Chapter 60: Numerological Distraction
After a long drink I made the last arrangements with the dead man, tucking him in and closing his eyes without really thinking about it. In the background of my thoughts, Dr. Fidyka was installing like a new computer program. But I could multitask, and another business needed to be wrapped up. If Apollyon’s words were obeyed I could just walk right out here, but that would be wasteful. I had a last bit of business with these middle-management types.
“Dr. Charles Best.” I made a dismissive summoning gesture at the door. “You may enter.”
“I think,” a reluctant but wry voice answered, “that this makes you a bit of a sore winner.”
I turned with a smile on my face, though I was stunned for a moment – there were four tutelaries in the room, all but one with defeated, scowling faces and folded arms.
Dr. Best had no obvious mortal wound like the glowing mark I had seen on Dr. Bethune’s finger in Gravenhurst. I could not say the same for Dr. Frederick Banting, who had died in a plane crash from injuries and exposure. Without an expensive guise he appeared to me like a man-shaped vase that has been smashed with a hammer and then reassembled, each piece in place but each crack aglow, his lips a little blue, dressed in a very old suit that was contemporary to his colleagues – I quickly realized that every time someone was thankful for insulin, these tutelaries who had discovered it in life got a little hit of power.
Dr. John Macleod was the odd man out in terms of attitude, without obvious mortal injury, rubbing a hand over his mustache and perhaps suppressing and full-blown guffaw; Dr. James Collip had also died of more internal reasons than Banting and came in wearing a startling-white lab coat, adjusting spectacles and looking cross like the first two.
I noticed that just outside the open door was a fifth tutelary tossing a coin up and down in his palm, another young man of the same era, head turned down with face in shadow. Nancy Belmont said she knew who he was, but that story would have to be for later.
“Will you leave peacefully?” the shattered Dr. Banting asked crisply.
I pointed through the fifth tutelary flipping his coin to the closet across the hall. “One last thing, guys. But you can relax, I’m very full.”
Not as full as I should have been, with Nocome’s hunger slowly becoming my own. This meal normally would have left me feeling sluggish and not in dire need of a drink for the next night – now it might not last all night, and I’d be thirsty after the next sundown. And I thought that the doctors all sensed this, which put most of them in a hurry. Dr. Macleod still looked like he was suppressing delight and didn’t groan with the rest of them.
“Well, that seems rather reasonable to me. Come down to our cafeteria, we’ll get some notes and write things out.”
I clicked off the light when I left the room – I had turned it on in my panicky rush in, forgetting that I could see in the dark. Silly how old habits linger.
“I owe Elder Mother exactly one thousand trees,” I said.
Me and the discoverers of insulin were hunched around a table in the Mount Sinai Hospital cafeteria, under a lonely lamp with a ring of dark privacy warding off any wandering mortal. It was about a quarter to midnight, and the wind outside had quieted just a bit. Nocome’s hunger had been turned inward by the effects of Apollyon’s spell, which made her unavailable for comment at the moment, and the precipitation striking the windows was now rain like the forecast had promised. I had tried to smooth the hunger over by taking some coffee just to take one last thing from the hospital, though it wasn’t great stuff.
I held up the clump of dirt that I had stuffed in my pocket. We needed her to talk to get this right.
“I take it you’re not on great speaking terms?”
Dr. Best scoffed. “Tree spirits! They won’t lift a finger for anyone around their tree, but God forbid you pick up an ax.”
“Not true,” Dr. Macleod said happily, scribbling the proceedings onto a piece of yellowed paper with a small golf pencil. “Charles was always a bit loose with the truth.”
“Oh shut up.”
“Let’s toss a coin and see if Noble takes your seat.”
I thought the two tutelaries might get into a brawl, so fierce were their sudden glares. I knew it had happened at Casa Loma with two others, and it would be interesting to watch.
“My colleagues,” Dr. Collip said angrily, “have wasted enough time with you case. If we replant the Elder Mother’s seeds, what are you willing to offer us in return?”
I had settled this in my head on the elevator ride down. Toronto was packed with potential victims of Nocome. It was also full of deadly enemies, and I had just been walking around for a couple of days. More would come out the woodwork, stop bickering and plot against me. And then there was Belie and his ‘students’, and the risk of my living relatives being identified should they tie me to my grandmother’s house.
“I leave town. Not forever – Elder Mother tried something indefinite with me already. We can negotiate a span of years, or an event. That’s how magical rules work, right? How about this: ‘until the last tree grown from those seeds dies’. Seems like a nice way to wrap up a fable.”
“I approve,” Dr. Banting said at once. “A good long time.”
“But before we shake – Mother, are you listening?” I held the clump of dirt up to my ear. “How many of those seeds remain viable?”
We all waited, long enough to make me feel a little bit silly. But then there was a low whisper from a far, from the mouth of the ancient tree-witch.
“Six hundred and seventeen. You fall short, child.”
I sighed, looking up at the doctors. They were going to need to walk a little bit closer to me on this.
“… wait! Wait!” Dr. Best returned his focus to the subject at hand. “We’re getting … offers!”
The other medical tutelaries were all turning their heads, listening to voices I couldn’t hear.
“Huh,” Dr. Macleod says. “Ottawa wants in on this. So does Winnipeg … Montreal says no. They’re confident they can fry you.”
I rolled my eyes. “They think they’re Quebec City.” But there was still a lot of old Catholic power there. “I’ve never been to Winnipeg, so I don’t want to rule it out for so long. Ottawa … been there a bunch of times. If they’re willing to plant all of the remainder – no, make it a full four hundred, in case some seeds die before they go in the ground after now. How’s that sound?”
The ghostly doctors all leaned their heads in, conferring silently with private telepathy amongst themselves and abroad with their colleagues at the nation’s capital. I saw the smile on Dr. Macleod’s face spread to all of them – and for an instant I was unnerved. Was I forgetting something? Could they still hurt me despite the words from what I had to guess was upper management?
Then they leaned apart, all folded arms and serious, even Dr. Macleod.
“Ottawa agrees, and we agree with our own berries. We furthermore require that you not enter either city until after the last elder tree from the full planting of one thousand trees dies.”
“Agreed. So we’re done.” I felt like I was still missing something. Had that last, trivial addition on their part been a distraction made to finish the legalese duel of magical law with a lethal thrust? I should have felt wonderful: I was not dead, I could walk out of here unbothered, and I was out of debt from a very powerful and cruel witch. But that smile they had all shared …
I stood up, and got on my backpack. “Now – wait a fucking minute.”
The doctors all looked shocked for a quick second, but then they grinned maliciously, sweating a little as if they had just made it through a complicated operation – or, to be more cynical about their profession, as if a patient had lived just long enough afterward to keep them free from a malpractice suit. I’d finished the agreement, the magical ink written on my true body’s heart was already dry – but I still wasn’t getting whatever it was they were so happy about.
“Six hundred and seventeen? Elder Mother, are you screwing with me?”
“Whatever are you talking about?” the old crone’s voice hissed from within my clump of dirt.
“That’s the exact number of sundogs Nocome killed!”
There was a long silence. Dr. Banting’s mouth popped fully open. The others were shuffling and raising their eyebrows, all looking genuinely surprised.
“Is it?” Elder Mother sounded perplexed. “I did not even know about those dead animals.”
“Amazing coincidence,” Dr. Macloed said, rubbing his chin.
I put my hands on my hip. “If we were all still alive a bunch of us would be talking about fate and destiny and Jung’s ‘synchronicity’ right now! That’s more suggestive of something than any horoscope I’ve ever seen! Now we’re dead, or undead, we know that some kind of magic is real – but it’s just a coincidence?”
Dr. Macloed opened his hands. “In full honesty, young man, that’s probably all it is. Your sense of coincidences gets adjusted when you get to be this old.”
“But – just let me think. It’s the number of the beast minus … wait, the real number of the beast is six hundred and sixteen! So it’s the number of the beast plus one! C’mon, that just means nothing to you guys?”
“Will you shut up and get lost?”
We all peered into the dark, where the voice had come from. It was Angel Eyes, standing tall and striding out of the shadows, not so blind anymore. Maybe the hospital did work on tutelaries as well as mortal humans. His hatchet-face and ‘stache looked even more like they belonged in a tavern under the midnight lighting in here, a light in the ceiling overhead carving out angular shadows on his stern face.
I poked a finger at him. “You have something to do with this? Is this some extra ritual you worked out with all of your fellow hipster doofuses to kill those seeds?”
Dr. Best was marching toward the Movember man with two closed fists. “We had him walking out on his own, gone for decades if he can even make it to dawn! Did you fuck this up because of your damn dog? We had him!”
And there was a mighty click in my brain, loud enough to make all of my onboard souls wince. The mystery of the number remained, but I knew why the doctors had smiled among themselves.
I snapped my fingers with both hands, to get everyone’s attention.
“So … who’s outside?”
The secret was out, so they all smiled openly now – especially Angel Eyes, who had big white teeth clenched together.
“Three,” Dr. Best said triumphantly.
“Three?”
“Three,” Dr. Macleod said, maybe a touch regretful.
And now that I was out of Elder Mother’s debt, I was no longer her mule. That extra power and protection from an ancient witch had gone completely unused, and I was back down to the power I had built merely on my own doing exercises. The doctors had surely seen this, reading the extra power knit into my flesh. They’d needed to get rid of it for their night-kin friends outside, so taking away my debt to Elder Mother had been essential. They’d even called in a favor with Ottawa.
“To be fair,” Dr. Macleod continued, standing up and straightening his suit, “without that distracting coincidence I think there’s a good chance you would have caught this tiny catch before you finished the deal. You’re not too dumb. Or too evil. That was just some terrible luck.”
I sighed for a long time. “And people die from terrible luck every day. If the car that hit them had been one meter to the left, and a million other examples.” In this moment I still somehow felt singled out by bad luck, by the universe itself, which was hard to explain when I had just taken a hit from an archangel and lived.
The other tutelary docs were grinning and fading away, maybe retreating to a better vantage point. Angel Eyes looked positively canine in his eagerness to see me walk outside and get what was coming to me, marching to the window and rubbing his hands together. Dr. Macleod lingered a while longer.
“They’re spread out around the district – we didn’t allow them to get nearly as close as you. There’s Princess Margaret to our north, the Health Foundation to our south, the Russian Orthodox Church to our west, and the Hospital for Sick Kids to our east – all off-limits. You’ve got room to run, and they’re pretty spaced out.”
“Just makes things interesting,” Angel Eyes snorted.
“And though we can’t harm or hold you here, I can make you leave now,” Dr. Macleod said, idly showing me the palm of his hand. Another snake-tattoo had materialized there, green and gold light reaching out from the design and grating against my eyeballs. “Goodbye, Angry Son.”
Chapter 61: With Apologies to the People of Japan
Image credits: University of Toronto Library