The place reeked even worse of marinated blood and feces. The lights were on, just as they had been when we had arrived, and I took a moment before I reentered the slaughterhouse of the den. I wished for the tenth time I hadn’t chucked the bottle. It was now almost two in the morning. This scene had been gone over by Dragon and Vigil, but I needed to feel like I was doing something and I had ways to suss things out of a scene that neither of them could. I started out standing at the doorway to the den, trying to make order out of the blood-spattered chaos. I noticed that the cardboard file boxes that had contained Caern’s possessions were gone. I assumed that Dragon and Vigil had spirited them away, even though they had been shredded by the thing that killed Elextra and George.
The killer spent virtually no time on George. Plucking out his eyes was an afterthought, a sick joke for whoever found this scene. The killer had gone out of its way to annihilate Elextra and even more out of its way to shred the boxes of Crystal Myth’s life. It was sent with specific mission parameters, like a good little kill-bot. So this was a hit to keep Elextra from talking any more about Crystal and from helping us find her. I had found a pigeon feather resting on a bench in a bus stop shelter. I held it up now and directed my will and power through it. “Surge Sursus,” I said. Everything in the room drifted upward, ignoring gravity’s demand. Each drop of blood, each chunk of Elextra’s body, the furniture, it all rose. A tiny scrap of white drifted downward as the leather recliner in the room drifted up. It had been stuck under the chair, and I walked over and plucked it from the air where it now hovered under its hiding place. It was part of a doctor’s prescription pad. The full name of the doctor and the practice’s phone number were not on this scrap, but it was enough to start looking. I pocketed it next to the crumpled photo of Crystal I had recovered from the room earlier. I had almost slammed it down on Gida’s desk in my anger, but I was glad I hadn’t. It gave me an edge, knowledge she didn’t have, and I’d have to worry about her and the Nightwise soon enough if I wasn’t smart enough to heed her deadline. I let everything drift back to its place on the ground.
After another of hour of poking about, both physically and metaphysically, I had zip. If Dragon or Vigil had turned something up in the room, they took it with them. I walked to the hallway beside the den and felt the shiver of the still-bruised space that had been torn for the killer to escape. The house was stunted in its silence. I once again reached out my perceptions and sought to feel my way along the slowly healing wound in the world. My awareness didn’t get as far this time as it had when the thing was running away, but I reached the same conclusion. The killer had not fled into the outer worlds; it had fled inside this world, inside someone’s mind.
I rubbed my face and wished I weren’t out of cigarettes. I considered making myself a drink at the bar in the corner of the den, but I saw Elextra’s face in my head, and I suddenly wasn’t thirsty anymore. I took out the scrambled satellite cell phone Vigil had given me. I dialed a number I had committed to memory. I pulled the crumpled photo of Crystal Myth out of my pocket and unfolded it as I held the phone in the crook of my neck, waiting for the connection. I knew that the phone call was bouncing across the world and perhaps through several others, in an act of electronic and mystic legerdemain that would make Grinner’s head spin. There was an electronic beep, a pause, then a second beep, and then a click as the call was answered at a quiet little farm tucked away in Harrisonburg, Virginia. A woman’s voice answered. “Hello?” she said, sounding a little wary.
“Pam, it’s Laytham Ballard,” I said. “How are you? Sorry if I woke y’all.”
“No,” Pam English said. “You didn’t wake me. We’re on farm time, remember? I’m on watch with a foal that’s got a bad case of colic. I imagine you want to talk to Wayne?”
“Yes, please,” I said.
“Now him, you’re waking up,” she said. Pam was the gatekeeper for her husband, Wayne. The couple had already lost a son to Wayne’s decades-old connection to the Life, and Pam had no intention of losing her husband as well. She was very protective of Wayne, which was understandable. Wayne English was one of a kind, the last of the Acidmancers, a prodigy, a Man in the Gray Flannel Suit for IBM, back at the dawn of the information technology age. Wayne had found the world-changing power inherent in the computer revolution to liberate and ennoble the human soul being turned into another gimmick, another marketing tool, another way to chain and control, tabulate and sort mankind. In his search for truth and freedom, he began to wander down some very unconventional rabbit holes. He worked with the military and intelligence boys on projects like Grill Flame and Stargate. Eventually, the twisting pathways led him to the White Rabbit himself, Timothy Leary. Wayne became one of Leary’s Acidmancers, psychedelic knights of the Summer of Love, the first psychonauts. Using LSD and computers, Wayne achieved a heightened state of awareness and could actually “hack” the Akashic record, the collective unconsciousness of the human race.
I had
