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Chapter Seven

I waited until Mama Samm had situated her bulk in the back of a cab and directed the driver to an address on University Place before starting up.

<What the hell is a "Nyarlathotep" and how does he make other people's faces grow tentacles? What about Volpea? Is it safe to just go off and leave her like that? What if the maid comes in to clean? What if Mr. Dark 'n' Scary attempts another hostile takeover? And are you serious about this elder god crap? You called it the Crawling Chaos like it was some sort of name! So does that make ole octopus-nose "Mr. Chaos" to casual acquaintances and "Crawly" to his close friends?>

>Are you finished, yet?<

<Finished? I'm just getting started! Since this doesn't appear to be totally off the map for you, I'd really appreciate a little more disclosure on your part! I mean I've got the Pisces Patrol making houseboat calls, Nazi nanobots turning me into a cross between Lee Majors and Hugh Jackman, lesbian werewolves pretending to seduce me—>

>Stop babbling!<

I stopped.

>There was only one.<

<What?>

>Lesbian. Singular. Not plural. And she isn't a werewolf. The only harm there is to your pride. Given her preferences, you could choose to see her deception as a compliment.<

I scowled at her. Being on the inside of her head, the expression was probably lost on her. <The more salient point is there's some genuinely scary shit going down, here!>

>Yes. Yes, there is. I wasn't sure until now that we were dealing with his kind—<

<His kind? You mean there's more than one of him?>

>You're getting hysterical, again. I won't be discussing this with you if you get all excited. It opens ancient pathways in the mind that should stay closed and forgotten. And it draws their attention.<

<I'd say it's a little late for that, already.>

>What? The Deep Ones?< I caught a mental image of my fishy foes reflected from her thoughts. >They are mere flesh and blood, the mortal detritus of those who opened their minds and their flesh to the madness generations before.<

<So, these Deep Dudes—not the Big Bad you're talking about here?>

>Mister Chris, do you know your Bible? Do you know the story of Sodom and Gomorrah? Of Lot's wife?<

<Pretty much.>

>Sodom and Gomorrah were bad places. Evil places. Abraham tried to bargain with God. Made the Lord promise to spare the cities if he could find fifty good people living there.<

<Yeah, I remember. He couldn't find fifty decent folk in the whole city.>

She nodded. It was an interesting sensation. >Then he negotiated down to forty-five. Then thirty. Then twenty. Ten. Couldn't do it. In the end only Abe's nephew Lot and his family could be evacuated. God told 'em: 'Don't none of you look back! This place is too evil to stand!'

>The Bible says evil can enter in through the eyes when it beholds that which is sinful. When Lot's wife disobeyed God and looked back while He was a-destroying all that evil, she was destroyed, too. Turned into a pillar of salt. A lot of them man preachers like to say she was punished for disobeying her husband and disobeying God. Like God going to take time outta scrubbing the toilet to hose a crumb off the back porch. No, I think Lot's wife looked back while the power was pouring down on all that evil and some of that evil entered by way of her eyes—just like the Bible says. And the power that was chasing right on its nasty-ass tail followed right on in and destroyed that woman just as it turned two whole cities into dust and ashes.<

<So, what's your point here?>

>That, just as you're supposed to avert your eyes from evil lest it enter in, you must turn your mind away from madness, or it will enter you and have its way within, as well. What I am trying to do here, Mister Chris, is stop you from turning your attention to things that don't bear thinking about. Because if you turn your attention to Them, They will eventually turn Their attention to you!

>There are things that you have seen that would give most people nightmares for the rest of their lives. But they are still the things of this earth, this Creation. But there are things that dwell in the darkness between this Creation and others—awful, empty, evil places—Places of Madness! Things that don't belong here. Shouldn't be able find Their way here. But They want to come! They hunger! And sometimes They find ways! Terrible ways! Unthinkable ways! And They don't even have to actually be here! Just by whispering through the keyholes of the universe, just by casting Their shadows over the line between our reality and Theirs, They infect places. And the people who get caught there for very long get infected, too!<

<So this Crawling Chaos is only a shadow?>

>You have only met the shadow of Nyarlathotep, though he alone walks the earth at this time. One other sleeps on this side of the gate. The rest—Azathoth, Shub-Niggurath, Yog-Sothoth, the rest of the Great Old Ones, the Outer Gods—are exiled outside of this universe and cannot, must not, ever return or Creation will unravel and the stars will gutter into eternal darkness!<

<Then maybe we should go back and you punch Mister Chaos some more until he yells "Uncle".>

>It don't work like that, child. What you saw and heard was just a shadow, not the real thing. If the real Nyarlathotep had showed up in person you'd be dead or forever insane. Besides, he been walkin' this earth for a long time, makin' trouble here and there. As for the rest? As long as Their great priest sleeps, They ain't comin' nowhere. Now, I don't talk about these things because the best way to let sleeping gods lie is to not wake them up. Think about Them too much and They begin to dream. You don't want Them dreamin' about you. Their dreams . . . leak . . . <

<But—>

>But nothin'. I told you, this is something that is way out of your league. You may be all badass and bluff when it comes to bad peoples and vampires and shapeshifters. But you ain't no astral physicist: the Great Old Ones should be left alone. To sleep. You can't do nothin' but quicken Their dreams. And I will kill you myself if I ever get the idea that you might disturb the eternal slumber of the Master of R'yleh!<

There was that weird title again. I would have asked for an explanation but after a long explanation about not explaining certain things, the last was thought with such vehemence that I was shocked into mental silence.

>But enough of this,< she continued. >I have said too much already and we will speak of it no more. All things have an ending, even this world and this Creation. But when it comes—whether next week or a thousand years hence—it will be as Yahweh, God of this Creation ordains it. Not mad abominations from Outside in the Great Dark. Our work is to deal with the evils of this world, of this Creation. We do not—we cannot—concern ourselves with the Endless Oblivion Outside and Beyond! Right now you are about to see the mother of your unborn son. And your . . . (ahem) . . . colleagues. You need to focus. I'm risking enough carrying you around this city without you going all Busby Berserkly inside my head now that we're on our way to Marie Laveau's inner sanctum!<

< >

>What's that? I didn't hear you!<

<Yes, ma'am,> I said politely.

At which point we had arrived at the Orpheum Theater.

 

Located in the central business district, the Orpheum has had its share of past lives. The Beaux Arts terra-cotta theater opened in 1918 as a part of the vaudeville circuit. It saw its heyday, however, as a movie theater—one of the crown jewels of the RKO chains. Even after they reclaimed a section of the first balcony for a projection booth, the "O" could still seat an audience of 1660 people, spreading them around a main floor, two separate balconies, and a number of private boxes. Back in the Jim Crow days of the previous century, the audience was segregated. "Colored" seating was restricted to the second balcony and that could only be accessed by stairways from the outside alleys on either side.

That was then, this is now. We walked up to the front doors of the building that was now home to the Louisiana Philharmonic Orchestra and knocked.

A crash bar boomed two doors over and we were admitted by a young Latina girl wearing jeans and a T-shirt. The T had a picture of a crawfish and some message about "sucking heads and pinching tails." She did not look happy.

"Sammathea D'Arbonne?" she asked, looking us up and down.

Mama Samm nodded. "I thought you were off at school, doing summer studies."

"I am. Oceanography. I'm assigned to crew the Spindrift, which is in port for a few days so I wrangled leave for the weekend."

The big fortune-teller leaned toward the girl to peer at her more closely. "Oceanography, huh? How you likin' all dat water?"

The girl smiled like Alice's Cheshire Cat. "It's full of all kinds of fascinating fish. Follow me, please." She turned and led us through the small lobby and into the orchestra foyer.

<So, I'm guessing she's not a member of the early morning cleaning crew. . . . > I observed, noting that the tightness of her jeans did little to impede the wiggle of her posterior as she walked ahead of us. A pendulum of black hair fell to the small of her back and swished in counterpoint to the ticktock of her budding hips. It was a reflexive notation; I was still a bit shell-shocked from recent events and Mama Samm's outburst.

Or would that more accurately be referred to as an "inburst"?

Mama Samm harrumphed inside our head. >This is Jorge Pantera's daughter, Irena, so behave yourself.<

<I am behaving myself!> I protested. <She's too young, anyway.>

>And probably a lesbian,< Mama Samm added wryly.

<Oh, now cut that out!>

"When we are done here, I must ask you a favor," Irena Pantera said as she led us down and then back up and onto the stage. "It's about my stepmother . . ."

It took me an extra moment to realize that she was talking about Marie Laveau.

"We'll talk after my visit," Mama Samm told her. "I'll require some privacy, you understand. But we'll meet afterwards and you can tell me all about it, then."

Irena nodded, her chocolate eyes narrowing as if to squeeze her agitation down to a more manageable compactness.

She led us off into the wings and down a corkscrew spiral of metal stairs to a chamber under the stage. Across this room was another door that required a key. Past that door was a narrow bricked alcove with stairs leading down into darkness. She flipped a switch, illuminating a string of bare bulbs tracing the descent, and we eventually found ourselves in a metal-sheathed room that resembled a modern elevator façade. A ten-key number pad replaced the binary up/down configuration.

Irena punched in a code, shielding the keypad with her body so we couldn't learn the access number. The door slid open to the left and we entered another metal-walled room that was, unmistakably, an airlock.

"We're below the water table now," Irena explained. "This egress doubles as security and protection against flooding."

That made sense. New Orleans was notoriously short on any kind of subterranean construction. You don't put buildings with basements in a swamp. And, between vast bodies of water that make periodic attempts to overrun the levees and an aggressive groundwater table that seeks to rise to the level of the Gulf of Mexico, the Mississippi River, and Lake Pontchartrain, even the dead get aboveground housing. The limestone and marble crypts that fill Cypress Grove, Greenwood, Metairie, Lafayette, and all three St. Louis cemeteries like so much tract housing protect the corpses from the decompositional effects of ground water.

Perhaps more importantly, they protect the ground water from becoming corpse consommé, as well.

The real problem is not the abundance of water so much as the illusion of land. The lower portion of what the maps identify as Louisiana is a geological illusion. You don't have to go back more than a few million years—an hour or two on Earth's curriculae vitea—to find ocean here. Ocean going all the back to the very Beginning. Beginning with a capital B. The primary engines responsible for the subsequent landfill were rivers and tributaries that moved dirt in a migratory course to the South, building thousands of miles of new coastline one quarter of an inch at a time.

The trouble is, mankind showed up and moved in too soon on the geologic calendar. Not only moved in too soon but shut down the remaining landfill engines, building dams and locks and levees, choking off the silt and sand migrations that had fed the delta regions for the past hundred million years. The one remaining engine—the "hemi" of the northern half of this hemisphere—is still called the Big Muddy. But the earthen cargo for which it is named no longer spills out into the Gulf of Mexico to continue its millennial task of shoring up the shore, growing the ground, and deepening the dirt. We've managed to dredge and divert and choke the Mississippi River to where it's both dammed and damned. And, as a result, the process has reversed itself: every year more land is lost. The sea is returning to claim its ancient and rightful territory. Louisiana loses the equivalent of two football fields to the ocean every day.

Don't believe me? Look it up.

Still don't believe it? That's because the concept is unthinkable.

And that's why it continues. You can't motivate people to combat something they can't wrap their minds around.

Let's face facts: it takes a certain amount of denial to live in a swamp, below sea level, surrounded by vast amounts of water held back by flimsy walls of earth and ancient cement.

Maybe I just have a better imagination. Or a clarity of perspective since I live in the solid, northern end of the state. Whichever, I couldn't help flinching when the inner door of the airlock opened. By all rights there shouldn't have been anything on the other side but water and/or compressed silt and muck.

Instead, there was a dry and spacious corridor.

Of stone!

For a fleeting moment I felt the first quiverings of a fresh, full-blown panic.

Then I saw that the floor, walls, and ceiling were nothing like the stone-flagged, earthen tunnels in the Faerie Mound. Here the construction was tightly-fitted stone blocks of gigantic dimensions. The passageway itself would have allowed four of us to walk abreast with plenty of room on both sides. Instead, there were only two of us, fleshwise, and Mama Samm and I had to follow our diminutive guide, feeling uncharacteristically tiny amid such cyclopean architecture.

The floor beneath our feet felt pebbly and uneven and the nearest wall seemed to contain some three-dimensional motif or decoration.

<Wander a little closer to the right and let me get a closer look at the wall's surface.>

>Yo mama, Cséjthe?<

If I'd had my own eyes I would have blinked. <What about my mama?>

>What kind of manners did yo mama teach you, boy?<

Oh.

<Please?>

>Very well.< She steered over and turned her eyes toward the dressed stone to our right. >Just remember I ain't no taxicab and you ain't no high-tipping fare.<

<Yes, ma'am.>

The surface of each ten-by-fourteen-foot block was adorned like a prehistoric diorama of aquatic life. Trilobites, brachiopods, gastropods, bryozoans, cephalopods, crinoids, tabulate and rugose corals, pelecypods, littered the walls, the floor, and, presumably, the ceiling which was illuminated here and there by another bare bulb on a naked string of wires every twelve feet or so.

<Uh, I'm looking at Paleozoic fossils, here!>

Irena turned back and saw us touching the knobby protrusions of petrified flora and fauna. "Oh," she said, "I see you've noticed one of our great mysteries."

"Mmm-hmm," Mama Samm agreed. "Giant blocks of dressed stone dating back to the dinosaurs . . ."

"Oh, much older than the dinosaurs. Most of these," Irena indicated the scattering of ancient forms, "date from the Devonian and Mississippian Ages of the Paleozoic Era—between 380 and 420 million years ago."

"Well, honey, I may not know the exact numbers, but I do know my sequences."

<Sequences?>

"Sequences?" Irena echoed.

Mama Samm nodded. "I mean you got more than a bunch of pretty rocks stuck in your old stone walls." She ran a large finger along one of the tight seams where a calcified crinoid had lodged around four hundred thousand centuries ago. "Seems these fossils showed up here after this stone was cut, after this place was built. Which means whoever built it was really, really old. Older than the dinosaurs! Certainly older than humans! Our ancestors didn't show up until about six million years ago. And they didn't get around to doing anything like this until like ten seconds ago in geological time. So, who built this place?"

"The Krell," Irena answered.

* * *

Actually, she was pulling our leg. No one in the New Orleans demesne had a clue but neither was anyone inclined to look a 400-million-year-old gift horse in the mouth.

All that Irena knew was that Marie Laveau had led her "people" down into the underspaces of the Orpheum back when it was first being built at the turn of the last century. The Voices told her where to dig, and she enlisted the bodies of dozens—and eventually hundreds—of thralls to excavate the miles of prehistoric stone corridors and chambers choked with mud, ranging from packed sediment all the way to fossilized strata. As the decades passed above, a succession of airlocks were constructed, openings were sealed, collapsed rooms and hallways walled off, and foot by foot, yard by yard, sections were cleared and areas were made habitable.

The ancient underground city was not reclaimed by archeologists but by monsters. Led by a monster who was hearing voices even back then. So the best clues as to the identities of the ancient builders were excavated along with the tons of mud, sand, silt, and petrified sediments, and dumped in ditches, canals, trash heaps, the river—wherever the equally disposable thralls could dispose of hundreds of thousands of cubic feet of earthen debris one bucket at a time—without attracting undue notice. It took decades just to carve out sufficient space for Marie and a staff and guest list approaching seventy. But what was time to creatures that might be immortal. Especially in preparing the perfect shelter to retreat to when threatened? Laveau might be crazy but she wasn't stupid.

<Except for the fact she's set up housekeeping in a temple of the Great Old Ones,> I mused.

>What? This was never a temple. And it wasn't built by or for any Great Old Ones, Mister Chris. Don't you be talking or thinking no nonsense about which you know nothing about!<

<Elder Gods, then. You said something about Elder Gods.>

>I said "Outer Gods" not "Elder Gods." The Elder Gods oppose the Outer Gods!<

<Then—um—logically—this place did belong to the Elder Gods.>

>Excuse me?<

<Well, if the Great Old Ones are also the Outer Gods and this place belonged to the big ancient scary types that weren't their friends, one would assume—>

>I never actually said that the architects of this place were the enemies of the Great Old Ones.<

<Your tone implied it.>

>My tone—look! This is part of an ancient complex built by the Elder Things!<

<I thought you called them Elder Gods. And said they weren't the contractors.>

>Elder Gods are different than Elder Things! Elder Things were an alien race!<

<Well, this is all very confusing. . . . >

>And I told you we are not going to discuss this. The Elder Things came here a thousand million years ago! The Great Old Ones hated and feared them! The Elder Things waged war against the Mi-go, the Great Race of Yith, and the Star Spawn—<

<So, these Elder Aliens are, like, the good guys? I think I'm gonna need a scorecard, here.>

>They're gone, Mister Chris! Wiped out! Extinct. Between their wars without and the rebellion of their dreaded shoggoths within, the last remnants escaped to the stars eons before the first hominid climbed down from the trees!<

<Okay, I'm going to stop now. Not just because I have no idea of what you're talking about but because I got you to use the word "hominid." That, alone, is worthy of silent contemplation . . . >

Plus we both needed to focus on the remainder of Irena's account. She was telling us about rooms, still being excavated, where great murals adorned the walls. Scenes of fantastic tableaus featuring an incredible array of creatures unlike anything Irena had come across in her biology or zoology texts. Murals which were defaced and destroyed at Marie Laveau's command. Presumably the Voices told her to do so, and so these Voices—presumably—were no friends to the original architects of this place.

Which continued to beg the question.

Unfortunately someone was being a big ole party poop on that subject.

The one thing Irena could tell us about these Voices is that they had spoken to the Vampire Queen of New Orleans again, early this morning. Laveau had staggered out just an hour or so before sunrise, muttering that she had to obtain "The Russian Key" before it was gone.

"And for all I know, she's just ashes on the morning winds, now," the young woman finished, visibly upset.

While my host and I were both of the opinion that this wouldn't necessarily be such a bad thing, we both realized that Marie had saved the lives of this girl and her father. That she probably cared for them in her own way and that they had come to care for her, too.

So Mama Samm promised to do what she could to find out what had happened to Irena Pantera's oh-so-wicked stepmother once she (we) had looked in on her (my) people.

 

The clinic wasn't anything like the medical facilities for the Seattle demesne.

Of course, the medical needs of the undead and their lycanthropic servitors were pretty simple. Whatever didn't outright kill them seemed to have little lasting effect. As for those exceptions—Laveau's management style was more of a hands-off, live-and-let-die approach. I was guessing that the better equipment in the treatment area was on loan from Stefan Pagelovitch. With all the blather about how I posed such a threat to the other enclaves, I found such little signs of détente encouraging.

The chambers were uniformly large, so the patients were clustered together and given the dubious privacy of individual prefab cubicles and curtains. Big surprise: even undead health care sucks . . .

Dr. Mooncloud was already on duty and came bustling up with a stack of clipboards.

"Any problems? I was starting to worry."

Though I didn't have the same access to Mama Samm's nerve endings as I did when Bloodwalking in other bodies, I got the general sense of her planting her massive fists on her Gibraltar-like hips as she gazed down at Taj. "I used to live in this city, Doctor, and I know my way around better than most. If there is a reason I do not live here now, it is largely because of Marie Laveau. But she has invited me and so what have I to fear?"

Mooncloud shrugged. "You've visited before. Even dropped in back when she was headquartered at the Lalaurie House. But not down here." She crossed her arms across her chest and seemed to repress a small shudder. "This place isn't right. You know the old digs were haunted. But this place is . . . I don't know . . . fundamentally wrong on so many levels that I just don't know where to begin . . ." She shook her head. "And we may have another problem."

"What kind of a problem?" Mama Samm asked.

"You know how the coastal demesnes have been losing vampires of late? Well, it's happening here, too. And now we're starting to miss some weres, as well."

"That's not been a problem elsewhere. The defections were limited to the undead," Mama Samm mused.

"Well, Volpea and Fenris seem to have gone missing. A few of Laveau's other wolves have disappeared, as well. I don't know if it's connected but the good news is I spoke to Pagelovitch a couple of hours ago. I think I've finally convinced him that Cséjthe's not playing Harriet Tubman for the disaffected members of the Seattle enclave."

"I suppose that's something," my host mused, "but I doubt our boy'll be chomping at the bit to visit him any time soon."

"Nor would he be encouraged to do so. That little stunt he pulled in New York has all the demesnes and domans rattled." Mooncloud looked back over her shoulder. "In the meantime, I've got cranky patients right here."

Mama Samm turned our gaze from Taj to the curtained beds, then over to Irena Pantera lounging against the far wall, then back to the doctor. "I will need to speak with them in private, Doctor. If you would be so good as to keep Jorge's daughter occupied?"

Mooncloud nodded enthusiastically. "Oh, my pleasure! Believe me! Anything to get away for a while!" She turned to corral Pantera, muttering something about hormones, and we moved to the first curtained alcove.

A woman lay upon a bed surrounded by a sophisticated array of medical monitoring equipment. Despite the tape holding her eyelids shut and the respirator covering the lower half of her face, it was obvious that she was a stranger. Mama Samm, however, lingered at the entryway.

<Hello? Not one of ours. And a little rude to stand and stare.>

>It would only be rude if there was someone here,< she admonished. >This bed is empty.<

<Doesn't look empty to . . . > Oh.

The vital signs monitors were eloquent in their own way: the mountain range redux of P-wave, QRS complex, T-wave, over and over, measuring the depolarization/repolarization of the human heart. ECG, NIBP, SPO2, all registering the mimicry of life. But the EEG told a completely different story. The alpha, beta, theta, and delta readouts should have rippled like wavelets from four different rivers. Instead the sine waves unspooled like a four-lane highway across the great salt flats of Utah. And, like that level wasteland, what inhabited that hospital bed was potent with mirages but sterile and lifeless, all the same. Once upon a time a person had inhabited that flesh, those bones. Whatever the essence of personhood—personality, memory, thought, reason, emotion—was gone now. All that remained was what we linguistically recognize as such . . . 

The remains.

Turn off the respirator, disconnect the machinery and remove the personalized care that kept those remains fed, cleansed, and maintained within certain tolerances and the natural process would take hold. Rot. Decay. Putrescence. Dissolution. A final breakdown to the building block components of Biblical construction: ashes to ashes, dust to dust.

But not yet.

For now the remains . . . remained. Science had some purpose yet unfulfilled.

And I had a pretty good idea what that was.

Another curtained alcove. Another bed. Another carefully maintained husk. Another possibility. Another choice.

And another in the third cubicle.

The fourth held more. Much more. A ghost in the shell. Two ghosts, actually: a very pregnant Lupé Garou half-lay, half-crouched in the hospital bed, looking up at us with weary, wary eyes.

"Well," she snarled, "what's his excuse this time? Grateful Dead concert? Monster truck rally? Breaking in a new bodyguard?"

"I heard that!" piped another familiar voice. It came from beyond the next curtained screen.

Mama Samm dragged a pair of chairs over, next to Lupé's bed and settled her ample derriere across their twinned surface. "You don't take his phone calls, you don't answer his letters . . ."

"What phone calls? What letters?"

"If you didn't get them, it's not because he didn't call or write. Did you try to call or write him?"

Lupé shook her head, confusion replacing the fury in her eyes. "I was waiting for him. If he didn't hear from me he should have come in person."

"You think it's easy for him to come to you?" she asked softly. "You keep runnin' away, what's a man supposed to think?"

"I'm carrying his baby!" Lupe protested.

"Keep your voice down," Mama Samm admonished. "Too many peoples already knows your bidness. You think his stayin' away is all about pride? You been a monster so long, lived with monsters so long, you can't understand how he feels about being a monster, hisself. Other werewolves, other vampires, seek the societies of their own kind. He has no kind. And chasing someone who flees from him just makes him feel more monstrous."

"I didn't think—"

"That's right, you didn't think. You all just pregnant hormones and bent out of shape because your man is the demiurge on the cusp o' time. Well, it bad enough that there be things and groups of things that want to do him harm. How much do it help when the mother of his child goes running off to enemy territories, endangering herself, her child, and the man she claim to love?"

"I—I'm not in danger here," she protested.

"Yeah. You so safe you can't leave even if you wanted to."

"Why would I want to?"

"Have you tried?"

Lupe had no immediate answer to that.

"I know you cannot go back to your family or your pack. They would destroy your child as an abomination. And you along wit' it, just to please their vampire masters."

"So I choose to stay here where it's safe," she reasoned.

"You are kept here," Mama Samm corrected, "because you are a political asset. You are a bargaining chip that keeps the Bloodwalker out of Marie Laveau's territory and impresses the other enclaves that she has something to hold over him. Once the child is born, she will have two bargaining chips. Do you understand how that works? Two chips mean you can play—or dispose of—one without losing the bargaining power of the other."

"Particularly," Lupe puzzled out slowly, "if I am the one she uses and holds our baby back in reserve . . ."

"So you see," the big fortune-teller continued, "your safety is temporary at best and ephemeral in the long term."

<Ephemeral?> I repeated. <Since when did you start using words like "ephemeral" and "hominid"?>

>Reader's Digest.< Mama Samm mindwhispered. >"It Pays To Increase Your Word Power." You should subscribe. I'm particularly fond of "Life In These United States."<

"What do you suggest I do?" Lupé asked quietly, looking about as if to gauge our present level of privacy.

"You can start by talking to the one person who cares about you beyond your political value as a hostage or a science project. You can stop punishing the man for something you imagined he did and find out what really happened."

"She knows what really happened," chirped Deirdre's voice from the other side of the curtain. "She's just not finished running her tests."

<Tests?> I echoed as Mama Samm wrenched herself up and out of her dual chair arrangement.

Three long strides and the curtain was swept aside to reveal two faces leaning forward to eavesdrop.

Every face to face (to face) encounter with Deirdre and Theresa since our return from Dr. Mengele's Rocky Mountain fortress was a fresh shock to my sensibilities. The fact that I hadn't seen her/them for nearly six months didn't help. Neither did repeated viewings of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy—the Mark Wing-Davey 1981 incarnation of Zaphod Beeblebrox, not the Sam Rockwell performance from '05, that is. There's something about a pair of heads sharing a single body that is just so wrong on so many levels. And that's before we even get to the aesthetics. Trust me on this one, the old saw is wrong: two heads are not better than one!

Deirdre looked suitably embarrassed, her face blushed scarlet, nearly matching the arterial red of her hair. Theresa's face was pale in marked contrast to her coal-black locks. Her present pallor had nothing to do with surprise or fright, however. Chalk it up to a prior Goth lifestyle and a more recent condition as a headless corpse. Or a corpseless head. In any event, she wasn't embarrassed. The only thing I'd ever known to embarrass this bad-news brunette was her failure to achieve full-blown monster status during the "Lilith Affair." Not—I thought as I considered the place where Theresa's neck was fused to Deirdre's shoulder—that she was entirely out of the running now.

"You ladies," Mama Samm said, pronouncing the word as if she wasn't completely sure of it, "need to go lie back down and let peoples have their private talks. Your turn will be coming."

"Don't blame me," Theresa whined with a contradictory smile, "I'm just along for the ride."

"You look tired," the juju woman said abruptly. "Why don't you take a nap?"

Theresa's head suddenly dropped forward, her chin falling on Deirdre's chest. Her mouth lost its subtle sneer and began to emit gentle snoring sounds.

"Thanks," Deirdre said. "You don't know how much—"

"You need a nap, too," Mama Samm interrupted. "But I'll give you another ten seconds to get back into bed, first."

Deirdre turned and fled. Mama Samm reclosed the curtains. Turned back to Lupé. "What you think you testin' for, child? To see how much rejection your man can take? By the time you have your answer, you'll be alone and he'll be that much further away. Is that what you want?"

Lupé started to speak, then stopped and closed her eyes and shook her head.

The fortune-teller turned couples counselor repositioned the two chairs closer to the bed and repositioned herself upon them. "Then talk to him," she said, settling back. "I'm tired. I think I'll take a little nap, myself."

Her eyes stayed open but I had the sudden impression that I had been left alone in the cubicle with the mother of my unborn son.

"Lupé . . ." I tried through thicker, wider lips.

Her ears pricked forward. It seemed impossible that human ears could move in such a manner but the impression was unmistakable. "What . . . ?"

"It's me."

"It's you?"

"Chris. I'm . . . inside. Riding shotgun inside Mama Samm's head."

She stared at me, her eyes widening.

"I bloodwalked." Well, technically Mama Samm pulled some kind of juju move but this was confusing enough without getting into specific details.

"Chris?" she whispered. She glanced around as if expecting an undead Ashton Kutcher to appear.

I tried nodding the fortune-teller's head. The result was a perilous wobble.

Lupé crept out of bed cradling her swollen belly. "What are you doing here?"

"I've come to see you. You won't take my phone calls, answer my letters. Marie Laveau has forbidden me to come in person. What was I supposed to do?"

"I don't know. I didn't know. Someone must have interfered—" She crouched down to look in our eyes. "Are you really in there? She let you inside her head?"

"Yeah. She made up a guest room and everything."

She frowned. "How do I know it's really you?"

I tried shrugging Mama Samm's shoulders. All around, these days, I really sucked at shrugging. "I guess we should have agreed on a code word or phrase," I said, "just before you ran away. Too bad I left my wallet in my other pants."

"Well, you certainly do sound like him." Her mouth was hardening into a straight line.

"How about telling you something only I would know? Like that sound you make when we—"

"All right! All right!" she said, covering my mouth with one hand and awkwardly embracing me with her other arm. "You're him. You. Chris."

"I'd better be the only one who knows the sound you make when we—" The hand went over my mouth again.

"Do you want us to take you out of here?" I asked when the hand was removed a second time. "Say the word and Mama Samm and I will lean on Mooncloud and we'll pack your bags right now."

Lupé glanced at the screens on either side of her cubicle—toward the bed containing the body on life support, then toward the alcove where Deirdre and Theresa were sawing twin logs. "Not yet . . ."

"Why not . . . yet?"

My once-and-hopefully-future fiancée leaned closer and murmured: "She's working on a process to neutralize the silver in your body." She reached out and touched Mama Samm's face. "Your other body. How can we ever . . . be together . . . until you're clean again? Laveau needs more time. And she has promised Theresa her new flesh tonight. If I leave before then she might renege on her promise and hold her and Deirdre as hostages. If we take them with us now—" She shook her head. "I don't think Deirdre can stand it much longer."

I stared back at her through Mama Samm's eyes. "And you say she's ready to move Kellerman's head to her new body tonight?"

"She's already prepared redundant donor bodies. All she lacks is some kind of powerful artifact or key ingredient. I think she went out to fetch it early this morning."

Since that seemed to jibe with Irena Pantera's account of her stepmother's disappearance, it looked like we might be closing in on some closure with Theresa Kellerman, at last.

"All right," I said. "I'll give it another twenty-four hours. Then we blow this fallout shelter and head back to West Monroe with or without Pete'n'Repeat."

Lupé shook her head. "You wouldn't seriously consider leaving them here."

"I wouldn't want to but family comes first," I said, feeling sick at the thought of leaving Deirdre behind.

"Yes," she said, taking Mama Samm's hands and tugging us to our feet, "yes, it does." She led us back to the divider and pushed the curtain aside. "I know you fear for our son as much, if not more, than you fear for me. But you have your unborn wife and daughter to think about, as well . . ."

I looked through the parted curtains because Lupé clearly wanted me to see something. But all that was immediately evident was the hospital bed and nightstand that served as spartan furnishings for Deirdre's and Theresa's cubicle. And Deirdre and Theresa, of course: sprawled across the rumpled bed in careless repose where Mama Samm had just sent them for their conjoined naps.

Then I saw what I had not noticed before: the strained pajamas across the convex curve of their mutual belly. Third trimester well begun!

"Oh, what fresh hell is this!" I groaned.

Mama Samm's mind roused, flared in the darkness adjacent to my own. She took in the same tableau and processed the evidence more swiftly than I.

>The plan was always to provide surrogate wombs for the cloned embryos of your late wife and daughter, Christopher.<

<But this?>

>Why not Deirdre? Would you rather a stranger—?<

<I wouldn't want Kellerman in the same obstetrics wing with a fetus, much less sharing any kind of a mind/body connection!> I fumed.

The curtain on the other side of the cubicle was swept aside. Mooncloud and Pantera stared at me. "Is there a problem?"

The two-headed surrogate stirred in their sleep and rubbed their belly with their left hand. "Mommy take . . . good care . . . you . . ." Theresa murmured dreamily through a sly smile.

<Oh, bloody hell!>

 

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