Victor meanwhile was skimming through the rest of the article in the paper.
“Damn,” he said. “Another girl. They pinpointed the attack to eight in the evening-just about the time we were catching the Wendigo, and fighting off the fake Ifrit. So it really wasn’t the fake Ifrit and it wasn’t our Wendigo, either. Damn.”
Sherwood interrupted whatever else he was going to say by opening her eyes and sitting up suddenly and speaking.
“What happened?” she said in a clear and lucid voice. “Where’s Christoph? How did we get back to Victor’s?”
For a moment I thought she was asking about her return from the moors, but Eli nodded in comprehension and a second later I caught on as well.
“What’s the last thing you remember?” he asked, still holding on to her hand. She shuddered.
“We were up at McClaren Park. Chistoph had hold of me. He’d taken over my mind, somehow-I was fighting all the time, but he was too strong. Then he let go and made a gesture in my direction. I felt a blast of energy, everything went white, and then suddenly I’m here with all of you staring down at me solemnly. Am I hurt?”
“Not exactly,” Eli said. “But there’s a lot to tell you. You had better get comfortable-this is going to be rather a long story. Victor, some tea perhaps?”
“I could use a cup of coffee,” I said. Victor ignored me, and Sherwood said tea would be nice.
It took all of an hour for Eli to explain what had happened during the last year while I’d thought she was dead. Sherwood took it all in, interrupting only a few times with questions. At the end of Eli’s tale, she only said, “What about my apartment?”
“Gone. You can stay here, though.”
“And my stuff?”
“Also gone. There didn’t seem any point in keeping it.” She was silent for a moment.
“Well, thank God my parents are dead. I never thought I’d say that, but it would have killed them.” Another moment of silence. “I should be thankful, I guess, but to me it’s like nothing happened. Except that I’ve lost a year of my life. What a total drag.”
“Not really,” Eli said. “We’ve all aged a year, but you haven’t. Think of it as if you had traveled into the future.”
“Exactly,” I added. “You’re looking at it the wrong way around. You haven’t lost a year-you’ve gained one. Like Eli said, it’s as if you were a time traveler. You’re only a few days older than you were that day up in McClaren Park, but Eli and Victor and me have aged since then. You’ve gained over a year on all of us-you’re in the future.”
“I suppose you’re right,” she said.
We spent what was left of the day filling her in on the state of the world these days. One of the things she was most interested in was Timothy and how long Victor and he had been together. By afternoon, she was exhausted and crashed in one of Victor’s spare rooms. She may not have remembered anything about her yearlong sojourn into the netherworld, but it had affected her nonetheless. She kept losing her train of thought and asking us to repeat things. It was worrisome, but Eli thought she’d be fine in a few days.
By the time I got home, I was drained as well. But when I entered my flat, there was something waiting there for me. Not a ravenous ghoul or ghostly apparition, but something far worse. The goddamned message light on the phone was blinking again.
NINE
“MASON, THIS IS MORGAN,” THE MESSAGE RAN. “Sorry to bother you, but I had this weird dream…” Her voice trailed off and I heard a muffled curse as she put her hand over the phone. She took her hand off. “Okay, I didn’t realize how lame that was going to sound. But considering, I thought we could at least talk. Call me when you get a chance.”
Most of the messages I get aren’t anything I want to hear, but this wasn’t so bad. Not bad at all. I flopped down on the bed and picked up the phone.
“Morgan? Mason,” I said when she answered.
“Oh, God. I’m so embarrassed. A bad dream, for Christ’s sake, and I call you about it.”
“Hey, you’re a psychic, and a real one. Dreams are important.”
“Well, this one was. Or I think it was. There are dreams and dreams, you know, and this was the other sort. Scared me half to death to be honest.”
“So tell me.”
“You were walking along a street, somewhere in the city, I think. Two people were with you-a large black man, middle-aged. And another man, smaller and very intense, or at least that’s what I got.” So far, so good. Me, Victor, and Eli. “But your dog? Louie? He wasn’t around.” That didn’t sound good. “And here’s the weird thing-the reason I almost didn’t call. There was a sense of danger, worse than the vision I had last time, way worse. But there was nothing else there. Or if there was, it was invisible.”
“Was it a specific danger, or just something general?” I asked.
“Both. Very specific, but nothing I could put my finger on. Have you ever had one of those dreams where everything is perfectly ordinary, but for some reason you’re terrified? Like in the dream, you know if you go into a house, something dreadful will happen?”
“Sure,” I said.
“Well, this was like that. I have no idea what is waiting there-it might not even be something physical-visions rely on metaphor, you know. But whatever it is, it’s bad, really bad. How ridiculous is that?”
“Not ridiculous at all,” I said. “I know who you’re describing. Those two others are friends of mine, and if we were out together, it’s a good bet something nasty was waiting around the corner.”
“But why couldn’t I see it?”
“A good question,” I said. “Don’t worry. Between the three of us, there’s not much we can’t handle. But thanks. It’s always good to be on guard.”
After she hung up, I considered what it might mean. Despite my assurances that we could handle anything, I was disturbed. If her vision showed some awful thing awaiting us, where was Lou? He wouldn’t let me go off alone like that. And why couldn’t Morgan see what was threatening us? Bad enough to be searching for a monster, but an invisible monster just wasn’t fair.
But what was it? An invisible beast was possible, I supposed-anything was. But that seemed unlikely.
I pulled out my guitar and ran through some tunes, standards that I know so well I don’t have to think about them. It’s a form of meditation for me-it requires a conscious attention to detail, but at the same time, part of my mind is able to wander and free associate. Sometimes it works; I’ve gotten some brilliant ideas that way. Well, some useful ones, anyway.
But this time, nothing came. Lou sat in the corner, listening. That’s the way I like to imagine it-I doubt very much if he has any ear for music other than the occasional drawn-out howls from his canine brethren. But he usually sits there attentively, so who knows? Who knows anything about Ifrits, anyway? But after a while with no success, I gave it up and went to sleep.
When I woke up next morning, though, an idea did come to me as I was pouring my morning coffee. Nothing brilliant, something rather obvious, but an idea is an idea. The only real clues, the logical place to start, was with the murdered victims. So if I could find out more about exactly how those hikers had been killed, it might reveal something about what had killed them, or at least point us in a direction.
The cops weren’t releasing a lot of details to the papers, just using phrases like “mutilated” and “torn up.” And if those were the phrases they were using to prevent panic, the reality must be far worse. Specific information wouldn’t be easy to come by-you can’t just call up the cops and ask what the real scoop is. Only, sometimes, you can.
A few years ago there had been a rash of burglaries over in Cow Hollow. There were never any signs of a break-in; apparently the victims had simply neglected to lock their doors when they left their apartments. But after a while, that theory started to look unlikely. The residents there became so paranoid that many installed additional locks, and a few even changed their locks out completely. Still, the thefts continued.