figure climbs out and swaggers out jauntily to join you.
It's Shackelford. "So," he says, rubbing his hands together. "Medoff should be here in thirty minutes. Are we ready to do this thing?"
He just has time to notice the two bodies crumpled in the darkness at your feet before you swing at his jaw. With a grunt he goes down, and you kick him until he passes out.
* * * * *
"Nice work, squirt," Rick congratulates you later, when you're relaxing in the diner next to the motel. Together you took down Rocheford and Ellenburger at the motel, planted some of their own drugs in the room, and called the cops. That will be enough, you reckon, to get them to turn state's evidence against the rest of the gang. But although Rick never looks happy, he looks especially unhappy now. Uneasy, even. You ask him what the trouble is.
"That thing in my trunk," he says. "In the coffee urn."
"What about it?" you ask. "I mean, I know it's bad news, but—"
"I'm just going to have to go take care of it tonight is all," he sighs. "And I'm not looking forward to it." He leans back as the waitress refills his coffee (decaf) and after her back is turned he pours a shot of bourbon into it from his hip flask.
"You said you were going to wait until morning."
He makes a face. "I know what I said. I know what I'd prefer. But if you think I'm going to leave a thing like that and a thing like you in the same county together—" He grimaces. "It's a million to one against something going wrong. But when you're around, million-to-one chances come off nine times out of ten."
To wake from this reverie: "The Boy from Before Everything, Part 2"  You have the following choice: 1. Continue |
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