Vicious Grace

TWELVE

“Well, you two look smug,” Kim said as Aubrey and I came in. “What’s with the new shirt?”

“Bled all over the old one,” I said.

“Where’s Ex?”

“We just got him to take a nap,” Chogyi Jake said, coming in from the kitchen. “I told him I’d get him up as soon as the lasagna was ready.”

The condo had changed in our absence. The night pressing in at the windows was the same, but the smell of dust had been replaced by the reassuring scents of garlic and hot butter. And instead of a ragged hole in the wall, fresh pale wood made a clean, unpainted door frame. The iron security door was gone too. The scum of white that had covered everything had been cleaned up, and a squat red shop vacuum lurked in the corner beside the couch. Aubrey put the box of Declan Souder’s belongings borrowed from David’s attic on the coffee table, and I told the story. Kim and Chogyi Jake sat, listening to the whole thing.

Kim picked up the Der Körper und der Geist, paging through it with a frown. Chogyi Jake looked through the other contents of the box—a couple of books on architects named Speer and Troost whom I’d never heard of, a notebook of sketches, and a moth-eaten blue suit. In return for it, I’d left David my number, an offer to call him if I found out anything important, and stern instructions to start carrying his cell phone instead of leaving it at the office. If I’d asked for his car, I think he’d have given it to me.

“Poor bastard,” Kim said. “He must have been in pretty bad shape.”

“Worse than Kelly after his gels went bad,” Aubrey said in a tone of agreement. “This guy’s been trying not to sleep for months.”

“Kelly?” I said.

“Sorry,” Aubrey said. “Guy we used to know. I just meant that David was messed up. I did a couple small cantrips to lessen influences and help him sleep. Hopefully, they’ll give him a little cover. At least until we can get whatever this is resolved.”

“Speaking of,” I said. “What did we miss? And who’s the carpenter?”

Chogyi Jake tilted his head, unsure what I meant, and then followed my gaze to the new door frame and grinned.

“Harlan seems to have been taken by a generous impulse,” he said. “I think he’s still relieved that he’s not being sued. He sent building maintenance just after you left. I had them take out the security door too. I hope that’s all right?”

“Kicks all the ass,” I said.

“Other than that, we’ve been hitting the books,” Kim said. “Dividing up the material into piles. Division of labor and all that. No word from Oonishi yet, but I left him a voice mail. And I have more details on the interment ceremony. It does look like it would take someone of the same bloodline to open it.”

“Which fits in with the idea that Eric was looking to pop this thing loose,” I said. “He was keeping tabs on David on the theory that if Grace Memorial was the prison, then Declan Souder was the one the Invisible College sacrificed. Big Dave’s the key that opens the coffin.”

“It begins to look that way,” Chogyi Jake said.

Ex came in as Kim and I were setting the table, his face still marked by the pillowcase. He insisted that the whole story of David and Grandpa Del be retold, and then ignored dinner in favor of sitting alone in the living room with the German book. Aubrey rolled his eyes, but other than that, we let him be. The lasagna was out of the frozen section, but it tasted wonderful. Kim had brought a couple bottles of red wine that went with it beautifully. I relaxed in my chair. The conversation wandered off the subject of riders and magic quickly, turning to things like the story of Kim’s sister accidentally running over their mother’s leg with a truck and Aubrey and Chogyi Jake debating when exactly Quentin Tarantino had jumped the shark. It was as if we’d all tacitly agreed to step back, take a breath, and just have a quiet dinner among friends.

I went along with it, talking movies and books and politics, but it was playing a role. I wanted to relax into a simple, uncomplicated dinner. I could act like I was, but inside, I felt like I was lined up for a race and waiting for the starting gun.

After dinner, Chogyi Jake and Kim cleaned up while Aubrey brewed some distinctly nondecaf coffee. I headed back out to the living room where the blueprints of Grace Memorial still lay unfurled. Ex nodded to me, but didn’t speak. I sat cross-legged on the floor and let my fingers trace the curves and lines of the hospital. Even at this level of abstraction, it looked overpacked and organic. I found myself thinking of dissections in high school biology. Frogs and fetal pigs. The blueprints had the same feel. Here was something that had been hidden, brought to light.

And just like with the frogs, I wasn’t quite sure what I was looking at.

Sleep didn’t come easy that night. I’d expected it to. I was tired enough, but also restless. The tension that dinner had tried to dispel was seeping back. Every time I closed my eyes, images popped up like a slideshow—Grace Memorial glowering out at the street through the huge compound eye of its windows, the face of the red-haired man who’d attacked me, the coffin opening. And every time I opened my eyes, the darkness pressing in at the bed made me think about being buried alive. The interment ceremony. Some poor bastard having the unreal force of a rider driven into him, and then the coffin closed. I told myself that I couldn’t imagine how horrible that would be, but the truth was I could almost feel it: the painful, electric rush of the spirit entering my flesh; the constriction of the coffin; the air growing thick even before the sound of earth being shoveled over it had faded. I stared at the distant, dark ceiling above me and wondered how long Declan Souder had been alive. A normal person, it might have been hours. With the support of a rider, anything was possible. For all I knew, the man was still alive, down there in the darkness.

Aubrey muttered in his sleep, turning his back to me and pulling a pillow over his head. His back rose and fell with slow, soft breath. My hand tapped at my leg, and I noticed that I was humming a song. It was a kid’s gospel song I’d sung in church group about a million times. I’ve got the joy, joy, joy, joy down in my heart, down in my heart, down in my heart. But the voice I heard singing in my head was a man’s and the words had changed themselves.I’ve got the boy, boy, boy, boy down in the dark

Down in the dark

Down in the dark

I’ve got the boy, boy, boy, boy down in the dark

Down in the dark he’ll stay

My skin felt like it wanted to crawl off. I sat up. It didn’t matter how tired I was, I wasn’t sleeping. Even if it was only because I didn’t want to know what kind of dreams bubbled up out of a mind that was writing songs like that for itself. I got up, fumbled into my bathrobe as quietly as I could, and stepped out of the bedroom. The glow of light from the living room was a relief.

Ex was still on the couch, hunched over Der Körper und der Geist, one hand holding back his long, pale hair, one on the page. He was smiling like a wolf that’s just scented a rabbit. The west wall had been stripped of art. Instead, it had about twenty wide, yellow Post-it notes with bits of information on them, and half a dozen pictures stuck to the wall with thumbtacks. A picture of David taken from Eric’s big box o’ surveillance was posted by the door just under an image of his grandfather that I recognized from the Wikipedia article. One of the Post-it notes written in Chogyi Jake’s hand read CCU/fMRI suite—ley line connection? Another one beside it said CIVIL DEFENSE WARD in block letters I didn’t recognize and assumed were Kim’s. The whole thing reminded me of a homicide board out of a murder mystery.

“You all right?” Ex asked without looking up.

“Can’t sleep,” I said. “Creeped myself out. I’ll try crashing again in a little bit. Did Kim take off?”

“No. She’s in the new guest room. I loaned her a T-shirt and a towel. I assume that’s all right?”

“Sure, of course. How’s she holding up?”

“She’s a professional,” Ex said. His tone made it a high compliment. I wanted to follow up, dig more. How did she seem when I wasn’t in the room? Did she talk about Aubrey at all, and what did she say? I couldn’t think of a way to ask that didn’t seem weird and petty. I let it drop.

“Hey,” I said, “I didn’t ask how things went with the chaplain. Did you meet up with him?”

“Did,” Ex said. “Nice guy. Totally out of his depth. He’s aware that something’s happening at the hospital, but he’s spending his time and energy ministering to the patients and praying for guidance.”

“Doesn’t sound like you have much use for that,” I said. “I thought you were a big prayer kind of guy.”

Ex sat back. His eyes were narrow and intense. With his unbound hair spilling down his face, he looked softer, but it was deceptive. From the first time I’d met him, Ex had never seemed anything less than driven. Wrongheaded sometimes, condescending and paternalistic. Frightened sometimes. Even brokenhearted. But never soft. For a moment it seemed significant that he and I were the only ones awake.

“I am a big prayer kind of guy,” he said. “But I have a more nuanced idea of prayer than Father Gilmore. For him, it’s a way to not take responsibility. When he gives a problem over to God, he thinks he’s done, you know? Yesterday, he wanted guidance. Today, I showed up. Tomorrow, he’s still going to be asking for guidance. I don’t have a lot of patience with that.”

“Sounds like you didn’t think much of him,” I said. A stack of files sat, ignored, at Ex’s side. I picked them up just to have room to sit.

“I love everybody,” he said. “Doesn’t mean I have to like them. What about you?”

“Me?”

“You’re the one being mobbed and shot at,” Ex said. “Might throw some people off stride.”

“No. I’m fine,” I said. And then, “I guess maybe it’s a little weird that I’m fine, but I am. It’s just business, you know?”

“And you can handle yourself.”

“What? Skeptical?”

His smile started and stopped in the corners of his eyes.

“No, I think you can handle yourself. This is good, by the way,” he said, holding up the German book. “This is very good. And it’s big. I think you may have gotten the key to the whole thing, right here.”

“Yeah? What are we looking at?”

“Well, we know it’s something that affects people without having actually possessed them individually. We know it had to be driven into someone for the interment. And we know it’s powerful enough that even that didn’t entirely silence it. It’s looking like some kind of haugsvarmr. Given the subtitle, probably a leyiathan.”

“Taxonomy’s always a bitch,” I said. “And what exactly is a hog-swarmer?”

“Haugsvarmr.”

“Whatever.”

Ex waved an impatient hand, his hair drooping down over his eyes. While he talked, I paged through the files on my lap. One was labeled as security personnel for Grace Memorial as of three years before. Another had a list of the contractors who’d bid for the new emergency room five years ago, and records of their workman’s comp filings.

“It’s a level up,” Ex said. “It’s . . . Okay. Look. Riders possess people. That’s how they work. Someone who’s being ridden doesn’t have the demon in their finger or their liver or even their brain. When a rider takes over, it takes over the whole human system. It controls the hands and the feet and the muscles. It can use them in ways a normal, unpossessed person can’t. But it isn’t those parts.”

“A possessed guy isn’t a guy with a possessed gall bladder. It’s the whole guy. Got it,” I said.

I spotted a file with Kim’s name on it. I shot a look at Ex. I was pretty sure he wasn’t paying attention, so I shifted it into the pile set aside for her to look at. Better that the boys not find out about Kim and Eric’s affair that way. Hell, better they never found out at all.

“The haugsvarmr are riders that possess larger structures,” Ex said.

“So like haunted houses?” I asked, thinking of Declan Souder’s architectural dissections. Ex shook his head.

“Social structures. Like political parties or nations.”

I stopped looking through the files. I could feel my eyes getting wide, and I fought a sense of growing vertigo.

“Hold on. What?” I said.

“It hasn’t happened often, but it’s not unheard of,” Ex said. “Rosh, Meshech, and Tubal are probably the first recorded examples. Hitler’s Germany was the most recent.”

“Okay, time-out,” I said. “World War Two was about riders? Germany was possessed?”

“Well, the apparatus of the Nazi Party was. And maybe the nation as a whole. Why does that seem weird?”

“I just . . . I mean . . .”

Ex cocked his head. The expression on his face left me feeling dim and obvious, like I’d just blurted out my amazement that Britney Spears lip-synchs her concerts. A little burn of resentment lit in my chest.

“You know your problem?” he said.

“I think you’re going to tell me.”

“You and Aubrey and Kim,” he said as if I hadn’t spoken. “Even Chogyi Jake? Do you know why all of you can’t quite make sense of all this? You live in a morally neutral world. You don’t like the idea of evil, and so you don’t look for the patterns. Riders are just another kind of insect or amoeba to you. Parasites.”

“And for you?” I said.

“They’re demons,” he said. “The Second World War was a battle between a flawed, struggling human resistance and a force of pure evil. It’s the same struggle that’s going on right now. Whether you choose to acknowledge it or not, it’s the job you’ve taken on. It doesn’t matter whether you think of Hitler and Goering and all the rest as evil men or evil spirits in human form. They’re still evil, so they’re the enemy. Whether they’re nosferatu or noppera-bo or haugtrold only matter when we start planning tactics.”

“What about angels?”

“Never met one.”

The way he said it closed the subject. I backtracked.

“But the Nazis knew about this? Riders. Magic.”

Ex relaxed a little, back on safe ground. I made a mental note to ask Aubrey why angels were one of Ex’s buttons.

“There’s still a lot of debate about what exactly Himmler was up to when he founded the Ahnenehrbe,” Ex said with a shrug, “but we know for a fact that he was deeply into riders. We know that part of what happened at Dachau was ritual death magic.”

“You’re talking about Indiana Jones digging up the Ark of the Covenant?” I said, trying to make a joke out of it.

“Well, all right,” Ex said and grinned. “That they made up. But more generally, yes, Nazi occultism isn’t a big secret. Part of the national policy from 1939 on was to harness riders for the cause. Karl Wiligut spent most of the war in a project to make pacts with the riders, and enslave the ones that wouldn’t play. They certainly bound Wotan Irisi and the Black Sun. They worked with the Graveyard Child, but it’s not clear whether that was a free pact or a binding. There were dozens of asatro in the hierarchy of the German military, and more loupine than you could count.”

“Loupine,” I said.

“There was a reason the Nazi resistance to Allied occupation were called werewolves,” Ex said. “Whatever’s happened at Grace Memorial, it’s involved with the sort of thing the Nazis were looking at. Or the kind of thing that was looking at them, depending whether you think Hitler was the chicken or the egg. And”—he tapped the book in his hands twice, hard, sharp sounds—“a haugsvarmr. Probably a leyiathan.”

I knew I wasn’t thinking straight. It had been a hard, long, exhausting day that had involved four hours’ driving and being shot at in the middle part. I could feel that I was missing something here, some question or piece of information that would reframe the whole thing. Pull everything into focus. The best I could manage was a protest.

“But Eric was looking to get it loose,” I said. “His whole project was to free it.”

“And if we knew why, we’d know a lot more,” Ex said.

“Could he need it for an ally?” I said. “The Invisible College was part of tying it down. Maybe he was looking for something that would help him against them, and—”

“Eric planned to break the Invisible College as part of digging this thing loose,” Ex said. “Not as something to do afterward. No, I’ve been looking at that angle, and I don’t know what ends Eric could have been aiming at. Haugsvarmr aren’t usually aware of individual humans, at least not in the way we’re used to. They need a reason to care that we even exist. Eric would have needed a plan for getting its attention. Something that would make it notice him in the first place.”

“Any idea what?”

“Best guess? Access to David. If Eric could make himself a middleman between those two, he’d have been in a good position to bargain.”

“For what?”

“I don’t know. I assume he wasn’t looking to recreate the Nazi Party, though.”

“Are we a hundred percent that the hog-swarmer was what got bound? Could it have something else?”

Ex shrugged.

“Not a hundred, but high nineties.”

“Any chance they could have been working with a hog-swarmer to tie something else down? A common enemy?”

“Possible,” Ex allowed. “Politics in the Pleroma aren’t something any of us understand.”

A tapping sound caught my attention; it was my own fingers dancing nervously on the file with Kim’s name. I forced myself to stop. Ex watched me, his pale eyes gentle and challenging at the same time.

“Well, I don’t know either,” I said.

“We’ll find it,” Ex said. “There’s a plan in here somewhere. All we need to do is find it.”

The tone of his voice was ambiguous, but I was pretty sure he was talking about God as much as Eric. I’d lost faith in religion before I’d ever met Ex or Aubrey, but whether God had a plan for all things or not didn’t matter. Ex was still right. There was a plan, because Eric had made it. I could tell myself that the hard part was done. Once I knew what to do, doing it was easy. The thought was almost enough for me.

Almost.

“Hey,” I said. “Once we figure what Eric was up to, we’re going to have to talk to this thing. Strike some kind of deal.”

“Looks like, yeah.”

“So it’s probably not all that bad, right? You’re not scared of it?”

Ex actually grinned. I waited for him to say No or We can do anything or even just God is with us. Something motivational and upbeat that I could half believe.

“Petrified,” he said.