The Castle Doctrine (Daniel Faust Book 6) Page 11

  If this was an elaborate trap, a clue planted by the Enemy to lure me out of hiding, he’d have no idea when or if I’d follow up on it. I doubted Ms. Fleiss and her goons were sitting in the living room, twiddling their thumbs and waiting for me to show up. On the other hand, I thought, a few pounds of Semtex and a pressure trigger on every door and window would turn this place into a nice little bomb. They could rig the house to blow and go on their merry way.

  I took slow, deep breaths, stretching out my senses. Psychic tendrils, like violet sea anemone, wriggled out and stroked the walls, the windows, feeling for wards or signs of magic. Little glimmers, here and there. My senses bounced off a pentacle of cold iron, nailed up just inside the front door. A sprig of dried herbs, wound in rune-inlaid ribbon, deeper inside the house. Little enchantments, kitchen witchcraft to ward off misfortune. I’m not sure how well they worked. After all, I was still here.

  Nothing left to do but introduce myself. I strolled up the front walk, keeping my eyes on the windows and watching for an ambush, and pressed the doorbell. A shrill buzzing echoed from inside the house. Then silence.

  Deadbolts clicked and a chain rattled. The door opened, just a crack. The woman on the other side was in her mid-sixties, with a sleep-lined face and tangled, stringy white hair. She wore a fuzzy pink bathrobe and worn, tartan-patterned slippers. She didn’t say anything.

  “Carolyn Saunders? I’m Daniel Faust. I think you’ve been trying to get my attention.”

  She rolled her eyes.

  “No shit,” she said. “You couldn’t wait until I took a shower and had breakfast, maybe? Lucky for you, I’m a morning person. Well, come in already.”

  Her living room was cluttered with keepsakes and mementos, photographs of tropical vacations in kitschy frames, tiny crystal figurines. An old, leaning wooden bookcase, stuffed with fat and faded paperback novels. A threadbare sofa draped in a flowered quilt. She led me through an open arch into her kitchen, where unwashed dishes piled high in a tub sink. She plugged in the coffeemaker and pulled down a pair of mismatched mugs from an overhead cupboard.

  “I’d apologize for the house being a mess,” she said, “but I don’t think either of us cares. Cream and sugar?”

  “Black is fine. So, not to be rude, but…”

  “But you want to know how I found out all about you and your stint in Eisenberg Correctional.”

  “And why you wrote about it,” I said. “That too.”

  “Second question first: like you said, I wanted to get your attention.” She started the coffee and turned, resting one hand on her hip. “You weren’t exactly easy to find before you faked your own death. I didn’t have any way to reach you. So I took a half-finished manuscript, slapped in my own version of your story, and hoped you’d stumble across it. It was a shot in the dark, I admit, but it was the only plan I could think of.”

  “So…you didn’t send that anonymous email telling me to read it?”

  “Honey, if I had your damn email address, I wouldn’t have written the book. I’ve got better things to do with my time. Still, it got you here.”

  “So how did you know about me in the first place? About any of this?”

  “Easy,” she said, “Buddy told me.”

  Now it made sense. Now I understood why her novel recounted everything that happened to me in Eisenberg, up until the first failed escape attempt. I got caught. Buddy didn’t. He hadn’t been there to see what happened after that—or to tell Carolyn the story—which was why the fictional me ended up slaying dragons while the real me was getting blasted with a fire hose in solitary.

  “You’re the one,” I told her. “You’re the one the voices were telling him he had to see.”

  “Nope, just a side stop on the road, to bring me up to speed. We know each other from way back. Way, way back.” She gave me a rueful smile. “I’m the Scribe. That’s Scribe with a capital S, but you can call me Carolyn. Buddy and I have a most distinct role in this sad drama. His job is to see the doom that’s coming, though nobody will heed his warnings until it’s far too late. My job is to write the story when it’s all over. A cautionary tale that will help no one, and change nothing. My previous incarnations, I’m told, had a habit of drinking themselves to death. Can’t imagine why. When I found out what I really was, a few years back, I went a little nutty for a bit. I’m better now.”

  “You’re gonna have to start at the beginning,” I said. “I don’t even know what you are.”

  A burbling hiss rose from the dusty coffeemaker. She lifted the glass carafe and poured it out, filling the two mugs, taking hers black like mine. She passed me a mug and raised hers in a wry salute.

  “I’m a fictional character,” she said, “in the very first story ever told. And now you are too, which is why I needed to talk to you. Hate to break it to you, dear, but you’re up to your neck in this shit. And it only gets deeper from here.”

  “The Thief.” I blew across the brim of my cup, scattering a curlicue of steam. “Buddy—well, his sister, in a vision, she explained it to me. Sort of. She said the Enemy swapped me for him. That he needed the Thief dead, but he also had plans for the guy, so he pulled me in to take his place.”

  “And I’m still working out how he did that trick, but yes. The good news is, it’s probably temporary. The bad news is, you need to cling to that title as long as you possibly can. The future of this planet may depend on it. Come on. I want to show you something.”

  She led me to her den, where a vintage PC with a bulky monitor sat on the edge of a rickety desk. Sticky notes and graph paper covered every surface, and stacks of reference books piled high in teetering stacks. She walked to the back wall, took hold of the wooden paneling, and gave it a tug. The paneling popped free and she shoved it aside to reveal a hidden nook.

  “This is where I do my homework,” she said.

  The room was just big enough for the two of us, a walk-in closet lined with corkboard, looking like a conspiracy theorist’s wet dream. Photographs and newspaper clippings, printouts and receipts, tacked up and connected by a sprawling spiderweb of colored yarn. A few of the clippings hit close to home, like an article about the collapse of the Carmichael-Sterling Group and the FBI raid at the Enclave Casino. And a piece charting the downfall of Ausar Biomedical twenty years ago, after a wave of birth defects linked to their Viridithol fertility treatment. Carolyn followed my gaze and nodded.

  “Oh yeah,” she said, “you’ve been in the middle of this mess since day one. Pretty good for an outsider. Probably why the Enemy took an interest in you.”

  I ran my finger along a length of violet string, connecting the Ausar article to a yellowed clipping about a drug cartel massacre in a remote Mexican village. Eden Tendril here, Carolyn had scribbled in the margins with a faded red marker. Xerxes mercenaries, using deniable cover?

  “I stepped into somebody else’s war,” I murmured, following the lines. “This woman, Lauren Carmichael, she was looking to become a god. A couple of creatures I’d never seen before—we called them the smoke-faced men—were using her as a pawn in a long con. Promising to make her queen of the world, when they really just wanted to burn it all down.”

  “Fortunately for us, neither side succeeded. And do you know where these ‘smoke-faced men’ came from?”

  I nodded. “I met a man named Bob Payton. Former Ausar scientist. His team had cracked the barriers of space and time, learned to see into other places, other worlds. They’d found a gateway to…someplace terrible.”

  “The Garden of Eden,” Carolyn said, her voice a near whisper.

  “Payton knew the Eden experiments were getting out of hand. So he used their research to open a doorway to another Earth. An Earth burned to a cinder, with a black sun and a rotten moon. See, he was looking for the antithesis of life, the perfect antibody for Eden’s power. What he got was the smoke-faced men.”

  Carolyn nodded, sipping her coffee as she stared at the tangled web of string and clippings.

  �
�Oh, he got more than that. There’s a name for that black-sun Earth, Daniel. It’s called the Pessundation. It’s a prison. A prison built to hold one, and only one convict: the man with the Cheshire smile. The smoke-faced men were his jailers. Payton, well-intentioned idiot that he was, unleashed a far greater evil than the one he was fighting. He set the Enemy loose on our world. Fortunately, in a weakened state. Once the Enemy finds the key to his lost power, he’ll be unstoppable. And we will all, sad to say, be utterly fucked.”

  “So we just have to find it first,” I said. “What’s the key?”

  Carolyn gave me a lingering, humorless smile.

  “You are.”

  17.

  “There are other worlds than this,” Carolyn told me. “You’ve seen glimpses of them. Many are just like ours, so close you could accidentally visit them and never notice, save for the tiniest details. Others are radical diversions, parallels where evolution took a different tack or history veered off its path. And the First Story visits each world in turn. I’ve counted thirteen characters so far, including myself. When we die, we don’t go to any heaven or hell. No final destination for us. We reincarnate, on some far-flung parallel Earth, with our memories burned clean.”

  “Then what happens?” I asked.

  “Then we do it all over again. Our lives are shaped by the Story. When it was spoken into existence, we were created. And so, one way or another, no matter how hard we try, we repeat. We dance the dance, go through the motions. The Killer is murdered by his protégé. The Drifter freezes to death at the edge of a lonely road. The Salesman is imprisoned by a tyrant, his hands and tongue cut out. The Witch and her Knight burn in each other’s arms. The Prophet dies alone and in ruin, having seen all of his warnings ignored.”

  “I gotta ask,” I said. “What kind of fucked-up story is this?”

  “I believe it was a cautionary tale. A morality play to teach you what you ought not do. But it’s a tale woven by a storyteller who’s been dead for a million years, for an audience that doesn’t exist. All that remains is us. Cursed to repeat the cycle again, and again, and again.” She sipped her coffee. “I need to Irish this up. How about you?”

  “A little early, but I won’t say no.”

  She came back with a half-empty bottle of Glenlivet, pouring a generous dollop of whiskey into each of our cups. She waved the bottle at her net of colored string, the endless clippings.

  “The story always ends with the Enemy, and the Paladin. Sometimes it’s a grand affair, the armies of light and darkness clashing, horns blaring, banners and dragons and unicorns, all that bullshit. Sometimes it’s a knife fight in a rainy back alley, with the loser lying dead in the gutter. If the Paladin wins, that’s it. Story’s over until the last of us dies, and we start the next go-around on some other unsuspecting planet. If the Enemy wins, he gets to run the place for a while. Do some remodeling. Plagues, nightmares made flesh, torment and misery for everyone. He gets off on it.”

  “And there’s no way to break the cycle?”

  “Someone tried,” Carolyn said. “This is all rumor and conjecture, understand, but it’s what I’ve been able to piece together. An alliance of mages rose up against the Enemy. They’d found a way to steal his power, to render him harmless as a shadow and cast him into the Pessundation. And good riddance to the son of a bitch. Thing is, he saw it coming. He knew he couldn’t stop them from winning, so he took the long view. He used their technique to drain his own magic before they could do it to him. He hid it in a reliquary, gave it to his most trusted servant, and sent her across the wheel of worlds. To wait for his return, no matter how long it might take, and find him.”

  “Her,” I echoed. “I’m guessing that’s Ms. Fleiss.”

  Carolyn nodded. “That was the Enemy’s plan. To bide his time, escape when he could, and reunite with Fleiss. She’d hand him the reliquary and he could return to his full strength. Perhaps stronger, if he’d learned some new tricks along the way. It’s not as simple as opening it up and bathing in his old magic, though. He couldn’t risk it being stolen while he was away. So he sealed it, with locks only he could open.”

  “What kind of locks?”

  Carolyn reached out, tracing one of the colored threads. Following it from point to point, scrap to scrap, a pattern only her eyes could see.

  “He’s changing things. Using his influence and what little energy he has to…rewrite the world, you might say. He’s already directly interfered in a few of my fellow characters’ lives, altering the usual course of events. I believe that with every revision, with every twist in the tale, another lock pops and a little more of his power returns. Which brings us to you. The real Thief, a cat burglar named Marcel Deschamps, is working for the Enemy.”

  Her roving finger landed on another newspaper clipping. A private-museum heist in Dubai, where the intruder had carved his way in through a window on the seventy-second floor.

  “He’s been stealing some interesting things. Aztec relics, mostly, and a curious sideline: have you ever heard of a man named Howard Canton? Canton the Magnificent?”

  It rang a distant bell, but I shook my head.

  “He was a stage magician in the forties,” she said. “Mostly forgotten today. Also, quite the skilled occultist. He concealed his affinity for real magic behind his sleight of hand. I believe you know a thing or two about that.”

  “I’m not the first guy to work that angle,” I told her.

  “The Enemy has been gobbling up anything and everything to do with Canton’s career. Vintage posters, props from his stage act.” Her finger trailed along a stretch of pink string to a still image from a security-camera feed. An auction, with Fleiss sitting front and center in the first row. “This was taken at Sotheby’s London last week. Canton’s top hat was up for bid. The price ran to a cool million.”

  “They paid a million dollars,” I said, “for a hat?”

  “Tried to. Fleiss lost the auction; she was outbid by a stage magician with a private museum. I assume you’ve heard of David Gosselin?”

  My lips puckered like I’d bit down on a lemon wedge. “Sure. Made the White House disappear on live television. Owns his own island in the Caribbean. I’ve heard of him.”

  Carolyn tilted her head, catching my expression.

  “Just heard of him?”

  “We’ve met,” I said. “He made a move on my ex-girlfriend, who was not my ex at the time. There may have been…an exchange of harsh language.”

  “Charming. So, that’s all I know on that subject. The Enemy is obsessed with the Aztecs and Canton memorabilia, but I can’t begin to guess why. Could be connected, could be two different aims. The most interesting thing I’ve found, regarding the Canton archives, is a scrap of rumor about his stage wand. They say he used it for ritual work, and it was inlaid with bone on both tips. Human bone.”

  “He was a necromancer?”

  “An illusionist. On one end—if the story is true, mind you—the bone came from the mummy of an ancient Egyptian trickster by the name of Djehutimesu.”

  Damien Ecko’s teacher. We have a saying in the magical world: there’s no such thing as coincidences. And hearing the name of the same dead sorcerer from Halima’s lips two days ago, then Carolyn’s now, rang every alarm bell in sight. One name stretching out like a bridge across time to tie two threats together, by way of a stage magician from the forties. It felt like part of some vast pattern I couldn’t make sense of, not yet. I could see all the puzzle pieces, just not how they fit.

  “And the other end?” I asked.

  “Allegedly, a chip from the skull of Harry Houdini.”

  I frowned. “That can’t be right. Houdini wasn’t involved in the occult underground. Hell, the guy was a professional skeptic. He’d travel around debunking fakers and exposing their methods.”

  “It balances, doesn’t it? The power to weave illusions, and the power to banish them. Lies and truth. I can imagine any number of things the Enemy could do with that wand, none
of them good. It’s a moot point, though. Nobody knows where it went. Just about all of Canton’s stage kit is accounted for, in private collections or on the open market, except for the wand.”

  “So if I rounded all this stuff up,” I said, getting the idea, “that’d slow the Enemy down, right? Throw a wrench into whatever he’s planning to do with it?”

  “You need to stay as far away from the Enemy as possible, which brings me back to my point, and the entire reason I wanted to talk to you. Remember those locks I mentioned? His old power, waiting to be claimed? Safe to assume that changing the Thief’s ending—ensuring he, or you in this case, died in prison—is one of the keys. Except you didn’t die. You’re the Thief now, Daniel, and as long as you escape the fate he had planned for you, that lock will never open. The Enemy may still win in the end, but he’ll never return to his full power so long as you stay hidden and safe.”

  Given everything else Carolyn had said about the story, the litany of torments and disasters awaiting its cursed characters, a sneaking suspicion occurred to me. “So what’s the Thief’s original ending? How is he supposed to die?”

  Her gaze darted away, then back again, quick as a hummingbird’s wings. She didn’t quite meet my eyes when she replied.

  “I’m not sure. But you’ll be fine, as long as you stay in hiding.”

  Lying is like any other skill: you have to do it a lot if you want to be any good at it. She was a rank amateur. I let it slide, for now.

  “What about the real Thief, what’d you say his name is, Deschamps? Can’t I…give the title back to him somehow?”

  “I wish I knew how. As far as I can tell, killing him might do the trick. He’d reincarnate in some other world, reborn as the Thief again. In theory.”

  “Uh-huh. And wouldn’t that screw with the Enemy’s plans even worse?”

  Carolyn gave me an uncomfortable shrug, pursing her lips. “You have to understand, this is all conjecture. I think I know what might happen. Or I could be wrong. Kill Deschamps and you might be stuck in the Thief’s shoes for all eternity, as trapped as the rest of us. There’s only one thing I know with absolute certainty: right now, your survival is a thorn in the Enemy’s side. The best thing you can do, for yourself and for this entire world, is to hide and stay out of his way.”