Chapter #24Kenandandra Comes to Oswego by: Seuzz   You pick your way carefully across the carpet of the forest, trying not to make any noise. It's not really a forest, just an incursion into the outskirts of the town by the surrounding woodland. You glance over your shoulder as you top a small crest, and through a gap in the trees you glimpse the surface of Lake Ontario twinkling under the moonlight. You follow the bend of the hill, and soon your destination looms over the trees.
The long-abandoned State Hospital for the Criminally Insane. It's a gaunt shadow, and even less inviting in the dark than it is in the daytime. Even under the noon-time sun the dark stonework—unbroken even by windows—grimly deflects the gaze. At night, the walls are an obsidian nightmare.
You hurry across the open space between the woods and the walls of the asylum, and it's so dark that you're nearly on top of him before you see Shackelford.
He jumps when you call his name. "Jesus, Medoff," he hisses. "About fucking time. What are you—?"
"I snuck through the woods. Are those guys here yet?"
"No," he says. "You were cutting it close, though. Come on."
He leads you alongside the wall, crouching and feeling at the tall weeds, until he finds what he's looking for—a basement window. It squeals as he pushes it open and squeezes through. "Come on," he calls from within. You clamber through as well, and a shudder passes through you.
Shackelford has a flashlight, and by its dim beam the two of you pick your way through the abandoned office and into a dusty, airless hallway beyond. At the far end, a set of winding steps take you up to the first-floor atrium. "There's an operating theater that way," he says, indicating the end of a hallway.
"How do you know?"
"I broke in earlier this afternoon."
You tap the watch-shaped disc strapped to your wrist and study its face. The reading confuses you, showing both a surge of animal spirits on the other side of the door, and a sink of negative life. But it's enough to make you cautious. Before Shackelford can push his way into the theater, you catch him on the back of the neck, and he swoons into your arms.
You drag Shackelford back and dump him in a corner, then tear a copy of his memories and imago off him. You sidle over to the doors, push them open a crack, and toss in an Orb of Blindness. The marble-sized glass pellet cracks open when it hits the floor of the dark room beyond, and you shield your eyes as a small supernova blazes forth. The five men inside throw their arms and hands up over their faces, and in that moment you throw your cloak over them. As they blink their smarting eyes, you pass among them, touching them one at a time and dropping four of them unconscious to the floor.
But the fifth one has enough presence of mind to bolt the theater before you can catch him.
* * * * *
The Mirror on your wrist isn't a radar scope—it doesn't show location, only a general pattern of nearby life—so you grimace at the darkness of the atrium when you emerge. You should have cased this place out more thoroughly beforehand, and set some traps. But the whole evening has been an improvisation.
It's the Keyserling legacy that's brought you here. 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 when you met him, and he glowed with a healthy cleanliness as he took your hand. "My dear boy," he'd said, and his eyes had glistened. "How delightful it to see you again." He asked after your health and biography since last you'd last seen each other, and affected a lack of surprise on being told that you'd become something of an engineer and inventor of magical devices for the Stellae. "I knew it from the moment you fashioned that fetish of me, the first night we met," he said with a waggish smile.
There'd been a very long talk afterward, about the Keyserlings and the Shabblemans and two cities in upstate New York, and the two old women who had died the same day. 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 had lived and died in obscurity for more than seventy years.
You'd been looking over her files at the old diner on Bridge Street when you felt someone looking over your shoulder. "Interested in the old asylum?" the man had asked. You nodded, and told him you were a magazine writer looking for a story to write up and sell. "Those are spooky places," he'd said, and moved around to sit across from you. "Especially when there's cults operating inside them," he added in a whisper. "Ben Shackelford," he'd introduced himself, and held out a hand. "You want a story? I've got one I'd like to see get out."
You'd let your eyes light up with interest as he told you the story, and then gave you some of the merchandise as evidence. You agreed to meet him tonight at the asylum, so the two of you could watch from the shadows. "Should I check it out first?" you asked Rick when you told Rick about it. He considered the option silently from every angle, and finally advised against it.
"If there's nothing to it, it'd be a waste of time," he said. "And if there is, you might queer it by showing up early. Play it as it lays tonight. Just equip yourself. You always do," he added in an undertone.
* * * * *
So here you are, carrying in your small knapsack or upon your body:
-- Orbs of Light and Orbs of Darkness: ancient devices but so obvious in concept and application that you and generations of Kenandandrans before have reinvented on your own over and over again.
-- The Seven-League Sneakers: another ancient device, updated to the age of Nike and Converse. If you weren't worried about breaking your nose against the doors in the close quarters of the asylum, you'd have used them to intercept the last gang member before he got out of the theater.
--A Mirror of Perelandra: the disk at your wrist, which glows or fades with the presence or absence of conscious life. Another ancient device, but one you've been promising yourself you'll redesign and overhaul for greater effectiveness one of these days.
--Malacandran Caltrops: These are entirely your own invention. They wound and hurt when, but their real utility is in the pants-soiling terror they cause in the victim when stepped on.
--The Do-it-er Die, which you and Hal Swann designed after a weekend of binging on RPG games; and some other toys.
It's the Die you take out now, after listening for a few minutes and hearing nothing. It's shaped like a 21-sided plastic die the size of your thumbnail, but that's an illusion: the number of faces is literally uncountable. You roll it now, then consult your cell phone. Transportation in the side yard, it advises you, and as always it's not until you've followed its instructions that understanding dawns. There are four cars parked in the gravelly side yard of the asylum. Whoever is hiding in the asylum will be going for transportation when he finally works up the nerve to bolt the building.
After giving it some thought, you jimmy open the trunk of each car with your Universal Passkey, and pack each of them with an Anvil of Lurga. These (another of your designs, though John tells you he's found similar items in the Stellae archives) are fist-sized lumps of metal that weigh no more than a pound until they are blessed, at which point they expand their mass (but not their size) until they each weigh a ton. Soon the back wheels of each vehicle are sunk deep into the gravel.
You wait in the shadows. After fifteen minutes, a shadow darts from the asylum to jump into a Lexus. The engine roars to life, but the sedan refuses to move. When the driver stumbles back out, you are at his elbow to catch him with a touch.
* * * * *
There was a coffee urn inside the operating theater, and you learned from ransacking the gang members' memories that that was the center of the evil. You only glanced inside it before calling Rick.
"They ain't pretty, are they, squirt," he says after he's taken his own glance inside. You're going to have to give yourself a topical amnesia to get the memory out.
"What are you going to do with it?" you ask.
"I got my methods."
"So do I. I've got a Portable Bottomless Pit—patent pending—out in my car. Give me a couple of hours to set it up, and we could drop that thing—"
"Is it really bottomless?"
"I haven't been able to measure the bottom yet."
Rick grunts. "Let me do it my way. The last thing we want is to contaminate an aquifer with Blinky the Cthulhian Blowfish."
* * * * *
Afterward, John asks you what Blackwell, in the vision, meant when he referred to you making a "fetish" of him. You'd forgotten all about that but, stimulated by the vision, you recall and relate the story to him and Charles: how at your second meeting with Blackwell, at his house, you had found and accidentally fashioned from enchanted clay a fetish of the old reprobate. "Do you think that means my second ousiarch was Kenandandra?"
Charles's only judgement is: "It is very suggestive."
"So should I choose Kenandandra?"
"I only said it is suggestive. And even if we knew for certain, that does not mean you should choose it."
"Why not?"
Charles says nothing immediately. "Because we don't know why it was taken from you," is his final comment, and then he wishes you and John a good night.
To wake from this reverie: "The Boy from Before Everything, Part 2"  You have the following choice:  indicates the next chapter needs to be written. |
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