The Dark at the End

The Dark at the End Page 9

"They kicked you out?" Weezy said.

She'd run into Dawn Pickering in the lobby downstairs and they'd rode the elevator up together. They now stood outside their respective apartment doors across the hall from each other. A blue-eyed blonde, Dawn had lost some baby weight in the weeks since she'd delivered, but was by no means slim.

"Totally. Not just out of his office, out of the building." She glanced away. "I sort of lost it."

This wasn't good. Weezy, Jack, and Glaeken all wanted to know the baby's fate. Rasalom had personally involved himself in protecting Dawn during its gestation. He wouldn't have done that out of the goodness of his heart - he had no goodness anywhere in him, especially his heart. So the baby had to be useful to him. Or potentially so.

And if it was useful to Rasalom, it might be useful against him.

"You really think stalking Doctor Heinze is the best way to find your baby?"

Dawn shrugged. "If you can think of a better way, I'm all ears."

"Wish I could."

Weezy and Jack had tried, but besides the obstetrician - who seemed to have washed his hands of Dawn since the delivery - Heinze was their only link to the baby.

"So do I. But until we do, this seems the only way. But it just got harder now that I'm persona non grata at the McCready building. I mean, they won't even let me through the front door anymore."

Weezy had to smile.

Dawn caught it and frowned. "I hardly think it's funny."

Touchy, touchy, Weezy thought. Dawn was becoming more and more strung out in her quest for her baby.

"Neither do I. It was 'persona non grata.' You don't hear that too often in daily conversation."

"Don't you mean quotidian conversation?"

"Um, yeah. That too."

Finally Dawn allowed a faint smile. "You know, just because I'm still in my teens and say 'totally' a lot doesn't make me dumb. I aced my SATs, especially the verbal parts. I'd be in my second semester at Colgate right now if I hadn't..."

Her smile crumbled as her throat worked and she blinked back sudden tears.

Weezy's heart went out to her. This poor kid had been through more heartache in the past year than many people see in a lifetime.

"It's okay."

"It's not okay. If I hadn't gotten involved with that ... that monster, I'd be a college freshman instead of an unwed mother, and my own mother would still be alive." She shook her head. "She used to fine me every time I said 'totally' and 'like.'"

Weezy fought an urge to hug her. Dawn was too brittle right now. No telling how she'd react.

Aw, hell with it, she thought and slipped her arms around her.

"I'm so sorry. I wish I could say something to make you feel better."

Dawn hesitated, then, with a soft sob, returned the hug. She clung to Weezy a moment, then eased away.

"Just having you to talk to keeps me sane."

"You worry about staying sane?"

"Not really. Well, maybe. The baby's all I can think about. Sometimes I wish I could turn it off, but it won't stop."

Weezy knew how that was. She'd been diagnosed as manic-depressive as a teen - they called it bipolar now. She didn't know if the diagnosis was accurate, but she'd been medicated and it had helped ... some. She still hadn't been able to turn off the thoughts, but she'd been able to slow them. Having a memory that wouldn't allow her to forget anything, ever, was no help either.

Dawn wasn't bipolar, though, just post-partum and obsessed.

"Want to come in for some coffee?"

Dawn shook her head as she turned toward her apartment door. "I know you need to go back to reading your bizarro book, and I need to crash. Haven't been sleeping much and I need to catch up if I'm going to be fresh tomorrow."

"What's tomorrow?"

Dawn pushed open her door and stepped inside. "Back to the McCready building."

"But you're, as you say, persona non grata."

Her smile was grim. "They can keep me out of the building but they can't keep me from watching it. Thanks for being a friend."

She closed the door, leaving Weezy alone in the hall, wondering how long Dawn could keep going like this.

In her own apartment, Weezy headed directly for the kitchenette and her coffeemaker. She'd invested in a Keurig personal brewer - named it Katy, of course - and immediately it had become her favorite appliance. Pots of coffee went stale after a while. Her beloved Katy was always ready to brew a fresh cup for her.

She unlocked the kitchen cabinet where she hid the Compendium of Srem, the "bizarro book" Dawn had mentioned. Almost as old as Glaeken and Rasalom, and virtually indestructible, Torquemada had tried to destroy it during the Spanish Inquisition but couldn't, so he buried it and built a monastery over it. It wouldn't stay buried, however, and after a torturous journey through many hands - Hank Thompson's and Jack's among them - it wound up here in Weezy's apartment.

She laid it on the kitchen table and opened it to the leather marker she had left against the last page she'd read. As usual it did not open to that page. The book had this maddening, frustrating tendency to change pages on its own. Nobody knew the exact number of pages in the Compendium - the book was designed to have a finite number of sheets but a virtually infinite number of pages. But something had gone wrong and all the pages were out of order. What you found when you turned the page rarely had anything to do with the page before. And when you turned back, the original page might have changed as well.

She flipped to a random page, just to see what she'd find. When she saw the header, she caught her breath. The Other Name ... she'd seen that mentioned in the past but had never encountered a whole page devoted to it. Glaeken had mentioned something about each of the Seven who championed the Otherness back in the First Age having a secret name. This could be it. But the text that followed caused her to slam on the brakes.

It wasn't in English.

One of the many miraculous things about the Compendium - and what Torquemada must have considered the most Satanic - was its ability to present its text in the reader's native tongue. Someone born and raised in Riyadh would see Arabic; from the Congo, Swahili; from Johnson, NJ, English.

Yet this was in some mishmash of symbols and characters that Weezy had never seen. She had a feeling this was important - so important that she couldn't risk losing the page. She pulled out her cell phone and began snapping photos. As expected, what she saw as English reverted to the Old Tongue in the photos, but the gibberish remained the same.

She couldn't wait to show Glaeken.