“The birds,” I said, knowing she hadn’t. Suej shouldn’t have been able to either, and come to that, neither should I. They shouldn’t have been there at all, just like the scene in the elevator which I’d assumed was a Rapt-induced flashback. I was shaking violently, not feeling very tough at all.
“Suej,” I said. “What were you staring at in the bar, on the way out?”
“The door frame,” she said. “The wood was acting funny.”
Everest, wall-diving, the mad, happy birds. It was all leading to one place. The forest.
I wasn’t going back there again.
A rasping sprint along deserted corridors to the corner of Tyson and Stones; a huddle outside Nearly’s door. She was scrabbling for her keys and I was staring wildly around when the door lock spoke to us.
“There’s someone inside,” it said. “Just thought you might like to know.”
“Who?” Nearly yelped, as I pulled out my gun. Sometimes I don’t know why I don’t just have it surgically implanted in my hand.
“He didn’t say,” the lock replied mildly, as if its mind was on other things. “He had keys, so there wasn’t much I could do.”
“Howie?” I asked Nearly, trying not to panic.
She shook her head, backing away from the door. “He’s my manager, not my boyfriend.”
I took Nearly’s keys and stood in front of the door. Fresh clip into the gun. Not many left, but the way things were going I wouldn’t be around to need them for much longer.
Nearly tugged at my sleeve. “This is going to be bad news,” she opined. “Let’s find somewhere else to be. Seriously, I hear Florida’s nice…”
“It is, but I have to get Mal’s disk back,” I said. “It’s all that’s left of him.”
Nearly, very nervous now: “Like, I respect that and everything, but I really think we should…”
I put the keys in the door and turned. “Best of luck,” said the lock, and I took a step into the corridor beyond. A quiet sound from the living room, like feet moving on carpet.
“Who’s there?” I inquired. No reply. I walked a couple more steps down the hall. “I have a gun and I’m in a strange kind of mood,” I added. “So whoever you are, don’t fuck me around.”’
Still nothing, except that scuffling sound. It wasn’t going to go away, and neither was I, so what else could I do but just take a deep breath and burst into the room.
Johnny Vinaldi looked up impatiently, pacing around the floor.
“Where the hell have you been?” he said, and I just stared at him openmouthed.
Nearly dithered between coffee and a line of coke, and in the end opted for both. Suej went into the kitchen to help with the former, and I stayed in the living room with Vinaldi.
“He got away,” he said. “How, don’t ask me to tell you. He’s surrounded by a boatload of the guys I think of as my least disappointing men, not to mention hundreds of teenage dancing people, and he blows out of the club like a lungful of smoke and just disappears.”
“But he didn’t get you,” I said, lighting a cigarette. I didn’t know whether “I wanted to be having this conversation. Events had pushed Vinaldi and me together in ways I didn’t understand, but I still wanted him dead. Each sentence I spoke to him felt like unfaithfulness. I wasn’t going to waste many words.
“True, and I’m enormously psyched about that, as you can imagine, but Jaz—whom I know you have little respect for, and I can understand that but he is loyal to me beyond reason and good at hurting people, so what can I do?—is in the MediCenter with bullets in disturbing places. His brother Tony is dead, and three others are not as healthy as they used to be.”
“I just killed a guy who I think was an associate of the man with the lights,” I said. “In a bar on sixty-seven.”
Vinaldi looked up at me then, finally stopping his pacing. “I’m impressed,” he said, with apparent sincerity. “It’s been a long, long time for us. These guys, I think they’re still there.”
“Johnny, why are you here and what are you talking about?” I still had my gun in my hand and I wasn’t completely sure that I wasn’t going to use it on him.
“I know who the man who came to my club was,” he said, lighting a cigarette of his own. The clattering in the kitchen seemed a hundred miles away. “And that’s why I know now it wasn’t you who sent me that box or was violent to me in the shadows of my business.”
“Are you going to tell me?”
“Jeq Yhandim,” Johnny said, suddenly looking older. “I knew him in the war.”
“The war? You?”
“You remember—the ‘training exercise.’ I was a Bright Eyes, too.”
“Bullshit,” I shouted, angry and light-headed with disbelief, but Vinaldi just shook his head.
“I had them removed after I got back. It was very expensive and quite painful and I wouldn’t recommend it as an experience.”
I tried to get my mind round this, to understand how it changed things. In some ways it made all the sense in the world. Vinaldi’s weirdly distanced and confident slant on life was perfectly consistent with what he was telling me—plus he dealt Rapt, which, as discussed, is not everyone’s idea of fun. It also helped some other things fall into place.
“What’s the highest mountain in the world?” I asked.
He frowned, said “Everest,” and that’s when I finally accepted what was going on.
“I’ve just seen the birds.” I watched him as I said this. His eyes sprang open wide. For a moment he didn’t look like the most successful gangster in New Richmond, but like the scared boy he must once have been. Seeing that look made it harder to hate him; I knew the expression only too well, had seen it on my own face many years ago. It also made it impossible for me to doubt that he had been in The Gap. The birds are like little pockets of marsh gas—bright lights which show something invisible is gathering. Vinaldi couldn’t have understood this without having been there.
“Christ on a bike,” he said.
“You could put it like that. I also saw the forest. For a moment it was like I was actually there. And there’s been reports all over the news about someone discovering a mountain higher than Everest. Mount Fyi, which doesn’t exist. You heard of wall-diving, incidentally?”
“Yeah, a couple of days ago. People jump…” Vinaldi stopped suddenly, brow furrowed. “Wait a minute. People can’t just leap out of windows with a stick. That’s fucking ridiculous.”
“True, but I met someone yesterday who does it,” I said. “Or thinks he does.” Internally I clocked the fact that Golson lived next to an apartment where either Yhandim or his accomplice had murdered someone.
“It’s The Gap, isn’t it,” Vinaldi said. “It’s the fucking Gap. It’s got to be. It’s making people think things that aren’t true.”
I told him that it was true now. That it was seepage, stuff that should be unconscious becoming conscious. The planet’s dreams, seeping through the wall like hallucinations on the edge of sleep.
“Randall,” Vinaldi said, shaking his head, “you’ve been taking far too many drugs.”
“Worse than that,” I added, remembering the small creature I’d half-glimpsed the night before near Shelley Latoya’s apartment. “It’s changing stuff for real.” Then another fact presented itself; Blue Lights had access to narcotics. I’d seen him dealing. Maybe Shelley hadn’t overdosed herself, after all.
“Why is this happening? What’s going on?”
“You tell me,” I said. “And start with Jeq Yhandim.”
Vinaldi’s eyes flicked away, and before he replied he walked over to the rearWindow, which was showing a view of the mountains in the distance, relayed from a camera somewhere high on the north face of the city. The look in his eyes was one I’d seen before, as if he were staring with calm enmity at something a great distance away. The “ten-click glare,” we used to call it. I got the idea before he even started that he was about to reveal something he didn’t talk about very often. Maybe never at all.