Deuces Down Read online

  Cody blinked into the spotlight, shielding his eyes. “Cap’n Blane, is it? What’s the problem? I’m still in Rathlin waters.”

  “You’re a good half-mile outside, man.”

  “Not according to my instruments.”

  “Then your instruments are off or you’ve forgotten how to read them. And since when do you do your fishing at night? You know the regs, Cody-prepare to be boarded for inspection.”

  “Ah, now, Cap’n, you don’t be needing to waste your time with that,” Cody protested hurriedly. He clambered down from the top of the cabin to stand next to Caitlyn. The spotlight widened as he moved, then narrowed again. Caitlyn lifted her arm, squinting into the light. “The truth be, Cap’n, I’m not exactly fishing. I was taking Caitlyn here for a bit of a ride, and I suppose I wasn’t paying as much attention to the instruments as I might be, if you take my drift. You’re a married man too, are you not, Cap’n? So I expect you understand. Do you think I’d be trying to smuggle something over in this puttering slow thing?”

  Cody’s arm was around her, and she could smell the odor of rotting fish. But it was easy to smile… “I’d hate for something like this to get back to my missus,” Cody said.

  Caitlyn could hear conversation, then a burst of rough laughter and someone’s voice saying audibly, “She’s missing a nose if she’s shagging the Codman…” The spotlight snapped off. Afterimages danced purple and yellow in Caitlyn’s vision. “Turn that rustbucket around, then,” Blane’s voice called loudly. “And next time, keep it closer to home.”

  Cody waved; the patrol boat’s engines coughed and then roared as the prow lifted and the props churned the water to white froth. The lights receded, heading back toward Ballycastle. Cody went back to the wheel; Gary emerged from the cabin.

  Cody spun the wheel, and the Áilteoir turned. The South Lighthouse gleamed ahead of them. “They’ll be watching now,” Cody said. “I don’t have a choice.”

  “I know,” Gary said. “Maybe next time, eh?”

  Cody sniffed. “Don’t know about this ‘next time,’ either,” he said. “The Áilteoir ain’t much but she’s all I have. I come out again like this, and Blane or whoever’s out there waiting isn’t going to be so accommodating. I lose the boat, and I lose everything. Doing this once is one thing, doing it again…” Codman gave a massive blink, his bulbous eyes seeming to vanish into his skull and them pop out again. “I’m sorry. I hope you understand.”

  Caitlyn thought Gary might be angry or upset. Instead, strangely, he shrugged and sighed. “I know, Codman. I have a plane rusting on the bottom north of Rathlin that was my life, that I’d scraped and saved and borrowed to buy. And I threw it away for…” He shook his head. “I don’t even know for what, but it sure as hell wasn’t for me. So yeah, I understand.”

  He said nothing else on the way back. He held Caitlyn’s hand, and he stared over the stern of the boat toward the lights of Ireland.

  MAY, 1997

  Each word was a separate, labored breath of air. “Tell… them… to… come… in.”

  The doctor’s eyestalks blinked, and he scuttled away crab-like, his brilliant orange and blue carapace leaving her vision. Caitlyn heard him talking softly with the two of them, and a few moments later, she heard Gary and Moira enter the bedroom. Their faces swam above her as they stood over the bed. Gary was trying to smile; Moira was openly crying.

  Dying was suffocation by inches. Dying was slowly being turned to painted stone. Dying was forcing the muscles of lungs and heart to pump and knowing that it was a battle she had already lost, that she could continue fighting for only a few more minutes.

  At least she would be a beautiful, smiling corpse.

  “I… love… you,” she told them. “I’m… sorry.”

  “You can just be quiet,” Gary told her. “There’s nothing to be sorry about.” His hand stroked her face; she felt nothing of the caress-not the touch, not the heat. “We love you, too. I wish-” He stopped.

  She would have nodded, would have smiled. She could only cry. “Moira?” she said.

  “What do you want, Máthair?” She sniffed and scrubbed at her eyes with her sleeve. It hurt most to see her, to see how her face had lost its baby fat over the last few years. To see her shape changing to that of a young woman. To see the glimmer of the adult that she might become-and to know that because of the virus, she would never be that person.

  Caitlyn had thought that the worst thing would be there to witness what the wild card virus would do to her daughter. Now she knew it was worse to leave and not know. “You… be… careful,” she told Moira. “Every… one… will… watch… out… for… you.”

  “I know, Máthair.” Then the tears came, and Moira hugged her desperately as Caitlyn strained uselessly to hug her in return, to move the arms frozen at her sides.

  “Go… on… now,” she told her. “Please.”

  Gary slowly, gently, pulled Moira away from Caitlyn. They started to walk away, but Caitlyn called out to him. “ Gary…”

  “Go on, Moira,” she heard him tell her. “I’ll be right out.” Then his face returned, hovering over her. “Hey,” he said. “Are you in pain, love? Maybe Doc Crab can-”

  “No,” she told him. “No… pain.” She forced another breath through her lungs. She would have closed her eyes, but those muscles were no longer working, either. “You… kept… your… promises.”

  “It was easy. You made it easy.”

  “One… more.”

  “What?” She saw his face, his eyes narrowing. “Ah,” he said, and the exhalation said more than words.

  “No… you… don’t… understand… Promise… that… if… you… get… the… chance… to… go… home… you’ll… still… go. Don’t… worry… about… Moira. They… will… take… care… of… her… here.”

  “Caitlyn-”

  “No!” The shout, though hardly more than a hoarse whisper, cost her. She had to struggle for the next breath and was afraid it wouldn’t come. He waited, his hand stroking her hair. “Promise… it. That’s… all… I… can… give… you… now. It’s… what… you… want.”

  “I know,” he said. “But it’s not going to happen.”

  “… promise…”

  Gary sighed. “All right. I promise. I’ll go home.”

  JANUARY, 1998

  “… it’s not simple, I know, but you can get it. First you have to isolate ‘x’ on one side of the equation, so…”

  A knock on the door interrupted the algebra lesson. Moira shrugged at Gary and went to answer it. “Good evening to you, Moira,” Constable MacEnnis said. The garda stood outside the door in a misting drizzle, beads of water running down his cap, the impossibly round, white eyes bright in the murky day. “This just came for Gary. I think he’ll want to read it.” He handed Moira an envelope. The ivory paper felt thick and heavy in his hand, spotted a bit with the rain. “It’s from Mayor Carrick,” MacEnnis added.

  She could feel Gary behind her at the door. She handed him the envelope and stepped back. “Come on in,” she said to MacEnnis. “No sense in standing out in the rain.”

  MacEnnis touched the crown of the cap with knobbed, scarred fingers. “I don’t think so, Moira. I should get back…” He nodded to them and walked back to the Fiat parked at the side of the road. Moira shut the door, turning to find Gary still staring at the envelope in his hands. She knew then.

  “Go on,” she told him. “Open it.”

  He seemed to start, as if she’d shaken him from some reverie, then slipped his forefinger under the flap and slid it along the seal. He pulled out the paper-cream-colored legal bond-and unfolded it. She could see him reading the words, saw the tremble start in his hands and the eyes widen. Without a word, he handed it to her.

  … granted a presidential pardon, effective immediately. Any and all charges pending against you have been dropped by the governments of the United States, the Republic of Ireland, and the United Kingdom…

  She handed the pape
r back to him, then flung her arms around his neck, giggling as if she were nine again. “Oh, Gary! I’m so happy for you!”

  He hugged her, but the embrace was half-hearted and he released her almost immediately. “Moira, I can’t…”

  She didn’t answer. Instead, she went to the mantle, standing there for a moment as the heat from the peat fire warmed the front of her body, then turned, serious. “The night Máthair died, I listened to her talking to you.”

  He rattled the paper in his hand. “Moira, this doesn’t mean that I have to go now. Or… we can both go. Would you like that? Would you like to go to New York City?”

  She shook her head. “No. I wouldn’t like that at all. I’m staying here. I’ll be thirteen this year, Gary, and there’s plenty of people here to look out for me. I’m Rathlin’s only child, remember? They all know me.”

  “I should stay until-” He stopped. They both knew what he meant.

  “I know my odds, Gary,” she said. “I’ve known them for a long time. I also know that almost all latents express either at puberty or during some great emotional crisis. Well, the virus didn’t show itself when Máthair died, and I doubt anything will be more traumatic than that, so…” She shrugged. “I don’t want you to see me die, Gary. I don’t want your last memory of me to be something awful. I’d rather stay that little girl you helped to learn her math.”

  “God, you sound like her.”

  Moira laughed at that, pleased, and with the laugh was a trace of the childish giggle. She came toward him. The paper with its words of release was smoldering in his grasp, and she took it from him. “This is what you always wanted, and Máthair knew that. I heard you make her a promise,” Moira told him. “Now keep it.”

  He said nothing for a time, and she saw steam rise from the corners of his eyes. She went to the mantle and took Caitlyn’s pocket watch from where is sat, bringing it over to him and pressing the round form into his hand. “Remember us,” she said. “Remember us as we were.”

  “I will,” he said finally.

  The sound from the television set was tinny and the picture half lost in static. “Do you have any statement to make?” a reporter asked, shoving a microphone toward Gary, a darkness in a blizzard of transmitted snow and teeming rain from the storm flailing the island. She could see the curve of Church Bay behind him, gray in the downpour and besieged by a small invading squadron of press with cameras.

  “I’m going home,” he said simply. “That’s all. I don’t have anything else to say, and I’d like you all to just leave me alone.” The press of reporters shouted a torrent of questions, but he ignored them, pushing through them. She heard some faint cries: “Damn, look out! He’ll burn you if you touch him!” The cameras pursued him, but Gary pushed his way up the ramp and onto the ferry. The reporter who’d asked the question turned to face the camera. “This is the scene, live on Rathlin Island- ”

  Moira touched the remote and the television went dark. She stared at the glass tube for several minutes before getting up. She pulled on a sweater and her slicker and went outside to check on the sheep and open the gate to the pasture.

  She had moved in with Wide Abby Scanlon, who’d agreed to be her guardian, but Moira told Mayor Carrick that she wanted to keep the old house and move into it herself when she was older. The man had wriggled his rat nose and she knew what he was thinking. “Chances are that you won’t be needing the house, dearie. Chances are you’ll be dead…” But he’d agreed, and every day she walked back to the old place. Every day she did the chores and pretended for a time that she was an adult and this was her house now, and that she was living here for the rest of her life.

  That she would die here, as Máthair had, as her Gramma had.

  She swept out the barn and laid down new straw, then walked out across the field to the cliffs and just stood there as the sheep grazed, watching the waves thunder into the rocks in cascades of white foam. After a few hours, she went back to the cottage to fix supper-she should get back to Abby’s house, but she didn’t want to. Not yet.

  She crumbled newspaper and placed it on the grate, then put a few turves of peat on top. She reached up to the mantlepiece for the book of matches and crouched back down.

  The pack was empty. She tossed the empty cardboard into the fireplace. The stillness of the house struck her then, the silence lurking inside even as the storm softly lashed the structure. She wanted to cry, hunkered there in front of the cold, dead fireplace, listening to the rain patter and splash against the windows and roof while the house itself was consumed with somber quiet.

  She heard the door open, heard footsteps cross quickly toward her. A dark hand reached past her shoulder and touched the paper. A flame curled away, yellow fire spreading as the paper began to crackle and smoke curl away toward the flue. She could hear the ticking of a watch. “I knew I could find you here when you weren’t at Abby’s,” he said.

  He was smiling at her, uncertainly. She tried to frown sternly at him. “You broke your promise,” Moira began, but Gary shook his head.

  “I promised Caitlyn that if I could, I’d go home,” he said. “I got as far the train for Belfast before I realized that I was going the wrong way.”

  “ Gary..” She stopped. Took a breath and let it out again. She wasn’t going to hug him, wasn’t going to smile at him, because if she did either of those things, she’d be lost. “It’s going to happen soon. I can feel it. You should have gone. I want you to go.”

  “Is that what you really want? To be alone? To be with Wide Abby when it happens and not me? If it is, tell me now and I’ll go.”

  “He cupped his large, dark hands around her cheeks, warm and soft and loving. He kissed her forehead, and she sank into his embrace, pulling herself tightly to him, a child again, sobbing into his chest. He simply held her, rocking back and forth as they sat on the floor in front of the fire. “I don’t want to die, Gary,” she said. “I’m so scared… so scared…”

  “I know, I know,” he crooned, whispering. “I’m scared, too. But whatever happens, I’ll be with you. I promise you that. I’ll be with you.”

  WITH A FLOURISH AND A FLAIR by Kevin Andrew Murphy

  Pleasant evening, artist. A present. And a responsibility.” Sam looked up from his sketchbook just in time to see miniature squid attempting to escape from pirouline cookies, the pastry flutes impaled in a goblet filled with guacamole mixed with pomegranate seeds, winking like demonic eyes behind the round facets. While on one level he knew it was meant to be an exotic appetizer, fusion cuisine of the East-meets-West-goes-South-then-hits-the-other-side-of-the-galaxy school, the end result looked like nothing half so much as a sundae for the Elder Gods.

  Hastet benasari Julali Ackroyd, earth’s first and currently only Takisian chef, set the eldritch offering on the table in Martha Stewart’s “It’s a good thing” presentation position.

  Sam knew enough to smile, trying to avoid the wide-eyed “Help me!” stares and frantic tentacles of the squidlets which were, he noted out of the corner of one eye, frozen into position with strands of carmelized sugar.

  “And the responsibility?”

  “Inclusion in tomorrow’s brunch menu?” She preened, smoothing down her apron. “Since you’re already redoing it, I thought this might be Starfields’ new feature item.”

  It looked more like a feature from the Bowery Wild Card Dime Museum. A diorama of the Swarm Invasion perhaps, or one of the more disturbing examples of the Monstrous Joker Babies. But Sam knew it would not be politic to say so. Not if he wanted to keep his job. “Um… could we do it as table placards?”

  “As you like,” said Hastet. “I just showed my husband, and he said it would be perfect for Halloween.” She beamed at the mass of tentacles, then frowned. “But that’s not till Wednesday, isn’t it?”

  Sam gestured to the patrons in costume about the restaurant. “People celebrate early.”

  “Oh good.” She pursed her lips then. “I haven’t given it a name yet. I was t
hinking ‘Takisian Surprise,’ but given the last one, I don’t think that would sell.” Absently, she tucked a stray brown curl under her chef’s pepperbox. “Jay also said something about ‘Lovecraft’ when he saw it. But that would be for Valentine’s Day, wouldn’t it?”

  Sam pictured Cthulhu got up as Cupid and was immediately sorry he had. “No, not exactly.”

  Hastet rolled her eyes. “You earthlings have too many holidays.” She gave a grandiloquent wave of dismissal to the tentacle parfait, which Sam guessed to be the Takisian equivalent of ‘Whatever.’ “I trust your judgment. Just let it speak to you.” With that, she slipped back through the arch to the kitchen, leaving Sam alone with the otherworldly hors d’oeuvre.

  He leaned closer and gave it a wary glance, half expecting it to go scuttling across the table.

  It was looking back. A nameless thing from the far depths of space. Bloodstone eyes watched below, flat lavender ovals stared above. Lidless. Unblinking. Alien. Sam wondered how it could possibly speak to him, afraid that it would.

  Then it did: “Nice hat you have there.”

  A lifetime of living in Jokertown had taught Sam that the most unlikely things could speak. Plants. Animals. Even the urinal in Squisher’s Basement. Things that had once been people, and horribly, on some level, still were, the wild card twisting their bodies into forms no longer even remotely human. But only rarely did they become entities as bizarre as Hastet’s new appetizer. “What?”

  “I said ‘Nice hat,’” the dish of tentacles and avocado ichor repeated, its voice incongruously dulcet and feminine, albeit slightly annoyed. “Had it long?” Sam then realized that none of the squid were moving their lips, and unless the eldritch sundae were telepathic-always an option when dealing with victims of an alien virus-it was more likely that the speaker was someone behind it.

  He sat up straight and looked past the sugar-frosted cephalopods.

  The voice belonged to a woman. A nat woman to all appearances, mid-thirties but damn fine for all that, as petite or even more so than Hastet, with one of those figures you usually need corsetry to get, displaying it to best advantage in a tux shirt, black tie, swallowtail coat, black satin short-shorts, and cobweb-patterned black fishnets over stiletto heels. This ensemble was topped off with a top hat, worn over masses of Titian curls somewhere between Dr. Tachyon and the naturally vain girl from Peanuts. Accented with devil red lipstick and nails, the whole look said either stage magician or hooker, or something with the same effect thrown together for a semi-elegant semi-trashy evening of clubbing the Saturday before Halloween.