Cruel Zinc Melodies

41

Safely away from Eleanor and Mikey, I thought I understood why people refused to talk about the ghosts. Mine hadn’t been awful. And I see weird all the time. But what would the impact be on people for whom ghosts were the hardware of scary stories? People who had skeletons or heavy guilt in their closets? Which so many do. ‘‘Hey, Bill. Did you see anything in there?’’

‘‘Not this time. I did before. It was hairy. And there was some kind of ghastly music in the distance.’’

‘‘Garrett!’’ Tinnie was as pale as death. She pointed. I expected to see a street full of ghosts.

‘‘Cypres Prose! Get your young ass over here! Now! Your friends, too.’’

Kip Prose had been sneaking along in the shadows on the other side of the street, between two of his Faction friends. One was the chunky kid from the abandoned house. The lover of bugs, Zardoz. The other had been with Kip last time he came past the World.

The youngsters hadn’t expected anybody to come busting out of the theater. Especially not that fierce defender of order and propriety, Mama Garrett’s boy.

All three kids thought about running. Kip decided there was no point. I’d tell his mother. He wouldn’t like what came of that.

Kip came over staring at the ground a yard in front of his feet. His cronies tagged along. The thinner kid was a ringer for Barate Algarda, only younger.

‘‘Kevans and Zardoz, I presume.’’

They weren’t startled. Except Kip, who knew he hadn’t given me information enough to give Kevans away.

‘‘Kip. Why are you down here this time?’’

He wouldn’t meet my eye. ‘‘We left some stuff.’’

‘‘Of course you did.’’ Bugs still wandered around on the outside of the World. ‘‘Kip, I don’t get it. You’ve got stuff to do at the manufactory that ought to keep you busy twenty hours a day.’’ He had a million inventions inside his head. His job was to get them out and explained in a way the rest of us could understand. ‘‘So why the hell are you down here rooting around under a slum with a bunch of goofballs?’’

The redhead jabbed me in the ribs. Just reminding me that I wasn’t Kip’s father.

And wasn’t being smart, disrespecting his friends.

He stopped staring at the pavements. ‘‘What are you doing down here? You could have a real job at the manufactoryor the Weider Brewery. But you’re down here chasing insects and harassing kids.’’

Tinnie chuckled.

Wow. Up on his hind legs and barking back. Which left me speechless.

I do what I do because I don’t want to be a wage slave. I’m doing what I want to do. Usually reluctantly. I’ve got a lot of dog in me. Like most hounds, I don’t want to do anything more than the minimum needed to get by. I’m good at that.

I’m sure my mom and dad are spinning in their graves. Maybe Kip could come up with a clever way to tap that rotational energy.

I could hear my only surviving relative, antique Medford Shale, telling me my main problem is, I’ve never been hungry. If I’d ever been truly hungry, I wouldn’t have all these pussy, wimp-out excuses for not nailing me down a real job.

‘‘You score a couple points. But you’re not exactly following your passion by helping social and emotional cripples off the Hill hammer society by creating a plague.’’ I felt like an idiot as soon as I said that. It wasn’t what I’d meant to say.

‘‘And I’m nothing like them, am I, Mr. Garrett?’’

‘‘All right. I apologize. I was getting emotional. There was no need for that. Stipulated. Your friends aren’t likely to be weirder than Cypres Prose. On the other hand, Cypres Prose doesn’t have family on the Hill who want to get involved in my life. Or who hire people to follow you around.’’

‘‘Huh?’’

‘‘Tinnie. Can you keep these two entertained while I show Kip what’s going on inside the World?’’

The redhead sneered. Two teenage boys? She’d turn them to jelly, then set them howling at the moon like werewolves lamenting the change.

She didn’t know about Kevans.

I didn’t plan on exposing Kip to the ghosts of the World. I just wanted to shed the audience so I could give him the word about Lurking Felhske. I’d forgotten how sensitive he was, back when we’d been involved with the sky elves who’d helped spark his mechanical genius.

I told him, ‘‘Most of your friends are from the Hill. Some have big personal problems. You’ve got a girl who pretends she’s a boy. You’ve got a boy who wants to be a girl. You’ve got somebody who’s so interested in you that they’ve hired the slickest assassin in TunFaire to follow you around.’’ All right. I exaggerated. Lurking Felhske might not be a high-powered lifetaker. But I’d dealt with Kip before. You have to get his attention. ‘‘You’ve got somebody who’s so interested in what you’re doing that they’ve even tried leaning on Colonel Block. Any idea who that might be?’’

He had none. Nor did he believe me.

He did show more than sullen interest, though. ‘‘I know about Kevans and Mutter.’’ He shrugged. ‘‘We all do. Mutt is just a freak. But Kevans has got real problems. You’d understand if you knew her family.’’

‘‘I do. Barate Algarda came by my house. He wanted to pound me till I changed my attitude toward you guys. He didn’t have much luck, though.’’

‘‘Your smugness tells me you didn’t get much out of him, though. You won’t. Not him. Not even with a Loghyr to paw through his head. He’s a tough old man.’’ I saw him wondering about his own brief visit to a Loghyr with Kyra. ‘‘You know about the compliance device?’’

I confessed that I had no clue. ‘‘Unless you mean that thing that’s supposed to get a woman ferociously interested.’’

The light was weak but Kip’s blush was visible. ‘‘Actually, Kevans invented that. With help from Mutt. And that’s not what it does.’’

‘‘What, then?’’

‘‘It’s pretty simple. You take some common, off-the-shelf spells and braid them so they have a heterodyning effect. The device isn’t anything special. A spool wound with silver threads that anchor and store the spells. The spool is mounted in a wooden frame. You rotate till you get the right frequency and relative strength. That gives you an idea what somebody’s chemistry is. Doesn’t matter what sex they are. It’s just more likely that males will use it to look at females. That’s the way the culture is stacked.’’

‘‘I’ll take your word. Even if I don’t know what the word means.’’ I felt like I’d just sat through a lecture by somebody ten times smarter than me, who had tried to dumb it down. I did agree that guys would be more likely to deploy the gimmick. If it did what I thought. ‘‘Why would Kevans want to know if somebody was interested or aroused, or could be engineered into it?’’

‘‘Sometimes girls want to know the odds, too, Mr. Garrett.’’

I smelled the reek coming off that. ‘‘And being able to manipulate the other party?’’

‘‘Uh . . . The influence part was serendipity, Mr. Garrett. It wasn’t planned that way. Not so guys can improve their chances. It doesn’t do that very good, anyway. Kevans wanted to find a way to read people’s emotions and intentions. The rest of us all went in on it because we thought we could use it to help us not do the usual inappropriate stuff that scares people off. You’ve seen me go around with a foot in my mouth like a hunchback goes around with his hump. And then you saw me with Kyra.Kyra Tate! ’’

‘‘I was curious. But not too much. I didn’t want to jinx myself with Tinnie.’’

‘‘Yeah. Well, listen. I’m the gleaming social butterfly of the Faction. I’m the master of slick in that crew.’’

‘‘All right. I won’t disagree, based on what I’ve seen so far.’’

‘‘Really, honestly, the compliance device was only supposed to warn us when we were doing dumb stuff. So we’d stop. Plus, Kevans hoped it would help her get along better at home. But we couldn’t ever get the damned thing to do what we wanted it to do. It just let us figure out if somebody was in the mood. If you knew that, you could fiddle the spool a little and kind of tune them in.’’

Then he made a little squeaky noise. His eyes bugged. And I faced off with another invocation of the law of unintended consequences.

‘‘Power up its ability to influence. Figure out how to mass-produce it. You’ll get richer than Max Weider in a week. Call it the Shortcut. Something like that.’’

There might be holes in my reasoning but I knew I’d fingered the soul of it. I was sure, too, that even a superpower compliance device wouldn’t make irresistible studs of the Faction.

I was sure because I was them when I was that age.

Still, these baby blues had actually seen Kyra Tate tagging along after Cypres Prose, apparently liking it.

Did any of the Faction have the slightest notion how disruptive a workable compliance device would be? Socially?

We might be about to find out. The device might be the reason these kids were in the sights of somebody who could deploy a Lurking Felhske.

Staring into infinity, Kip said, ‘‘Oh my God! Ohmigod! Ohmigod!’’ Over and over, faster and faster.

Some wisps of mist over yonder had him seeing the unfortunate dead from back when first we’d met.

My own ghosts began to form. The same as before. I was armored with a powerful cynicism. They troubled me not. I heard no music, either.

Still, Kayanne and Maya did achieve a reality that surpassed the phantom stage. I didn’t doubt that I’d find them warm to the touch if I went over and fondled.

Eleanor did bother me. I still had issues there.

I dragged Kip toward the exit. Once out, I slapped his cheeks. It took three shots to shake him loose.

His eyes focused. He remained confused. ‘‘Listen!’’ I told him. ‘‘What happened in there did because of what your bunch have been doing. There’s something ancient and dreadful way down below here. Your bugs disturbed it. It’s trying to wake up.’’

Kip had no defiance left. ‘‘I don’t understand, Mr. Garrett.’’

‘‘I don’t, either.’’ I had a notion Bill Chimes couldn’t make it any clearer. Bill Chimes who had gone missing again. ‘‘All I can tell you is what I just did. That’s all I’ve been told myself.’’

His eyes glazed over. But he wasn’t going back to where he’d just been. He was doing what always boggles me when I witness it in a kid. He was thinking.

‘‘It would have to be something that operates in a mental realm like the one your partner occupies.’’

My partner. It could be time to drop everything and hustle my sweet self back to Chuckles. ‘‘It might be useful to have the whole Faction sit down with him. He’d make connections none of the rest of us can.’’

‘‘That won’t happen, Mr. Garrett. Nobody wants somebody digging around inside their head.’’

‘‘I understand that. I don’t like it myself. But he won’t do anything you don’t let him do. He isn’t some barbarian raider. Consider, though. He does have multiple minds. He can look at things from several viewpoints at once.’’

‘‘I know. I’ve suffered him before. It isn’t me you have to sell. Right now, despite everything you’ve told me, the Faction wouldn’t see a problem that needs solving.’’

I could have argued on but where was the point? Pushing kids in a direction they don’t want to go just makes them stubborn. Unless you’ve got a really big stick and don’t mind using it.

Better to be more clever.

‘‘I can’t force you. But you’ve had a taste. You know there’s something bad crawling out of the darkness.’’

‘‘Bad? I don’t—’’

‘‘Think about it, Kip. What do you know about ghosts? Why would the ghosts you saw wait for you here? Did any of them come anywhere near here when they were alive?’’

‘‘I’m young, Mr. Garrett. Not stupid. I see the implications.’’

Kip had had enough. He took off toward Tinnie and his friends. He and the friends headed out. Fast. I didn’t hear what they said. Kevans glanced back once; then the three rounded a dirty gray brick building, headed toward the Tenderloin. Headed for their hidey-hole.