Catskinner's Book (The Book Of Lost Doors) (10 page)

Beef jerky and chocolate. I tore into it. Between bites I asked her, “Do you know her?”

Godiva shook her head. “She just came up to the van and said you needed help.”

“She was right. So what did you dump on the water monster?”

“Dish soap.”

Dish soap, huh? I'd remember that.

“These kinds of constructs operate by manipulating the surface tension of the water. The soap breaks the tension so it can't keep cohesion. As soon as I saw what Morgan threw at you, I picked up a bottle,” Godiva explained. We were cruising north.

“You know a lot about this stuff,” I said.

Godiva shrugged. “Dr. Klein used the same kind of thing.”

I looked over at Alice. “So what's your angle?  And where are we going?”

“My angle is that I'm trying to save the human race.”

Yeah, she would be. “Repelling the invasion of the Macrobes, huh?”

“The invasion already happened. The Earth has been occupied for centuries. I'm the resistance.”

“You and who else?”

“I have investors.”

Investors? “So, people pay you to save the world, then?”

“Actually people usually pay me to save one person that they care about. The world is too big for most people to love.”

I chewed that over. Godiva spoke from the back. “I think we should help her.”

“Hang on,” I said. “I'm one of the bad guys, remember?  I've got a Macrobe living in my head. And you—you've been altered by Macrobe technology.”

Is Alice human? I asked Catskinner.

unaltered.

“So where are we going, anyway?” I asked. I was getting tired of not getting straight answers. From anyone.

“We're here.” Alice said. We had pulled into the parking lot of a bowling alley. It was pretty full and I realized that it was Saturday evening. It seemed like a lot had happened since Friday.

“So, is the secret headquarters of the human resistance?”

Alice turned to look at me for the first time. “No, James, it's a bowling alley. It's a good place to talk without being overheard.” She got out of the van, and Godiva opened her door.

“The van's a good place to talk without being overheard,” I pointed out.

Godiva flashed me a grin. “Yeah, but they've got beer here.”

It was hard to argue with that kind of logic.

Chapter Nine

“what is done may not always be undone.”

I got out of the van. It wasn't hard to catch up to Alice. I held out my hand. “My keys?”

She handed them over.

“Thanks for coming to get me back there.” It seemed like the thing to say.

Alice sighed. “You're in way over your head. We can help each other.”

I chewed my lip. “Maybe.”

“What I don't get,” she said slowly, “is how somebody could know enough to bind an Eldil without knowing more than you seem to.”

“I didn't bind it,” I pointed out. “My parents did.”

Her stride faltered. “Your parents? When?”

I shrugged. “I don't know. Young enough that I don't remember ever not being like this.”

She stopped dead at that. “Wait a second. Where were you born?”

I hesitated, but couldn't think of any reason not to tell her the truth. “California. L. A. County.”

“You're Adam Chase!”

No one had called me that for twenty years. “How do you know that name?”  I could feel Catskinner focus his attention on her.

Godiva almost bumped into me. “You said your name is James,” she accused.

I turned to her. “Did your folks name you Godiva?” I asked.

She looked away. “No,” she said in a very small voice. Her reaction seemed strange, but I was more concerned with Alice.

“What do you know about Adam Chase?” I demanded.

Alice was walking again. “Let's get inside before we say anything else.”

There were a couple of people in the parking lot, mostly coming in, a few going out. None of them seemed to be looking or listening to us, but after the day I'd had I figured paranoia was the better part of valor.

We got three beers and a table against the wall, amid the echoes of clattering pins.

“Adam Chase,” Alice said, looking at me, and shook her head. “Incredible.”

“My name is James Ozwryck.” I told her firmly.

Godiva was looking from me to Alice.

Alice rested her chin on her hand. “Okay, James, you asked me what I know about Adam Chase. He was born in ’74 or ’75, as I recall. His father was Michael Chase, his mother was Sabrina Erikovitch. The two of them were the leaders of a group called Clear Vision World. They wrote a couple of books together.
We Pass From View
was one, and, uh,
The Eternal Odyssey
. I can't remember any of the other titles, but I've probably got them back in my library.”

The second book was actually called
Mankind's Eternal Odyssey
. I nodded for her to continue.

“The Clear Vision World was a fairly straightforward millennial/spiritualist cult. The leaders were in contact with spirit guides from the great beyond who prophesied a  coming apocalypse and that a chosen few would be spared to repopulate the new Eden—Michael Chase getting a jump on the repopulation business as usual, aside from Adam he may have had as many as ten other children. The chosen few, of course, being those who heard and believed the guidance of the spirits, because the rest of the world was too wicked, waging war, despoiling the environment, oppressing women and minorities, blah, blah, blah. Very 70s.”  She sounded like a lecturer or a schoolteacher.

I nodded again. None of this was news to me, except the bit about Michael Chase's other children, and that didn't surprise me.

“The only child Michael Chase ever officially acknowledged was born to Sabrina Erikovitch. A son. He was going to be the first of the new race of perfect humanity and so in a fit of originality Chase named him Adam.”

She stopped and drained her beer. I did likewise. Godiva sipped hers.

“Michael did something to Adam. There really were spirits that he was in communication with, but the communication was flawed. Human minds aren't designed to accept the perspective of an alien intelligence. Too much exposure damages them. The spirits, outsiders, Macrobes—call them what you will—could influence human thought. They could send dreams and visions clearly enough teach humans new technology. They could even possess human beings, take over their bodies for a brief time, but it was like trying to send high voltage through speaker wire. The human minds would burn out over time, and the closer the connection, the faster they burned.”

I glanced over at Godiva. She was listening very gravely.

“The spirits gave Michael Chase an idea, though,” Alice continued. “An infant's mind is unformed, malleable. By linking together a Macrobe with a human infant, binding them, Michael hoped to create a new kind of human. The voices he heard promised that he would be the father of a new species, human bodies with alien minds, who would inherent the Earth.”

Catskinner's laugh bubbled out of my mouth.
“but it didn't work out that way, did it?”
 

Godiva straightened in her chair, backing away from Catskinner's voice. “What happened?”

Alice looked over at me. I could see her registering Catskinner behind my eyes.

“yes, tell us what happened to michael chase.”

“He was killed in killed in April of 1982. He, Sabrina, and seven other members of Clear Vision World. The only survivor was Adam, who was seven at the time. Of course, the authorities didn't believe that a child could have murdered nine adults, so Adam was placed in an institution. A month later, he escaped, leaving six dead staff members behind him. No one has seen him since.”

I had my body back. “No,” I said softly, “no one has.”  

I got up. “You two can make your own way home.” I turned to go.

“Wait,” said Alice.

I kept going.

“James, please,” Godiva said. That made me pause. “Just listen to her.”

I sat back down. I peeled off a couple of twenties and gave them to Godiva.

“Get us some more beer. And some nachos or pizza or something, okay?”

She nodded, then smiled. She was heartbreakingly pretty. I watched her walk away, admiring the bounce in her step, and turned back to Alice.

“So, talk.”

“There's a war going on, James—” she began.

“Between the humans and the Macrobes, I know.” I'd picked up that much.

“No!” She leaned forward, her voice quiet but forceful. “The war is between the outsiders. Most humans have no idea that it's even happening. The outsiders don't care about humans at all—this is just a convenient place to fight. We're not even their foot soldiers, we're their ammunition.”

She leaned back again. “Do you think that the spirit guide who told Michael Chase how to bind Adam cared what happened to Clear Vision World?  It didn't tell him what Adam would be capable of. Those things find people who are easily led and already half crazy, and then they spin whatever lies will get things done. They claim to be angels, aliens, spirits, demons, ghosts of dead relatives, whatever they think people will listen to and obey. They do a few tricks, things they know will impress the natives, and send their pets out to fight each other. When their pet humans die, they just go out and get more. We don't even know what they are.”

Her voice was getting strident, she made a deliberate effort to bring it back under control. “Do you understand that? They have been influencing human history for thousands of years, starting wars, building empires, inspiring all manner of atrocities for their own purposes, and we don't even know for certain what the fucking things are!”

“Keith Morgan called them Macrobes,” I said.

She shook her head angrily. “Some science fiction writer made up that word. Morgan is as bad as they are. The crazy ones I can almost feel sorry for, but a man like Morgan who sells his soul with his eyes wide open. . . .”

She paused and Godiva came back to the table, carrying a tray with beer and pizza on it. I had expected her to take longer.

I took a beer, took a long swallow.

“What has all this got to do with me?” I asked.

 Alice sighed. “Well, I could say it's because you're a human being.”

“Part of me is,” I corrected her.

“All of James is human.”

I considered that. Nodded. Catskinner was quiet, but I could feel him listening.

“More importantly, though, all of you is in danger.”

“I've got a good track record of taking care of myself.”

“Against humans, sure,” Alice took a sip of her beer. “But what would you have done if I hadn't broken the barrier effect when I did? You don't know what you're facing. You've kept a low profile for twenty years, you've been lucky. Or maybe the outsiders just didn't want you yet. They don't think on a human time scale, twenty years is nothing to them.”

Is she telling the truth?

she is telling as much of the truth as she understands.

That was the same thing Catskinner had said about Keith Morgan.

What should we do?

avoid decay. live in shelter. survive.

Can we trust her?

“will you seek to make covenant with me?”
Catskinner asked Alice.

“No. A simple agreement is all I want.”

My head bobbed up and down, Catskinner trying for a nod.
“what do you ask of me?”
 

A short bark of a laugh. “To start with, please don't kill me.”

“if you do not seek to harm myself or james, i will not kill you.”

“And listen. Listen to what I have to say and make up your own mind about where your best interests lie.”

“reasonable.”
And he sank back out of sight. I could feel his attention, but not the hair-trigger tension I felt when he expected violence. It was more that he was simply interested in what the others had to say.

I looked over at Godiva. “Where do you fit in all this?”

She fiddled around before answering. She took a piece of pizza, put it on a plate, set it in front of her. She glanced at Alice, then looked at me, her sunglasses reflecting streaks of neon from the bar. “I was lied to,” she said finally. “I don't know what to believe anymore. I thought Dr. Klein was going to help me—”her voice broke—“help me become what I wanted to be. Instead, she left me. She just left me there, didn't even tell me she was leaving.”

She picked up the pizza, threw it back down. “I can't even eat in public anymore. She made me a freak. She made me a monster.”

I felt like I should say something, but Catskinner spoke first. “
be glad
,” he said, “
in this world you're either a monster or a victim
.”

I gasped. I tried to find some way to unsay it. Godiva stared at me, outrage on her features, then she shook her head. “I guess you'd know.”

“Yeah, I would. Story of my life.”  I turned back to Alice. “So what's a decent human being like you want with a couple of monsters?”

I'd intended the remark to be cutting, but if she was cut by it she gave no sign. “Mutual protection. Exchange of information.” she said simply.

The pizza was cooling in front of me. I took a piece and ate it. Nobody said anything while I was eating.

Then, “Why did Dr. Klein kill Victor?” I asked.

“Keith Morgan paid her to,” Alice answered. “I don't know why Morgan wanted Victor killed. It's likely he saw Victor as a threat.”

“Why didn't she kill me?”

“She thought she did. A few hours stasis would have killed an ordinary servitor.”

“And I'm an extraordinary servitor?”

“No, a servitor is more like a human puppet. In order to be able to use the human's body the outsider has to rebuild much of the human brain and destroy most of the existing personality. You're not like that, James. You co-exist with the outsider.”

“Because we grew up together.”

“Basically, yes.”

“Dr. Klein said that I was just a puppet.”

Alice nodded. “That's what she believed. That's been her experience.”

A light went on. “The Manchester nest.”

“The nests are the worst. They don't even try to maintain a facade that any human personality remains. One outsider with multiple human hosts, human bodies. Like a hive of insects.”