Catskinner's Book (The Book Of Lost Doors) (20 page)

“Wait, give me that,” Russwin said.

I handed it to him and got in the driver's seat. Russwin got in more slowly, studying the flier.

He held it out to me. “Read the last line.”

The last line was in large type and bold.

the Great misunderstanding of Our time is the iDea that we are alone In the uniVerse and we Are not!

The capitalization was screwy, but I kind of expected that...

Wait a second...

G.-O-D-I-V-A. Godiva.

I looked at the information. The convention was being held at a banquet hall in South County and the opening ceremonies were tomorrow at three in the afternoon. Well, technically, today at three in the afternoon.

I looked over at Russwin “This is—?”

“Morgan's move. Yeah.” He sighed.

“So, what do we do?”

“We show up and try not to get killed. But first we get some sleep.”

Try not to get killed and get some sleep. Great. He was starting to sound like Catskinner.

“Can't we . . . I don't know . . . do some research? Case the joint or something?”

Russwin rubbed his temples. “We've got about ten hours. That's not enough to find out anything useful. Ordinarily I'd call Alice and ask her if she had any intel on this group, but that's not an option right now, is it?”

Alice. Morgan had her, too. I'd forgotten about that.

“I guess.” I backed the van out of the space. I remembered how we got here, so I could get back to the motel.

“Look.” Long sigh. “It's a trap. We know it's a trap. They know that we know it's a trap. We know that they know, et fucking cetera. We can walk into it, or we can run away. I'm not running.”

I thought about it. I was good at running. I'd spent my whole life doing it. But . . . not this time. Not when things were maybe going to change for me. I couldn't go back.

But it wasn't just me.

we won't run.

I could die, you know. This could kill me, and then you'd have nowhere to go.

we won't run.

“Me, either.”

“Then let's get some sleep.”

I pulled onto the highway. “What I don't understand is—is this whole convention just for our benefit?”

“Huh?  No, it's probably been in the works for months. Just another group that Morgan has his fingers on.”

“But Godiva's name in the flier?”

“Oh, that? That's a new flier, printed out special for us.”

I considered. “So . . . Morgan had to find us, get hold of someone to add a new line to the flier, and come out and put it on our van in the middle of the night?”

“Yep.”

“That's a lot of work. Couldn't he have just called you?”

“Sure. But that wouldn't have sent the same message.”

“What message?”

“He wants us to know that he's got this UFO cult in his pocket. He's trying to intimidate us.”

“Oh. Is it working?”

“Pretty much. We're fucked. You do know that, right?”

I sighed. “Yeah, I figured that part out.”  

I drove south. The sunrise was red over the river at my right hand.

At one o'clock in the afternoon we were eating lunch at a pancake house. I insisted. If we were going to die, I refused to have my last meal handed to me through a drive-thru window. We'd slept, showered, and in Russwin's case, shaved. Me, I didn't care what I looked like.

Russwin nursed a soda and watched me engulf an order of chicken fried steak and eggs, plus pancakes.

“Not much puts you off your feed, does it?” he asked, amused.

I shrugged. “I'm always hungry—always have been.”

A considering look. “I guess that makes sense—you're eating for two.”

“Yeah. And one of them isn't human.”  I was finished. I pushed my plate away and dropped cash on the table. “Let's go.”

Russwin stood up. “Right. We want to make sure we get good seats.”

The woman at the registration desk was wearing a T-shirt with my father's picture on it. I'm sure she thought I was staring at her tits—which, to be honest, were worth a second look—but she looked down, looked back at me and said, “Michael Chase. A true visionary.”

I looked away. “I know exactly who he was.” Russwin paid for two admissions, collected two badges. He hung one around my neck and Catskinner let him. I grabbed a program off the stack and looked at it.

Well, let's see. There was a panel discussion on something called “Bell's Conjecture” that started at 4:00, and the ever popular “George Adamski: Notes And Observations” forum at 5:15—no information on who George Adamski is or why I should care about him—and then an EXCLUSIVE (with lots of exclamation marks) advance screening of
We Pass From View
—

—wait a second.
We Pass From View
?  Somebody made a movie of one of my father's books?   And that one? There wasn't any story there. I pointed that out to Russwin as we walked away from the registration desk.

“I don't get it. It's not like there are any characters. It's just a bunch of theories. I mean, do they just have some guy saying, 'This is what some people think happens when you die, and this is what other think happens when you die, and this is what I think happens when you die.' It's got to be the dumbest movie ever.”

He sighed. “Just be quiet, okay?”

“Seriously, it's like making a movie of, I don't know,
Windows For Dummies
or something—”

Quietly, but very forcefully: “Shut. Up.”

That got my attention. I looked up from the program.  

We had acquired an escort. Two men, one big guy, about Russwin's size, with tattoos covering his arms and a bushy biker beard. The other was huge, about seven feet tall, with that gaunt Abe Lincoln look that so many really big men have. They were watching us and making no attempt to conceal it. If the intent was to be intimidating it didn't quite work. Catskinner isn't impressed with size. Giants have weak joints.

I stuffed the program in my pocket and looked around. Everybody except for us and our big shadows seemed to have someplace to go and most of them were late, judging from the rush.

There was a Meeting Room A, and a Meeting Room B. One of them was having that panel about what's-his-name's thingie, and the other one was having the talk about that other guy I couldn't remember.

Then there was Screening Room—where the movie version of
We Pass From View
was going to have its Exclusive!! Premier!! later on in the evening. Right now something else was playing in there—dark room, probably crowded, limited mobility, no, not a good option.

That left the Vendor's Room. Perfect. Maybe we could buy some moon rocks or pixie dust or something. I met Russwin's eye and nodded towards it. He fell into step beside me.

There was a bored security guard in a gray uniform sitting by the door. Inside the room tables were set up on both long sides, maybe twenty in all. Behind the tables were the sellers. Milling around in a mass in the middle of the room were the buyers, on the tables was the stuff.

Books, a lot of books. But also DVD's, magazines, T-shirts, a table loaded down with crystals, another one with a selection of knives—

—You want a knife?

i have enough for now, thank you—

—one that was full of tiny bottles of God knows what, one set up with a row of laptop computers that people were entering information into.

Russwin and I wandered around, trying to look at everything without getting close enough to any particular table to trigger a sales pitch. So was everyone else, so in a way we were blending in. Except for being followed by a pair of thugs, of course.

Catskinner didn't like the crowd. He wasn't particularly concerned about our shadows; it was the whole roomful of people, moving, talking wandering in the usual chaotic social Brownian motion of human beings everywhere and getting too close for comfort. I could feel Catskinner's awareness flitting from person to person and I was acutely conscious of the mismatched blades tucked in my clothes. This could get ugly.

By reflex I moved to the edge of the room, Russwin staying close without looking like it was intentional, the biker and the giant simply stalking the pair of us without apology. I moved to the end of the row of tables, trying to get most of the crowd on one side of me so Catskinner could keep my eyes on them without breaking my neck.

The last table was the one with the laptops on it. “Repressed Memory Testing” the signs said. How do you test a repressed memory? Play Concentration with a blindfold? I glanced at Russwin. He seemed to be utterly fascinated with the table across the hall, which had stacks of old magazines wrapped in individual plastic bags.

What the hell were we even doing here?  

you are looking for godiva. i am hunting keith morgan. he is avenging his partner.

And how does shopping for UFO cult crap do any of that?

No answer. Naturally.

So what else could I do? Grab those two that had been watching us and torture them for information? Well, why not? Obviously somebody told them to watch us, so somebody knows something. Besides, the biker one kept giving me this tough guy glare and after the last few days I wouldn't mind watching Catskinner peel it off his skull. I wouldn't mind at all.

Then the person next to me turned and walked away from the table and I realized that I had joined the line waiting to take the test on a laptop without realizing it. It was my turn, if I wanted to take it.

Russwin was talking to the woman who ran the used magazine table. What the hell. I turned and looked at the screen.

This test—the screen informed me—was developed by the Air Force as part of the debriefing of pilots who exhibited erratic behavior following long term high altitude flight. The questions were written by military psychologists who were experts in the field of post-traumatic stress and memory repression and is 97% effective in uncovering evidence of close encounters that have been unconsciously repressed by the respondents.

Fascinating. I clicked past that part.

Do you ever find yourself doing things without fully understanding the reason why?

Brother, you have no idea.

I have taken a couple of hundred psychological profile tests in my time, and I knew what answers meant what and how to get whatever score I wanted. I was going to play with it and get it to say that I had definitely been abducted by aliens and probably impregnated by them, but at the second question Catskinner reached out and closed the lid of the laptop—gently, it didn't shatter.

I hadn't even got to tell it which animal I'd rather be. Instead I found myself face to face with one of the men who ran this table. The man was about forty, I guessed, with long brown hair streaked with gray and a small neatly trimmed beard. His eyes were absolutely empty. Holes in the world, leading the the darkness between the stars.

I'd seen those eyes before, catching a glimpse of my own face in a mirror when Catskinner was riding me. Catskinner and whatever was looking out through that man's face stared at each other for a long moment. Something passed between them—greeting, challenge, question and answer, I had no way of knowing—and then I was turning away. Russwin was at my elbow.

“Are you okay?”

“Yeah, sure,” I said. I fumbled the program out of my pocket. “I think they said there was a bar in this place somewhere?”

Russwin nodded, headed to the door. I followed. The biker and the giant fell into step behind me.

What the hell was that?

nothing.

Friend of yours?

nothing.

Chapter Nineteen

“the enemy of my enemy is the enemy of my enemy, nothing more.”

I studied the map on the program. It didn't even try to be to scale. Here was the vendor's room— Meeting Room B—so the Hospitality Suite should be . . . there. Or maybe the other way. I wasn't good with maps. I looked up to get my bearings, and there was the biker, giving me his tough guy glare from across the corridor, the giant standing behind him.

“Hey, buddy,” I called across to them. Russwin, a few steps down the hallway, stopped and looked back, his hand going inside his jacket reflexively.

A frown replaced the glare. I was breaking thug etiquette. I was supposed to pretend I didn't notice them or something.

“So where's the bar?” I gave him a grin. “I'm kind of lost.”

He looked confused, then pointed down the hall the way Russwin had been headed.

“Thanks,” I turned my back on them. Russwin gave me a sharp look, then grinned, visibly relaxing.

 A thought occurred to me, and I glanced back at our escort.

Ask him something, I thought to Catskinner. Ask him if you can buy him a drink.

“can i buy you a drink?”

Both men reacted, recoiled slightly at Catskinner's voice. I saw surprise and confusion and just a hint of fear.

“I don't drink,” the biker said stiffly, his eyes wary.

I turned back and head down the hall. They weren't expecting Catskinner, no one had prepped them on what I am. Interesting. Russwin didn't react, but I was sure he'd picked up on it, too.

Past Room A and Room B and the Screening Room and something called Convention Services (and the omnipresent Men’s and Ladies’) was a room called Hospitality. The door was open. Inside a bar was set up along one wall with a bartender in a black suit. A couple of steam tables were set up along the other wall, but they were empty and dry.

A dozen or so people stood around with plastic cups in their hands. They were more of the same that had been in the vender's room—serious young people in T-shirts that were meant to be shocking but were mostly just silly, the men with beards, the women with brightly dyed hair, all of them looking vaguely unwell.

We passed through pockets of conversation on the way to the bar, most of them concerned with who else was here and what had happened in their lives since the last convention. We were the focus of attention and not just from our shadows, who took up station near the door. I assumed it was Russwin—he couldn't be anything other than a cop of some kind, and this seemed to be a crowd who took conspiracy theories seriously.