F Wilson - The Dark at the End

“The fuck you think you’re doing here? Get your ass off my truck!”

“Just looking,” Jack said as he sifted through ways to play this.

“Bullshit!”

“If I’d seen anyone around, I would’ve asked, but the place was deserted, so-”

“I know you. I seen you at the Lodge. You was trespassing there and now you’re trespassing here. Get down.”

Jack thought about that. The sigil was too important and he wasn’t through with it. He couldn’t go for his Glock without the Mossberg tearing a hole in him, so…

“No.”

In the following seconds of stunned silence, he turned back to the sigil.

“ What? ” Tommy finally said.

“No. It’s a simple word. Also known as uh-uh, non, nein, nyet, and that’s a negatory.”

“I’ll blow your fucking head off!”

“Well, go ahead, Tommy. I’m here only to look, not steal, but you go ahead and do what you think you have to do. By the way, you related to Luke Mulliner, the guy who used to run the canoes at Quaker Lake?”

Another pause-Tommy probably hadn’t expected a question about his family right after a death threat.

“Yeah. My uncle. What about him?”

Jack knelt beside the sigil and ran his hand over the glyphs. Again that feeling of something not right, but he had to keep Tommy talking.

“Knew him when I was a kid living in Johnson.”

“Easy to say.”

“I know he had brothers named Matthew, Mark, and John. Their mother was into the Gospels. And you’re Thomas. Another apostle. Doubting Thomas. You still doubting me, Tommy?”

“I’m doubting you’ve got your head on straight. Get off my truck or I shoot.”

“Your family’s related to Joe Mulliner, the Robin Hood of the Pines, right? Would old Joe approve of that?”

He ran his fingers over the glyphs, outlining their shapes.

“Old Joe was hung in the seventeen hundreds.”

And then it hit Jack like a sucker punch to the gut.

“Oh, no.”

He rose and turned toward Tommy. He didn’t want that itchy trigger finger to twitch so he gave him a preview of what he was going to do.

“I’m getting off your truck and going to my car.”

“Now you’re talking.”

Jack jumped to the ground and pulled open the passenger door. He found the pen Weezy had given him on the seat.

“And now I’m going back to the truck.”

“No, you ain’t!”

Tommy made the mistake of stepping in and trying to club Jack with the barrel. He wasn’t experienced in this sort of thing and, before he knew it, the shotgun had changed hands.

Tommy raised his arms and cringed back as Jack pointed it his way.

“Hey, no! Don’t!”

Jack lowered the weapon, saying, “Not here to hurt anyone or anything. I need about two minutes with that crazy black thing and then I’ll be on my way.”

He took the shotgun with him when he climbed back into the truck bed. He took out Weezy’s drawing and laid the sheet over the glyphs, then began rubbing the pen over it. Gradually the writing began to appear. When he was finished he held the sheet up to the light. He leaped to his feet when his worst suspicions were confirmed.

“Shit-shit- shit!”

The same glyphs but in a different order. An optical illusion. The visible glyphs weren’t the same as the carved glyphs. A different name. Rasalom had hidden his true Other Name. Had all of the Seven done that, so that even if someone outside their circle found their sigils, he still wouldn’t know their Other Names? Over five thousand fake variations remained, after all. Or had Rasalom been the only one?

Didn’t matter. What did was the Lady using the wrong name in the Ceremony.

He had to tell them.

He opened the Mossberg’s breech and pulled out the two shells, tossed them over his shoulder, then closed it. He laid it at the foot of the sigil and hopped down to the ground again. Without a word, he jumped into the car and slammed it into reverse.

“What the fuck’s going on?” Tommy shouted as Jack backed around. Jack heard him repeating, “What the fuck?” two or three times as he roared down the driveway.

WTF, indeed.

When Jack turned back on to Carranza Road, he faced a straight shot back to 206, allowing him to make some quick calls. He speed-dialed Weezy’s cell number but her voice mail picked up immediately. He tried two more times with the same result. Another post-crash cell dead zone? They were happening less frequently, but still happening.

Or had she turned off her phone? She wouldn’t do that. Not unless they’d started the ceremony.

No-no-no. They wouldn’t start without hearing from him. Or would they?

Feeling a little frantic, he dialed her home landline: no answer. No surprise there-she had to be at the Lady’s-but he’d needed to give it a try. He dialed Glaeken’s apartment. He’d no doubt be down in the Lady’s place too, but he usually left a nurse with Magda. She’d answer and he could ask her to go downstairs and Glaeken’s voice mail picked up immediately too.

He wanted to smash his phone against the steering wheel. What the hell was going on?

He gunned the car around the traffic circle onto Route 70 and headed west, weaving through the traffic, but carefully. He faced a frustrating gauntlet of traffic lights between him and the freeways, and he couldn’t risk a cop stop for being too aggressive.

Every cell in his brain and body screamed at him to stop that ceremony. But why? As if some part of his subconscious-the primitive crocodile hind brain perhaps-was sensing danger but unable to explain it to the higher centers.

All right… what did he know? Why this gnawing feeling that they’d been gamed?

It all centered around the Other Naming Ceremony. Where had that come from? Discovered by Weezy in the Compendium of Srem.

The Compendium… it kept opening to the Ceremony-so often that Gia had remarked that it seemed to be “trying to tell you something”-a quip they could have brushed off had it referred to any book other than the Compendium. Because the Compendium was sui generis, and its page order seemed to be in constant flux. It frustrated you by making it almost impossible to return to a page after you’d seen it. And yet here it was, opening to the same page time and again… the page about the Other Naming Ceremony.

Yes, it did seem to be “trying to tell you something.”

But books don’t have awareness, don’t have a will. Not even the Compendium. At least not as far as anyone knew. Srem had used a long-lost technology to construct it, but Jack doubted she’d been able to imbue it with consciousness.

So that meant randomness or manipulation. He discarded randomness-first, because he couldn’t buy it, and second, because if that was the case, he had nothing to worry about.

But the manipulation possibility bothered him. A lot.

Two sources for that: the Ally or the Otherness. If the Ally, no problem. It wanted to frustrate the Otherness as much as Jack and Glaeken.

But what if the Otherness was the source?

Jack’s fingers tightened on the steering wheel as he remembered how the Order had put out a BOLO on Weezy a few weeks ago. Out of the blue. After months and months of disinterest-he now knew they’d been preoccupied with developing the Jihad virus-they suddenly wanted to locate Weezy. And according to Eddie, they’d found her.

But they did nothing. They left her alone. Or maybe not. Rasalom moved Dawn in across the hall. No one had yet to make sense of that. But Weezy discovered the Other Naming Ceremony shortly thereafter.

Connection?

Could Rasalom have sneaked in and altered the Compendium? Manipulated it to show the Ceremony page every time it was opened?

Jack stiffened in the seat. Could he have added the page? Neither Glaeken nor the Lady had ever heard of the Ceremony. Was it bogus? Could the words, written in the Small Folk tongue that only the Lady knew, have an effect that went beyond naming? Would the Lady’s reciting them harm her?