M.L.N. Hanover - Vicious Grace

“Fight it out,” Aubrey said. The amusement in his voice told me he’d understood.

“There are no problems that can’t be solved by enough duct tape and a hammer,” I said.

“What a wonderful world it would be,” he half sang.

Classical conditioning. That’s what Chogyi Jake had called it. It was true, everything I’d faced since Uncle Eric had passed his legacy on to me had eventually come down to violence. And even when I’d had the crap kicked out of me—and oh, I had had the crap kicked out of me—I’d wound up on top at the end. Evil vanquished, peace restored, nothing wrong that a few stitches, a couple handfuls of Tylenol, and a week’s rest wouldn’t cure. Something in my hindbrain had learned from that. Maybe not the right lessons.

I heard Ex’s footsteps in the kitchen, the clink and gurgle of coffee being poured into a cup. Aubrey snuggled into the bed, his breath growing deeper and slow. The red numbers on the clock said it was almost two in the morning. Sleep seemed like a distant rumor to me. My mind kept going back to Grace Memorial: the strange angles of its walls, the windows staring out into the street like they were looking for something. The maze of corridors and rooms, twisting in and back on each other. Stairways that skipped whole floors or led to nowhere. It reminded me of something I’d heard about when I was a kid. A mansion built by a rich, crazy woman with false halls, stairways that went up to nothing and ended blind. She lived in a labyrinth so that the evil spirits would get confused. Grace was the same thing, writ large. Only it was also a hospital. The place where people go to be born and to die and to linger in the weird halfway place in between.

And like a dog chasing a car, I wanted it.

I didn’t think I could stand another day of going through Eric’s cryptic notes to himself and apparently random articles about everything from Jews fleeing Germany in the thirties to the communication signals of Argentine ants. Not to mention the unlabeled pictures of men and women and rooms. And those boxes of surveillance reports on Declan Souder. Or, no. Not Declan. The guy’s name was David. Why was I thinking Declan? Who was Declan Souder?

I started grinning before I knew why. My one, delighted cough of laughter roused Aubrey enough that he opened an eye. He grunted a wordless question.

“Declan Souder redesigned Grace Memorial in the 1940s,” I said. “He built the place. And what do you want to bet David’s his son?”

I would have lost the bet. David was his grandson.

Chogyi Jake sat on the kitchen counter, a cup of green tea steaming between his laced hands. Ex sat at the table, squinting against the blasting light of early morning. Aubrey and I were splitting a blueberry bagel with cream cheese. Outside, Lake Michigan had an eerie mother-of-pearl look to it: water and mist and sunlight.

“Nice work,” Ex said. He sounded almost disappointed. His all-night study session had also borne fruit. Looking through Eric’s Lisbon notes, he’d Googled every YNTH notation. Every city listed had a building or natural structure that might have worked as a second-stage prison, like Grace: ancient catacombs in Italy, a network of natural and constructed smuggler’s tunnels under a port town in Maine, the Winchester Mystery House in San José. Good, solid research that tended to confirm our view of what was going on, but no breakthroughs. My flash of postcoital insight rankled him a little, and the mere fact that it did made me want to tease him a little.

“Really?” I said, my eyes wide. “Did I do good?”

Ex rolled his eyes.

“It is suggestive, at least,” Chogyi Jake said. “Declan died at the end of ’51. Daedalus-as-sacrifice has some very strong resonances, and it would tie the two layers of imprisonment together.”

I took the last bite of bagel and raised my hand.

“Too jargony?” Chogyi Jake asked.

“Kind of, yeah.”

“Two of the three things they did in ’51 are bindings,” Aubrey said. “The buried-alive part being the first, and the . . . the maze. The hospital itself. That’s the second. If this guy was the sacrifice that went into the coffin, it would help those two spells reinforce each other. There’d be a connection.”

“It’s not proof,” Ex said. “But as circumstantial evidence goes, it’s not bad. And then there’s the fact that Eric was interested in his bloodline.”

“Which he’d need,” I said, “if the point was to break whatever’s under Grace out, right? So we can start working with the assumption that Eric was looking to undo everything the Invisible College and their buddies did here. Crack the thing free.”

“Very good, grasshopper,” Ex said, actually managing a smile. “Soon you will be able to take the pebble from my hand.”

I looked at him blankly. Instead of explaining himself, he shook his head.

“We don’t know why, though,” Aubrey said. “Or even what exactly Rahabiel is. Why it would attack Jayné.”

“If it even did,” I said. “I’m starting to like the idea that it was the hospital that got pissed off at me. Allergic reaction to other magic, maybe.”

“I don’t see what Eric planned to lock up in the cell he built,” Ex said.

I pulled back my shoulders and refused to be discouraged. I had a lead, by God, and one I’d figured out for myself. If it hadn’t cracked the whole case open wide, that mattered less than the feeling of making some actual progress. That I could follow up on it without braving Grace Memorial itself only made it better.

“Okay,” I said. “So what’s the plan for the day?”

Ex spoke first.

“I have a meeting with the hospital chaplain at noon,” he said.

“You’re going back there?”

“No,” Ex said. “Meeting him at a bookstore well off the hospital property. I won’t need backup.”

“I was going to read and organize more of Eric’s notes,” Chogyi Jake said. “We still have two drawers we haven’t looked through. And I believe Kim was planning to call in sick and come help with that.”

“Cool,” I said.

“And you?” asked Aubrey.

“I was going to take you and the laptop up to Waukegan and meet David Souder,” I said.

“Saw that coming,” Ex said.

“But before we go,” I said, “I want to make a couple phone calls.”

Aubrey hoisted an eyebrow.

“I want to see if they’ve cleaned up Oonishi’s dream data yet,” I said. “I’m wondering if there’s something in there our man Souder might recognize.”

IT WAS a two-hour drive, and we didn’t get on the road until almost ten. Aubrey drove, and I sat in the passenger’s seat, my laptop open, replaying the cleaned-up dream file over and over. It wasn’t, I’d been assured, the absolute final version, but it was pretty great compared with the originals. The six feeds of Oonishi’s data had been put together, cleaned, sharpened, averaged, and then tweaked so that whichever one had the greatest level of detail in any single frame was given greater weight. The man I’d talked to was going through now and making the same adjustment within frames, so that if one subject had better resolution in the upper left and another in the lower right of any given frame, the relative weight of the image could be split between them.

All in all, it wasn’t more than thirty seconds, but now I could see the soil sliding and shifting as the black coffin split open and the light poured out. The digital-imaging man had also sent an e-mail with four frames set apart from the flow of images. The details in the stills were as clear as photographs. The eye caught in a flash of light, clearly human only with an uncanny elongated pupil like a goat’s. The splayed hand, its palm out toward me, the fingers just too long to be right. A detail (he’d noted that it was the clearest single image in all the data streams, and it had only been really clear in two of them) of thin, pointed teeth like some kind of deep-sea fish. And then one thing I hadn’t noticed before; as the coffin split, in the instant between the fine-lined cracks and the whiteout of arcing light, there was a moment when the side of the coffin was lit and showed carved letters. In the moving image, they were just a moment of uneven texture. In the still image—captured, manipulated, sharpened—they were readable.