Nightjack Read online

  He remembered Ernie calling him “killer.” Pace was recollecting pieces here and there, retaining more without the meds. “Tell me who Cassandra and Kaltzas and Pythos are.”

  “You’re beginning to remember them?” Pia asked. “It’s a long story.”

  He stared into the void where her eyes should be and said, “Give me an abbreviated version in thirty seconds, okay?”

  She let out a deep breath and the scent of her lips, which he knew well, wafted against the back of his throat. “We were on the ward with Cassandra Kaltzas, daughter of a Greek shipping magnate.” The anxiety ratcheted her voice up an octave. “Are there any other kinds of magnates? Aren’t they all goddamn ‘shipping magnates’? What the hell is a magnate anyway?”

  “Faster,” Pace said.

  “Cassandra was beaten and raped on the ward four months ago. Kaltzas thinks one of you did it, and that I helped.”

  “Helped?”

  “I didn’t like her very much. I was jealous. Sick, you know? I have mother issues. Sister issues, really. Well, mother and sister issues. I wasn’t on the ward for my goddamn health. Anyway, the bastard sent men to visit us. They asked questions like they were our friends, but they had us marked from the beginning. They knew all about us, everything in our files, all about our lives. We think they were planning to kidnap or kill us. That’s why we skipped from the Falls.”

  “You’re sure about this? It wasn’t just paranoia?”

  “It’s always paranoia, but yes, we’re sure.”

  “How did you escape?”

  “I fucked the guards. We got out.”

  Pace thought about how many attendants there were between the ward and the front gate. He counted four. “All of them? One after the other?”

  “Where’s the challenge in that? No. Collectively.”

  Jesus Christ. “Ernie? You screwed Ernie?”

  “I don’t know their names.”

  “I hate Ernie. And Brutus.”

  “I hated all of them. I have father and brother issues too. And men in general. Well, men and women.”

  Pace thought about it some more. “What about forensic evidence?”

  “From the guards?”

  “From the rape.”

  “There was no ejaculation,” Dr. Brandt said. “No sample of semen to test against your DNA.”

  “Then how do you know it even happened?”

  “Severe vaginal bruising. Rectal bleeding. Scratches, welts characteristic to sexual molestation.”

  “Who did she say raped her?”

  “She couldn’t say anything. The trauma sent her into a fugue state. Her father immediately had her taken back to Greece.”

  “How many patients were on the ward?”

  “Thirty-five,” she said.

  “So why were we singled out?”

  “We don’t know, except that it’s likely he considers you four the most likely suspects due to your histories.”

  “Hey,” Hayden said, “I never did any evil shit like that.”

  “Me neither,” Faust said.

  “I only fuck men,” Pia said.

  Rape? Pace wondered. Was he capable of even that?

  Hayden said, “You might’ve been getting it on with Cassandra, we don’t know, but if you were it wasn’t rape. You had a special relationship with her.”

  “I did?”

  “You’ll remember soon enough. But because of that bond you shared with her, Kaltzas thinks you might be responsible for what happened.”

  Dr. Brandt’s lovely face screwed up with anguish. Her shoulder muscles tightened. It had to be tough on her, being surrounded by her greatest failures. “No one on the ward is known for violent tendencies. Since you’re the only true cases of DID at Garden Falls, it cast greater doubt on you since one of your alternates may have been responsible for such brutality even if your primary personalities weren’t.”

  “It could’ve been one of the attendants.”

  “There were three on duty and two night nurses.” A hint of embarrassment crept into her voice. “They were busy playing strip poker together.”

  “They could be covering for each other.”

  “They’re too selfish to cover for anyone. They’ve all been summarily fired and have charges still pending.”

  The laughter was trying to work its way up Pace’s throat again. He turned to the faceless Faust and asked, “Why didn’t I go with you when you ran?”

  “You were supposedly in a straitjacket, shackled to your bed in a secured room. Solitary confinement. It’s where they put the tempestuous cases.”

  “He was there,” Dr. Brandt said. “He was having a bad reaction to his last medication. It was making him very manic. He struggled with the guards, broke one of their arms.”

  You had layers to your life, and within those layers were other strata. Levels and planes and tiers. You got a hold of one memory and it slipped away in a torrent. There was the person you were before the madness and then the one you became. The many you became.

  The man he was now meant nothing except in relation to the one he was an hour ago, and the one he’d be an hour from now. He felt ephemeral, tenuous as tissue paper.

  Pace looked at Dr. Brandt. “Four months ago I was shackled and today I walked out?”

  “You’re perfectly stable when you take your new medication.”

  Okay, he wasn’t stable, but he was right enough to play their game.

  “So one of us might be a rapist.”

  “Or one of our multiples,” Faust said.

  Hayden laughed bitterly. “That makes about a hundred and thirty-seven suspects. You want to include yetis, aliens, dinosaurs, robots, demons, dogs, or fallen angels, you gotta add another twenty-five or so.”

  Pace felt the need for contact again and touched Dr. Brandt’s wrist. It electrified him, put him back in his body. “Why have you thrown in with them?”

  “Alexander Kaltzas holds me accountable as well. For failing to keep his daughter safe in the hospital. For allowing you and Cassandra to have an association.”

  “So it’s not all paranoia? This man is really after us?”

  “Yes. I’ve met him before. And his...his agents visited me at home. He frightens me.”

  “Worse than we do?”

  “Yes.”

  “Didn’t you go to the police? The FBI?”

  “They can’t do anything without proof.”

  “Couldn’t you go ask help from your friends? Stay with someone?”

  “I don’t have many close friends.”

  Pace thought, She’s as nutty as any of us.

  “And did you allow Cassandra and me to...associate?”

  “You were close friends. You were both notably calmer in each other’s presence. You were better off together than apart.”

  He looked out the window at the prostitutes below. In his depths, somebody opened up a doctor’s bag and pulled out scalpels and instruments and a heavy leather apron. Pace wondered if he should run. Steal the Chevy and drive through the tunnel and find himself a fish cannery. Stay the course, start slapping back the meds. Forget this little detour ever happened.

  “I need sleep.”

  “It’s only three in the afternoon.”

  He could sense a burgeoning realm of misery building within him, a growing understanding. Within it, he thought, would be design and purpose. Further blood, maybe redemption, perhaps even the reclamation of Jane.

  There were two bedrooms in the apartment, a small one with a door and large one without. He knew the three of them would be sharing the mattresses on the floor of doorless room, afraid to be closed in or spend the night too far away from one another.

  He walked to the other bedroom. They’d left it for him. There was an old box spring and mattress, but the sheets looked clean. Maybe they planned on giving him Maureen Brandt too, as a sacrifice. They were scared and wanted to appease him.

  five

  When he awoke, the orange lace of dusk slipped in th
rough a barred window. They were still shouting in Spanish on the street.

  Atop the sheet kneeled the blue woman.

  Her gills eased open as she breathed, arching above him on the bed, watching him. As she shifted her chain mail dress jangled, crusted with jewels, seashells, and coral. She drew fiery sigils and spells in the air. Arcane symbols and covenants in a sea language that had been chiseled into rock at the bottom of the deepest trenches and abysses of the ocean.

  Her black and lidless eyes, like a shark’s, somehow retained a great humanity. He sensed her sorrow.

  Princess Eirrin, ten thousand-year-old sorceress and heir to the Atlantean throne, one of Pia’s alternates.

  “You awaken to this world once more,” she said in a voice strong enough to be heard even under the frothing waves of the Aegean. She used to show him treasures taken from centuries-old galleon shipwrecks: gems, Roman coins, doubloons, riches from the fallen empires which she used to decorate her throne floor.

  Pace said, “Hello Princess, it’s been a while.”

  Beside her sat a panting pug which she stroked with one webbed hand. The dog cocked his head at Pace, climbed up the blankets, and laid his chin on Pace’s forearm. This was Crumble, one of Hayden’s personalities.

  Eirrin undid Pace’s shirt and pressed her palm against his chest: it was cool, a bit clammy, soft and meaty like dolphin skin. She moved her nails against the burn scars, tracing their ridges and contours.

  “You remind me of another human male I knew millennia ago. Odysseus. He too suffered because he would not bow to a greater fate. The orders of his commanders were not enough to persuade him. He refused to accompany the Greeks to Troy, feigning madness by sowing his fields with salt.”

  Even imaginary friends could be a little insulting. “Is that what I’m doing? Feigning madness?”

  “He eventually complied and, the greatest of all heroes, was cast out upon the ocean. He spent decades on the water with his men, hurled away from Troy by typhoons. I did what I could to help, but my magic failed. It wasn’t possible to alter the thread of his destiny. I fear I cannot amend yours.”

  “Odysseus wouldn’t show proper deference to Poseidon,” Pace said. “That’s why the gods wouldn’t let him return home. I have no home to go back to.”

  “You would if you set aside your blood oath.”

  “If I could set it aside, it wouldn’t be a blood oath.”

  Eirrin leaned in closer, and he saw himself reflected in the black, prehistoric eyes. “Your vengeance has already been fulfilled.”

  “Not entirely, Princess.”

  Crumble barked and licked Pace’s face happily. He petted the dog and said, “Good boy, that’s a boy.” He knew what was really happening—that Hayden was on the bed with his tongue hanging out, grunting and slobbering. But Pace patted the dog’s head and felt only fur, the wet cold nose, the fleshy pug wrinkles.

  That was his talent, the real genius of his madness. He not only saw the other alternates, he could interact with them. They were as real to him as anyone else in the world.

  The door opened again.

  Daedalus, with his wings folded, entered. The father who knew not to fly too close to the sun when wearing wax. What your humanities teacher would call a “masculine solar deity” even though Daedalus wasn’t a god. Just a poor architect in ancient Greece trying to pay homage to his mad king who saw treason in every act of grandeur.

  He said nothing, only wept for his dead son smashed into the sea. The leather straps crossing his muscular chest creaked as he came closer to the bed, the tears running into his knotted beard. The lost father was an alternate of Faust’s.

  The three of them ringing Pace on the mattress.

  This hallowed ceremony meant solely for lunatics, shared only by the damned.

  ~ * ~

  Dr. Maureen Brandt sat on the couch smoking a cigarette. Pace stepped into the small living room and the three faceless figures followed. He sat in the leather chair. She glanced at him once with shamed eyes.

  “I’m sorry, Will.”

  “Don’t be.

  “You’re my patient. Your health and well-being are paramount to me. At least they should be.”

  “You just got tangled up with us. You can’t straighten out our kind of sick.”

  “With your meds you’ll be—”

  “They just hold back the storm for a while. But they can’t stop it.”

  A voice from above said, “Do you remember us?”

  Pace looked up.

  Stuck to the ceiling were three faces staring down at him.

  Pia, only twenty, a pale blue-eyed next-door cutie-pie. You took one look at her and you wanted her to care for your fevers when the rains came, cuddle with you under an afghan while the snow piled high against the windows. Elfin, that might be the right word, and she tugged at every heart. Lower lip cocked in a half-grin. Like she knew something you didn’t, and she was never going to tell you.

  Hayden, always with that expression you just wanted to smack. Sharp nose, chin, and lips, the thrust of thinning black hair knifing down to a widow’s peak, everything on the man like a razor, especially his teeth. Only the eyes were misleading, set about a half-inch too far apart. It was understandable why the doctors thought he might be mentally impaired. He was, just not the way they thought.

  Faust with the blazing glare of a holy man who wills himself to see God everywhere. Like somebody who’d gone into the desert and eaten honeyed locusts for forty nights, meeting strangers on empty roads, seeing through lies to the heart of every matter. His blue-black beard was flecked with silver. The thick, raised scar on his forehead stood out like a badge of honor. He’d never told anyone how he got it, but the injury brought on temporal lobe epilepsy.

  The faces dislodged from the ceiling and gently floated down as if on a breeze, rocking, swirling. Pace kept staring and wondered, If one lands on me, will I become somebody else? Would they possess me even more than they already do now?

  “What is it, Will?” Dr. Brandt asked. “What do you see?”

  “A hell of a show.”

  The three faces swept against each other in a ballet of form and ritual. Mischievously they settled on the wrong bodies momentarily before peeling off, twisting in mid-air, and settling squarely onto the proper heads of the three shadowy figures. They affixed themselves there.

  And with those features fastened in place now Pace felt himself returning from the faraway place he’d been.

  The sense of unbearable speed and insane distances was incredible. He had to tighten his grip on the arms of the chair and champ his teeth on his tongue to keep from crying out. A rush of disjointed memories flooded back into his head.

  Dr. Brandt took a long draw on her cigarette and blew smoke toward the floor. She used to do the same thing when she ate lunch by herself, seated on the canopied patio outside the ward, looking lovely and a little pitiful.

  Pace looked and saw the cigarette pack in her purse, alongside a paperback copy of Psychoneurotic Disorders—The Intrusive Past: The Flexibility of Memory and the Engraving of Trauma.

  He said, “Got another?”

  “No, this is the last one.”

  It was more than a white lie. She was testing him, pushing to see which him was going to respond. Like so many other minor temptations, this one had become a dare. No matter how many hoops you jumped through, there were always more to go.

  Something happened so fast then that no one saw anything but a smear of motion. The cigarette was gone from her lips and Pace had it between his own.

  Faust walked forward but stopped out of arm’s reach. ”Our father who art incessant.”

  Pia stepped up and kneeled at the side of the chair, pressed her cheek to his thigh. She let out a wracked sob.

  “So,” Hayden said. “You’re back.”

  “Most of me,” Pace told him. “There’s still a lot absent.”

  “We’ve missed you, Will.”

  “I’m not Will.” />
  The cigarette tasted magnificent. It was the first one he’d had in years. He looked at the fiery tip and thought of Jane again, screaming as flames swarmed and swept over her. He nodded. He’d returned from purgatory, right back into hell.

  Kaltzas would be watching and now he would know. His men would have had the hospital staked out. They’d have followed behind the Chevy. They’d have parked on the street with high-powered binoculars. That’s what the agents of a furious shipping tycoon would do. You weren’t going to hide from a magnate with a mad-on, not even in Alphabet City. Now they’d be in the building. Up the steps. Pace heard footsteps in the hallway.

  He jumped out of the chair, pressed Maureen Brandt aside and yanked Pia behind him. He had time enough to say, “Down!” before a shotgun went off and the front door exploded.

  six

  Some of the memories were still there. He knew that the gunner was a kid named Rollo Carpie, a low-level shooter for the no-longer functioning Ganucci syndicate. He’d must’ve gone freelance. Kaltzas was just being insulting now. Telling Pace, You belong to me. Look, you didn’t kill everybody in the organization, there’s more bad boys for you to chase around with your fancy knife with the stacked micarta handle. Telling Pace, I own you.

  Rollo stepped in through the smoking wood chips. He looked smooth and a bit smarmy for such second-rate muscle. He had half a bottle of mousse in his short black hair so that it looked like polished sandstone. He could fire his shotgun all day long and a strand wouldn’t flutter.

  Pace stood. He didn’t feel rushed at all. The time aphasia struck again, but now it acted in reverse. Everything around him slowed while his thoughts sped up. He plotted the angles and positions and already knew how much force he would need to apply in order to bring Rollo to his knees.

  The rage began to take on a familiar shape within him, expanding from the center of his chest and conforming to the contours of his body. Filling and strengthening him. Rollo pumped the shotgun and swung it toward him.

  Pace’s mind buzzed and simmered with information as he imagined a carefully choreographed waltz of murder. Icy sweat crawled across the landscape of his scars. Somebody inside him started to cry, and someone else laughed.