Chapter 54: How Do You Cross a River with a Vampire, a Wendigo and an Elderberry?
I had resigned myself to never getting word back from Dr. Starling and his two hulking friends several days ago. Now I had the chance at some answers, though I wouldn’t correct Nocome’s thought that I had sent just two assassins.
With a quick flash of her control over my body I was able to kick in a locked door on this building’s roof to find my way down, reaching to my pocket to make sure the elderberry was still there in its sunglasses case.
I got late, frantic reports from the inner army as I thundered down the stairwell to the street.
“Sir!” Bergmann shouted, quickly giving the facts. “She planted someone inside our walls from her own force! I don’t know when. Her servant seems to be another one like us, a consumed soul. They were lurking in the garden and digging tunnels to the outside. We found one completed tunnel and we have the infiltrator cornered. The other tunnels are being mapped and will be collapsed once we see how far they go. I will arrange to make sure that all residents are familiar with all others so that this cannot happen again.”
“Your tulpa James did it so well. I had to reply, and that servant had to redeem himself for letting James mimic him,” Nocome hissed. I spoke past her to the others.
“And what do you see in there when she takes over?”
“Cameras say she got to the sanctum and vanished – that’s when she got your body,” my security system guy from North Bay – a Mr. Hoyt – reported. “And you come back. It’s like switching places. She’s in the sanctum right now, and it’s driving Snuffleup crazy!”
“I made my secret way in to use should there be an emergency, when it was clear you would enter the city thick with guards before winter. These servants seem competent enough to find all the tunnels after noticing the first, and I can hear Hoyt already collaborating with Bergmann on an underground ear system to detect new tunnels. Very annoying. But listen! If you let your staff open the doors to flush me out I will not be able control you again so fast. Your fortress was strong and it took much planning and stealth to make that emergency path, and it would take days for me to make another … if we do not come to an arrangement. For the next emergency on your own, you will be caught. Those sundogs were the primary threat, but there will be other problems before we leave this place.”
We were stuck, and stuck with each other. I did not believe that Nocome had somehow arranged the incident with the sundog and the tutelary – the threat of the guards in this city was real.
But I had come back to controlling my body after her takeover. How had that happened?
“I simply shoved you aside. If I could have secured my victory you would be enjoying a bed of icicles in my dungeon right now. I can already see that you and the others are adding straps to the chair that you sit in to command your body, adding layers of steel to the door and a latch. Always a move and a counter-move. You were stronger than I suspected, forcing a different move each time. I can of course bind and break you all, kavdlunait, but that struggle would probably be long and this body would be defenseless for that time. As the hunters come for us, we cannot have that happen.”
We hit the ground floor. I tried to look less frightened so I could blend in on the sidewalk and the subway.
“There is a switch,” I mumbled to myself, flinching in the sunlight and looking for the stairs that would take me underground. “It would have opened a trap door to send her down into Snuffleup’s pit.”
“I saw that trap with ease,” Nocome bragged.
“Someone outside the door will always have a hand on that switch from now on. Even if she won’t go down, I am confident that Snufflup will just go up.”
There was a yowling, angry-cat sound
“She has to stand there and do nothing unless I tell her otherwise. Snuffleup comes up if she misbehaves.”
“Fool! That thing would eat your mind as well! You would be a drooling idiot husk! Any of your kind would tell you to eject-”
“Just stand there, please. It seems we have another nuclear option: lobotomy for the both of us. While you’re standing there please tell me about the friends I sent your way.”
Checked, but not checkmated, Nocome hissed and snarled but eventually told me what had happened to two of my assassins.
I walked south to the Osgoode Metro Station, away from the mess Nocome had made at St. Patrick with the Movember man. The subway would take me north closer to the hospitals, but being underground might count for something. I got under the street and in line and got a ticket without problem. I heard a barking dog in a cabin when the train came, but whatever was going on was near the front of the train – so I hopped in the rear.
Meanwhile, Nocome was telling me with her awful, airy, cadaverous voice that my first assassin Arnold had caused a lot damage by literally driving a truck packed with explosives through the front gate of her fortress as Dr. Starling had expected, tearing apart tulpas and her consumed human slaves with gouts of machine gun fire and rocket-propelled grenades (though she had odd names for these weapons). The tulpas had to be remade, the human slaves stitched back together. Arnold had systematically swept through the surface castle of Nocome’s lair looking for her, perforating or incinerating or fracturing everything that got in the way, but never found the tunnels leading down into the real lair – like myself, Nocome made upgrades every time she was attacked and hurt.
“Much too powerful, idiot boy,” she hissed. Was that her trying to be a teacher?
With the deeper lair hidden Arnold had become a one-man parade, circling through the empty rooms in the castle without success until Nocome had arrived to unmake him without receiving so much as a scratch.
Mr. Voorhees had technically done better, not bothering to enter the smoking lair a few days later when he arrived at his slower pace. He’d circled unseen in total silence, reaching in from the mental wilderness to strike down the occasional lust-tulpa. When Nocome had returned from a search through the unstructured mindscape for more useful fantasies and desires she had been silently followed upon leaving for another harvest, and then successfully stabbed three times in the back and impaled against a mindscape ‘tree’ with a spear from one of her own slaves. Each time she got a clear view of the tulpa he was unmade a little, though he kept disappearing into the shadows to prepare for another sudden strike – and from Nocome’s frustration I realized that it was harder for her to find tulpas than complete souls.
“It was recovering, even at the end. Do you think you could control such a thing without me to cut it down?”
Eventually, though, Mr. Voorhees had his machete shattered, and Nocome had plunged him in a block of ice and dragged him back to her lair. She had kept him intact for a longer time, studying how I had made him, and then annihilated him with contemptuous ease.
By the time Nocome had told all this I had switched subway lines, leaving the Spadina station. The pass by the hospitals had been uneventful, though I thought I heard another dog barking far off while walking between subway tunnels to the other line.
If that was the entire story, it seemed like Nocome could have someone waiting for her when she went back to her lair, with beans and fine wine waiting for her liver. She seemed to be under the impression that I had sent the assassins out one at a time.
“Whatever your next plan was, suspend it. The tulpas must be made simple to the point of animalistic. If they can grow and change on their own they will always grow and change into a tumor in the soul.”
I didn’t promise anything, though now I did have to worry about Dr. Starling paying me a visit instead. It would be just like him, to care nothing for the other serial killer and their victims while having his own fun.
Mr. Bergmann interjected once Nocome had fallen silent. “Sir … on the other matter, we should not get off at Jane. We must suspect that footage of you will be collected later, so we should get off at a different station and walk the rest of the way.”
“This machinery is filled with stolen copper,” Nocome hissed, seeming to look over my shoulder with fascination and disgust and evil plans at the heart of a busy city. “I am not yet strong enough to desecrate the copper of the water panthers. But when that time comes none of these glass eyes on the ceilings or on the road poles will be able to capture my image.”
“You mean my image,” I retorted.
“That difference will die,” Nocome promised.
I would remember those words, if I ever slipped into thinking that I could use this wendigo like the others I had taken. There was rage in those words, and a promise of retribution for every moment in which I thought to use her like a pet.
“When will you be strong enough to change the copper?” I asked her. The subway was a bit more crowded and the young Indian woman behind me shifted suddenly, as if startled. Stupid – I should do things silently.
“Let me break the bitch’s neck, a startled mind can be read by a hunter.”
“Not very inconspicuous,” Mr. Bergmann said, not bothering with moral arguments. “In this new world you can’t just dump a body in the woods and let it lie. People have numbers and names, and they will be found. They will be missed in hours or minutes, not days.”
Nocome went silent, which was limited acceptance. I shuffled away from the young Indian woman and got off at Lansdowne station, planning to get back on the next train in case there was a tutelary onboard the first who could slowly work me out. I would go all the way to Kipling and then backtrack on foot to the neighborhood where my grandmother had lived. If any hunter tracked a smell of vampiric corruption that smell would be upon the entire subway line, not coming to an end near my destination.
While waiting for the next train, we resumed our plans.
“I need more than ten days to take control of the copper and kill the glass eyes. You should not plant the elderberry until I am strong enough to manage that.”
“Why?” I mouthed, looking at an advertisement for the Royal Ontario Museum across the tracks, listening for barking dogs, hearing only the shuffle of feet overhead and the howling air in the subway tunnels. It was still many hours away from noon. I didn’t like the sound of this delay at all.
“Because the tree-mother has no use for you once your vow is complete. We must take on another cloak when we lose the first, and the first is the cloak of her silence.”
“I considered this in my scenarios,” Bergmann said cautiously. “But my original suggestion still stands: plant the elderberry at once before they work out who you were and where you might be hiding in Toronto, or else you’ll never be able to plant it.”
“Hm. Please bend over backwards as a Devil’s or wendigo’s advocate, Mr. Bergmann. I want to hear everything that went into that calculation.”
Considering second- and third-ranked scenarios of likelihood was no difficult task for my intelligence analyst. “Very well. The trouble with Elder Mother is that we don’t know how her allegiance works now, or how it will change after your vow is fulfilled. She knitted your body back stronger than it was before to survive … until you planted the berry. Once your vow is fulfilled her gift will probably leave, and you’ll be slightly more vulnerable. Maybe in need of an extra feeding to recover. The biggest risk with Elder Mother is that she might also tell the other tutelaries where her tree has been planted, holding silent now only because she wants her berry in the ground. So regardless of when we plant, I think we have to leave the city at once.
“However, waiting to kill the cameras as compensation for when we potentially lose Elder Mother’s silence sounds like a trick, sir – Nocome might not be able to do it at all, or she might be able to do it already and want you to rely on her when she’s even deeper in her season. And even if she is telling the truth each hour increases the odds that they will be able to stop you from fulfilling the vow altogether by the other ways I’ve specified, regardless of Elder Mother’s loyalties.”
“So I shouldn’t trust the giant cannibal ice-demon.” I psychically beamed Nocome the Internet’s troll face. She seemed sullenly confused with me, obviously furious with Bergmann. I decided that my ex-Mossad guy would need extra security like Daphne. I was a bit uncomfortable having such valuable souls.
If he had a flaw, I thought that Mr. Bergmann would keep proposing and unraveling the consequences of those proposals for hours before admitting total helplessness and confusion. He might be very good at selling a bad idea. I had not forgotten his words on Belie, who would be gaining his own vampiric powers on the strike of noon. It would be almost noon by the time I backtracked on foot to my grandmother’s address as an inconspicuous pedestrian on a wild goose chase.
The rattling subway train threatened my concentration on this horrible word problem that would probably decide my fate. I was vaguely reminded of that problem of getting a goat, a cabbage and wolf over a river on a boat that could only hold myself and one more at a time.
Plant at noon: Belie might start moving and Elder Mother might start talking at the same time, maybe to Belie, I’m still pretty weak. Sounds very bad.
Plant at sundown: Belie will have more time to find me, the hunters will have more time to find and ward off the address. Elder Mother keeps mum though, and I leave when she starts talking at full speed.
Plant after waiting for Nocome to power up: more hiding under Belie’s nose and the other hunters, Elder Mother still keeps mum throughout, but they all get a nasty surprise when all the cameras and other technology stops cooperating. Including me – I’d be getting a nasty surprise if I trusted Nocome, she of the many dead dogs, to do anything.
“Okay,” I said. “We plant today. No waiting ten days, that’s clear. Now for the other two possibilities, what about-”
Then my hand was forced, because as the subway stopped at the Kipling station a giant tutelary covered in spiked armor walked into the cabin, breathing like a bull and clenching two mailed fists.
Wait too long to decide things, they get decided for you.
Chapter 55: The Faces of God
Image credits: Hutima, Transportfan70