“Like spice from downstairs,” Samantha said.
Hayes did not meet her eyes. He played with the little baton in his hands. She walked away through the stacks of books and found another chair and sat in it, hidden from his view. “Damn you,” she whispered. “What are you?”
She heard him stoking the fire once more, maneuvering the brazier about. Then she heard him coughing. She leaned around to look and saw he had a hand placed at the side of his head again and he was bent over, knees touching his chest.
“Are you all right?” she asked.
Hayes took another sip of laudanum. He shook himself and said, “I’ll be fine.”
“An attack?”
He didn’t answer.
“What are those attacks? Is it part of your-”
“I don’t know,” he said.
“What do they do?”
“They hurt.”
She stood up and walked back to the chair beside him. Neither one looked at the other.
“Who else knows?” she asked.
“Brightly,” he said. “And Evans. And Garvey.”
“Garvey?”
“Yes,” he said.
“That’s why Brightly rushed us in and out so fast, isn’t it? He doesn’t want to be around you. Doesn’t want anything to… to leak in.”
“Yes.”
“And that’s why you live alone like this.”
He nodded. “It’s quiet here.”
“Is… is this what you meant when you said they were keeping things from us? From me?”
He nodded again.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
He laughed miserably. “How could I? Listen, Sam, I’ve been on this earth for forty-something years and I’ve not yet found one good way to tell someone what I am that wouldn’t end up with them screaming their heads off or me knifed for my trouble. How would you have told someone, Sam? Tell them your head fills up with the garbage their minds leave in their wake?”
Samantha sighed and shook her head. “You still should have told me.”
“But I couldn’t. How could anyone? I’d much rather just… let it lie.”
There was a knock at the door, the sound shooting up into the rafters and then drifting gently down. The door opened and Garvey stepped in. He looked at the two of them and called, “Am I interrupting something?”
Hayes and Samantha shared a look. Then Samantha sighed and turned away and sat down far from Hayes.
“No,” said Hayes. “Come on in, Garv.”
“So what’s the news?” Garvey asked as he strode forward, weaving among the stacks. It took him a good twenty seconds to walk over to them. He found a chair and sat beside Samantha.
“McNaughton’s panicked over the bad press,” said Hayes. “Guess who’s got the job of finding out if there’s any connections.”
“Ouch.”
“Yes. It’s going to be especially hard because I think they want us to find nothing at all.”
“Do they know you sent me those files yesterday?” asked Garvey.
Hayes thought about it. Then shook his head.
“You sure?”
“I’m pretty sure. They have a hard time keeping track of the things I make disappear. So I don’t think it’s connected. Anything on your end?”
“I have a few things, sure,” he said, easing back into his chair. “Gibson came and gathered them up. Shuffled the deck, you could say. I canvassed the area but no one saw anything. Spooky place, down there. We’re putting something in the paper about it, asking people to please let us know if they hear anything. I don’t expect much more than bullshit.” He glanced at Samantha. “Apologies.”
“For what?” asked Samantha absently.
“For swearing. Sorry. Don’t deal with ladies too often, these days.”
“Oh,” she said, and nodded.
Garvey looked at both of them queerly and said, “What’s with you two? Did I just walk into something?”
Hayes turned to glance at Samantha, sighed, and said, “Sam’s just figured out where I get my little hunches from.”
Garvey’s eyebrows rose. He uncrossed his legs. “Oh,” he said. “Huh. Is that so?”
She nodded.
“That’s… Well. That’s pretty fast.”
“What?” said Hayes.
“I said it was fast.” He grinned crookedly at her. “It took me a few months for him to tell me how he did it, and only then because he was slobbering drunk. You’re pretty quick, Miss Fairbanks.”
She stared at Garvey. “That’s what you have to say? That I’m pretty fast?”
“Well, yeah.”
“Aren’t you horrified? Aren’t you offended?”
“No. Don’t have much to be offended over.”
“But he can just… he can just listen!” she hissed in a stage-whisper as though Hayes were far away. “Like he’s got his ear to the walls of your mind, listening to everything you say to yourself!”
Garvey shrugged. “I guess. But it’s not like he can stop it.”
“He can’t?” she asked, looking at Hayes. “Is that true?”
Hayes looked up at her from the folds of his coat. He searched her face for a moment as though he had forgotten what they were talking about or maybe just who she was. Perhaps it was the dimness of the warehouse or the light from the small fire before him, but suddenly he looked older than any other person Samantha had ever met before. She had seen such things only once before in her life, when she had been an army nurse and had treated wounded men returning from battle. They had been boys, always boys, no more than twenty, and when they’d walked back through the carnage and the savagery and sat waiting to be treated anyone could look at them and see that they were creatures interrupted. Boys who would never become men now, never become people. They were something wounded and crippled. Something broken that could not be fixed.
“No,” he said. “I can’t.”
“Oh. You… you really can’t stop it?”
He shook his head.
She sighed. “I see. I think I see, at least.”
“Are you all right?” he asked. “All right with this? And with me?”
“I don’t know. I suppose I could be.”
“That’s good enough,” he said. “Good enough for me.”
They discussed the usual. How it worked. When he had figured out he could do it. His boundaries, both physical and moral. Samantha found herself both relieved and frustrated to find out how limited it really was. She asked about Evans, and Brightly, and especially the board, whom Hayes said he had been practically forbidden to ever come close to. She asked about the worst people he had ever read, whom he could barely recall, and the best, whom he recalled even less.
Garvey told her of the first time he had met Hayes, stinking drunk and sleeping off a two-day bender in the tank. They had come to haul someone out of lockup and as they dragged him through Hayes had reached through the bars and grabbed Garvey’s arm and slurred, “That right there is a guilty bastard if I ever saw one. Ask him about the tack hammer and he’ll weep like no tomorrow.” And he had been right. The suspect’s next-door neighbor had murdered his dog with a tack hammer, and the suspect had done only what he thought was right in return. Hayes claimed he had no memory of this event, and had been extraordinarily confused when a Detective Garvey came calling the next day.
“Anyways, what the hell was that you had?” Garvey asked. “A fainting spell?”
“An attack,” Hayes said.
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t know. Sometimes I’m out walking and it’s like a thunderbolt hits me. Like someone just opens up my head and pours things inside. Never good things.”
“Is that all?”
“There’s a few things I do after. Vomit. Cough. But yes. That’s all.”
“Christ,” said Garvey. “How long has it been going on for?”
“About half a year.”
“Are you sure you’re all right?”
“Yes,” said Hayes irritably. “I’m fine. Let’s talk about something important, eh? Like the bodies we saw today?”
Garvey reluctantly consented, starting with the Third Ring Pub. “They didn’t want me there, hoo boy,” he said, scratching his head. “I’ve had murderous looks before, but never so many at once. So I called for support and got a half-dozen patrolmen to accompany me in to speak civilly with the owner and the patrons. They didn’t want to talk at all, but they gave us something. Turns out Naylor and the rest of them were regular patrons there. They were there nearly every day, and they were there that morning before the Bridgedale trolley mishap. If ‘mishap’ is the right word. They left all together, probably heading to work or maybe to one of their homes, which explains why they were all on that trolley at once.”