Existentially Challenged, page 18
As he was scanning the crowd, he noticed a pink smear slowly growing larger and dismissed the vision to see a bespectacled girl of about twenty approaching him with open curiosity. He immediately pretended to take an interest in the strikingly regular brickwork in the nearest wall. Achilles Vanderberg, he reminded himself. Achilles Vanderberg.
“Hey, aren’t you Adam Hesketh?” asked the girl.
“Er, no,” stammered Adam, theatrically looking around so quickly that his arms flapped like tetherballs. “I’m. Er. My sister was a mansion in Switzerland—”
“I’m Rana,” said Rana. “I’ve seen you come into the school once or twice. I was there that time you were kicking Alison out.”
“O-oh,” said Adam. It had started out as an oh of disappointment at being recognized, but he was able to head it off at the pass and strangle it into an oh of feigned interest. “How are you?”
“Good,” said Rana, not breaking smiling eye contact. The way she spoke and looked at Adam implied a mixture of curiosity and total fascination. “I saw Alison here on the night she got the Bible in the face, but I don’t think she noticed me. How’s she doing?”
“F-fine,” stammered Adam, feeling he was losing grip on who was doing the investigating here. “Have you been coming to these often?”
“Yeah, for a while,” said Rana, taking a conspiratorial step closer and looking back to the house. “Don’t worry, I’m not one of the weirdo El-Yetch cultist types.”
Adam smiled weakly, taking another glance around. He had a strong sense that the vast majority of people present would say the same thing. “Right.”
“I’m here mainly because I want to know how they control life essence transfer the way they do, with no one having to die.” There was a sadness in her voice. “I guess you can see why I’d be interested in that.”
Adam double-checked with his special senses and confirmed that Rana’s magic infusion manifested as a pink glow around her. Pink was the color of both healing and vampirism, and for all Adam’s gifts, there was no way of telling which one Rana had if she wasn’t actively using it.
He recalled what Danvers had said, that as well as Miracle Meg being a conduit, another explanation could be that there was a murderous vampire among her followers. With that in mind, Rana’s inquisitive look took on alarming notes of a hungry wolf, but she was by no means the only pink smear on the scene. Life essence transfer was actually a quite common infusion; you just didn’t see it much in the wild, as it were, because they were trained not to use it. Adam could see at least six other pink infusions just from one scan around. He took a moment to carefully commit each face to memory but, by the end of that evening, would have forgotten every single one.
“You’re here to investigate the cult, aren’t you? Like Alison was,” said Rana, smile widening as her excitement grew. “You’re going to use your senses to figure out how they do the healing.”
Adam let his head drop, defeated. “It’s actually supposed to be a secret.”
“Oh sure, don’t worry,” said Rana, patting him on the back. “You probably don’t want to get a Bible in the face. Hey, is it true Alison’s got, like, supermemory? That her memory’s so good they put her in the school ’cos they thought she was psychic?”
“Yeah, that was basically it,” said Adam.
“Man,” said Rana. “She’s so cool.”
A small kerfuffle was unfolding on the part of the lawn that adjoined the driveway. A van had pulled up, and a man in the white clothing of a medical orderly was opening the side door while a second, practically identical man gestured irritably for the surrounding onlookers to clear a space.
Before long, the two men had gently decanted the van’s occupant. He was a boy of about twelve, strapped to a wheelchair and trailing several tubes and wires from a forest of drip feeders and monitoring devices. A young mother, with the sad eyes and permanent half smile of someone who has already cried themselves through the worst of it, also emerged and helpfully guided her son’s wheelchair down the ramp.
“Must be today’s star patient,” muttered Rana, only audible to Adam.
“All right, Miracle Mob!” said Miracle Dad, catching off guard everyone who had been watching the action around the van. He had emerged from the front door of the house and was bounding along the path to greet the newcomers. “Now this must be Jamie, is that right?”
“Yes, Miracle Dad,” said Jamie’s mother as Jamie himself boggled wordlessly over his mouth and nose tubes.
Miracle Dad bent down, bracing his hands on his knees. “Now, I think there must have been some mistake here. I was told Jamie had been feeling poorly lately, but you look like a pretty tough little warrior to me!”
Jamie replied with a weak little hiss from a nearby respirator. “Um, no, he’s . . . he’s been really ill,” translated his mother, with humorless concern.
To his credit, Miracle Dad managed to not let the energy drop. He met her gaze with an utterly sincere expression of sympathy. “How ill is he now, exactly?”
“Well, the doctors say he’s through the worst of it,” she replied, moisture gathering in her eyes as she spoke. “But if he . . . survives the year, it’ll be another year or so before he’s even strong enough to get up by himself.”
“Sounds like the doctors have worked a few miracles of their own so far,” said Miracle Dad, nodding respectfully. “But let’s see if the blessing of El-Yetch can give Jamie a little booster, shall we?”
“El-Yetch has got her work cut out for her,” muttered Rana, leaning into Adam’s ear, as Miracle Dad helped Jamie and his entourage into the house to prepare for the show. Adam gave her a curious look, and she responded with an embarrassed smile.
She’s trying to impress you, thought Adam, the notion surfacing from the depths of his subconscious like a lady of the lake.
Why would she be doing that? asked another part of his mind, a less subconscious one.
Because you’re a senior investigator for the Department of Extradimensional Affairs, and that’s the sort of thing that impresses people who haven’t gotten to know you properly. So make good use of this before that happens.
“Oh yeah,” he said aloud. He coughed as Rana’s confused expression began to unfold. “Uh. Yes. You’ve been coming to these ‘for a while,’ you said? You’ve seen this healing in action a few times?”
“Yep,” she replied, eager to be part of the investigation. “And I’m pretty sure the healing magic is real. But here’s the interesting thing.” She raised an index finger and waggled her eyebrows. “It’s usually something small. Sometimes it’s a little flesh wound, like what Alison had. A lot of the time it’s something more like, you know, what fake faith healers do. Get someone with an old ache and get them to think it’s gone for a few seconds.”
“I see,” said Adam, thinking about Danvers’s other theory that Miracle Meg might have been a genuine healer, but only doling out real life essence in small doses for special occasions. “And Miracle Meg definitely hasn’t prematurely aged from the healing? Could she be faking it part of the time?”
“I thought the same for a while,” said Rana, nodding rapidly. “But she’s done the real thing enough times I’m pretty sure she’d have aged up a bit by now. And besides, every few weeks or so they do a really big heal. That’s what they’re doing today, I think.”
Adam glanced at the now-closed front door. “The boy in the wheelchair?”
“About a month ago, it was a man who’d broken his spine and was never gonna walk again,” said Rana, leaning in with her conspiratorial voice again. “He came out afterwards and gave his wife piggyback rides around the garden. It may have been staged though.”
Adam gave a little nod he wasn’t really feeling. Jamie’s condition would have been difficult to fake, unless Jamie’s guardians were prepared to keep him starved in a dark basement for months until his muscles had all but wasted away and his skin tone turned the right shade of deathly. And even if they did, how were they going to fake the miraculous recovery? Take him into a back room, paint him pink, and feed him two hundred energy bars?
“Any idea how they’d stage it, exactly?” he asked aloud.
As if in reply, the music denoting the start of Modern Miracle’s sermon began playing. A hush fell over the congregation, and there was a gradual drift toward the front door, like impatient airline passengers who think their boarding call is coming next.
“Looks like we’re about to find out,” said Rana as the lock on the front door clicked open.
30
The gate in the rear fence of the Modern Miracle house opened directly onto the walking trail, which reflected the traditional suburban values of convenience and complete lack of security concerns. It opened slowly and Miracle Mum emerged, wearing an overlarge dark coat and carrying the kind of ragged tote bag that one of the nearby supermarkets would probably stubbornly refer to as a “bag for life.” She grabbed the gate before it could swing shut behind her and gently guided it closed, cringing slightly with every creak and click.
Alison, crouched behind a bush twenty yards away, sorely wished she had known she was going to be stealthing through the undergrowth that evening. She would have worn something other than her work blouse, the one that now seemed to possess the shining, lustrous whiteness that it always lacked while under harsh office lighting. Then again, when it came to going unnoticed, it was the least of her worries.
“Donation from Lakichew,” whispered Roger, holding his phone out. “He wants to know if this is the first time Alison has gone commando in the jungle.”
“Do you have to keep reading those out?!” hissed Alison, not looking away from Miracle Mum.
“He donated,” said Beatrice and Roger in unison. Alison was getting the unpleasant sense that she was the designated adult for the evening.
Miracle Mum frowned directly at their position, and Alison froze in the act of rubbing her forehead in exasperation. A tense handful of silent seconds drifted by before Miracle Mum finally shrugged and began to walk away from the house. Alison let all her breath out in a long sigh, slow enough to mingle with the sound of the trees swaying in the wind. “Come on,” she whispered, carefully sliding herself out from behind the bush.
She stayed off the path and behind the low fence that separated it from the grassy hills. If Miracle Mum turned around again she wouldn’t notice Alison as long as she could do a convincing impression of a plank of wood. She endeavored to keep Miracle Mum’s diminutive figure in the center of her view, assuming that Beatrice and Roger were staying close behind from the sound of rustling grass and whispered donation acknowledgments.
They followed Miracle Mum as the path split from the houses, curved widely around a hill, and began to slope downwards into a denser section of forest. The branches overhead clenched together more and more as the sun slipped ever farther below the horizon. Before long, Alison was having to squint to keep track of Miracle Mum’s movements.
“Lot of comments saying they can’t see anything and if we can turn the brightness up,” whispered Roger.
“We cannot turn the brightness up, because the brightness is the sun,” said Beatrice firmly. With the camera rolling, she had slipped into her businesslike, on-the-record persona.
“Maybe you should stop streaming,” suggested Alison over her shoulder.
“There needs to be a record of what we find,” said Beatrice firmly.
“Yeah,” said Roger. “No point of activism if no one can see you doing it.”
There was no hint of expression in his voice. Alison wondered, not for the first time, exactly how many layers of irony he was operating on. “Apparently, no one can see you doing it anyway,” Alison pointed out.
“Donation from JankWilliams,” said Roger. “He’d like to know why we didn’t take the night vision lens off the camera in the van and bring it with us.”
“Great question,” said Beatrice, who apparently hadn’t been listening, as she was busy extricating herself from a particularly thorny part of the undergrowth. “These are the questions for which today’s youth demand answers.”
Alison decided she was doing a poor job of being the adult. She stopped and turned on the two teenagers. “I would really like you to stop livestreaming this,” she said firmly, feeling her status as “one of the cool ones” draining away as she said it. “I’m just worried we’re going to get distracted and lose the suspect.”
She turned back around and discovered, inevitably, that she had lost the suspect.
“Oh, figs,” she muttered, before hurrying to the specific bush she’d last seen Miracle Mum disappearing behind.
When she reached it, there was nothing beyond but another cloud of foliage surrounding another section of overgrown trail, so Alison continued in the same direction, already concocting apologies and picturing the unsympathetic faces of Adam, Elizabeth, and the people of a disappointed nation as she made them. She pushed through the next wall of leaves and almost ran straight into the cave.
The ground was beginning to rise into yet another grassy hill, but this one cracked open at the base as if frozen at the most critical point of stifling a yawn. A wide black zigzag led into a passage running underneath, made all the more obvious by the way the plant life had been pushed aside at the entrance, probably several times in the recent past.
“She must have gone down here,” said Alison, crouching to peer into the darkness. She produced her own phone and turned on the flashlight. “There’s a tunnel. Maybe an old abandoned sewer or underpass or something.”
She glanced back to get Beatrice’s perspective and discovered at that point that she was alone. There was nothing behind her but crowding bushes and the trees that loomed overhead like disapproving playground monitors discovering an illicit game of marbles.
Alison had always been mystified by the concept other people referred to as “being lost,” and of the way it was spoken of with such fear and omen. She was incapable of not knowing where she was. Her eidetic memory ensured that she had a perfect three-dimensional map of her surroundings at all times. At that moment, she knew that Diablerie’s car was parked precisely two hundred and thirteen meters away in a roughly east-southeasterly direction.
And yet, while she didn’t feel “lost,” it was moments like these that made her think she could at least hum along with the idea—with the dwindling daylight barely penetrating the encroaching branches and the dark tunnel entrance in front of her like the expectant grin of a giant monster.
Precious seconds had passed, with Miracle Mum getting farther and farther away into the tunnels to do who knows what, and the teenagers were still nowhere to be seen. Alison had to press on. The alternative was having to explain to Elizabeth that she did nothing to prevent another death because she had felt a little bit scared. She ducked into the cave, keeping one hand over her head to brush away the spiders.
31
It had been ambitious of the Modern Miracle front garden to try to contain the entire congregation, but it was a stonehearted pragmatist compared to the interior of the house. Still, Adam and Rana were able to get inside by being among those members of the crowd with the foresight to politely speed walk closer to the door the moment they noticed signs of the ceremony beginning.
“Shoes off,” said the person directly behind them, mere picoseconds after Adam’s boot made contact with the living room carpet.
“What?” Adam turned to see that everyone coming through the front door behind him was removing their shoes and adding them to an increasingly monolithic pile under the hat stand. The person who had spoken was a young man wearing the inevitable Modern Miracle T-shirt and giving Adam the evil eye through thick spectacles.
“You have to take your shoes off when you come in,” said Rana, who was pulling off her own trainers as she spoke. “Miracle Dad’s rule. You know. Dads.”
Adam conceded that this was indeed characteristic of Dads, and reached for his boot zippers with sad reluctance, knowing it’d be an undignified couple of minutes sitting on the front step when it came time to squeeze his feet back into them.
He glanced around the living room. It was a large space bare of furniture—except for one old couch shoved right up against the far wall—although there were marks, scratches, and outlines on the wallpaper indicating the places where a television and some shelving units might once have stood. The carpet was an inexpensive beige affair that had already been worn down to the depth of a piece of paper, so the no-shoes rule seemed a little academic at that point.
Adam followed Rana’s lead by sitting cross-legged in the middle of the room, allowing the more devout attendees to fill up the front and provide cover—the “front” in this case meaning the part of the room that adjoined the main hall, at the end of which could be seen the door to the ground floor bathroom that served as Miracle Meg’s “altar.” Several identical floor lamps with much of the IKEA about them had been set up to form a walkway to the bathroom door. Each one was wrapped in Christmas lights.
It was all rather tacky, and even more so with Jamie in his wheelchair at the near end of the hallway. It was like watching a cancer patient having to go onto a high-energy Japanese game show to receive chemotherapy.
“All right, Miracle Mob!” said Miracle Dad, breaking off from the little huddle around Jamie to address the audience. “Make yourselves comfortable, we’ll be ready any second to change Jamie’s life.” He turned to one of the orderlies and did a very poor job of lowering his voice. “Can he come out of the wheelchair?”
“Does he have to?” asked the nearest orderly, after the two men took a moment to exchange disbelieving looks.
“Well, you know how it is,” said Miracle Dad, with the usual forced nonchalance of someone realizing in the moment that they had unthinkingly said something horrendous. “El-Yetch, nature goddess. Technology rubs her up the wrong way sometimes, you know. Maybe you could hold him up?”
