Chapter #97The Wake: Rick's Tale by: imaj   You stare at the bedroom ceiling.
You’ve been lying here for over an hour. Kali hasn’t said anything to you since she came back to the kitchen. Both she and Fyodor have been busy with… busy arranging the funeral you guess. You can’t help but shake the feeling that your last session with Margaret was somehow responsible for her death. Worse, you think that Kali thinks the same.
So you sigh and feel miserable. There’s nothing that you can do, except lie here while everyone else does important things.
Rick’s face appears above you. “Feeling sorry for yourself squirt? Playing nursemaid is more Kali’s speed.”
You prop yourself up on your elbows. “I don’t think she wants to talk to me,” you whine. “I mean, it’s my fault isn’t it?”
“Oh,” replies Rick “Why’d you think that?”
“I was the last one to talk to her,” you explain, your voice creeping upward. “The weird thing is, she looked better than anytime I’d seen her since I got here.”
“First off squirt, Kali was the last one to speak to Margaret,” counters Rick. “Second, you still got a lot to learn about things.”
“Meaning,” you ask.
“Meaning if Margaret died it’s because Margaret decided it was time for her to die.” You stare at Rick blankly. “Christ squirt, I’m no good at explaining all this,” he adds, rubbing at his chin and then licking his dry looking lips. “Look, Lurgas… They have a way of hanging on until they’re good and ready.”
“So she talked to me and wanted to die,” you say bitterly. “I get it.”
“You ain’t making this any easier,” sighs Rick. “Look, you were telling Fyodor how Margaret had gotten your head sorted out. And Kali was here to get her head sorted out. Maybe she got you both fixed and felt that the time was right. I don’t know.” He throws up his hands. “I only came up here to tell to you to come back downstairs,” he says angrily. “We’re… I guess it’s a wake...”
*****
“The function of wake,” lectures Kali, her cheeks stained by tears. “Was to watch or guard over the body of the deceased in the period between death and burial.” It takes you a minute to realise that she isn’t saying this for your benefit. Instead she is talking, lecturing simply for the comfort of doing something familiar. “For members of the Stellae Errantes, this was a doubly vital ritual because there was always the fear of… the fear of the departed’s enemies striking at them before their spirit made its… its way to its reward…” Kali tails off as Fyodor hands her a glass tumbler and sits beside her. He places one giant arm round Kali’s shoulder and hugs her gently. She stifles a sob.
Fyodor works his way round the parlour, handing both you and Rick glasses as well. You grasp it nervously in both hands, unsure exactly what to do in the circumstances. Fyodor returns from the cabinet by the wall moments later with an expensive bottle of scotch. He pours Kali a generous measure and she thanks him with the faintest of smiles. Then it’s your turn, he pours a smaller amount into your tumbler. The amber liquid smells strong and peaty. Finally he turns to Rick.
“Water for me please,” says Rick quietly. You glance at him out of the corner of your eyes. He licks his lips again. “Yes, I’m sure. Water.”
“This is unlike you my friend,” says Fyodor solemnly. He fetches a jug of water from the drinks cabinet and pours some into Rick’s glass, before finally pouring himself another generous measure of the whisky.
“Yeah, well, there’s a story in there says Rick. “I guess in the circumstances it’s appropriate that I tell you.
*****
Rick woke with a scream. The dreams were getting worse and worse.
They started out… Harmless wasn’t the word, and tolerable wasn’t the word either unless you were one sick fuck, but the dreams had started out bearable. The first one, he’d watched some broad getting cut up in an alley somewhere. She’d way too few clothes on, and it had been dark, so Rick had figured she was a hooker. One of the night people that came and went with barely a comment in the city.
Then the dream had repeated. From different angles, sometimes longer, sometimes shorter. He’d seen then that it wasn’t a hooker getting cut, it was a hooker getting cut ritually. The job was getting to him, Rick had thought. It got to everyone, sooner or later. Rick just assumed the little extra work on the side for the Stellae meant it was getting to him faster.
The dreams still hadn’t stopped. When the dream had shown Rick the incident from the attacker’s perspective he had gotten a little spooked. When he’d found out they’d fished out a dead body from the East River that morning cut just the way the broad in his dream had been, he got real spooked.
He’d done he sensible thing and called Sam.
“That’s good Rick,” Sam had said in that folksy twang of his. “Ah reckon it jes’ means your connection to Eldibria is getting strongah.” Sam was Rick’s mentor. He’d been a Bureau man for a while and was retired now, but in Rick’s estimation Sam was a damn fine cop. There weren’t many higher accolades in Rick’s estimation, so when Sam talked Rick listened. “It weren’t you that did it son? Didn’t think so. You see, Eldibria knows the depths and Eldibria know secrets. Sometime he’s gonna share some of them secrets with you son.”
But the dreams hadn’t gotten better, the opposite in fact. Now he dreamed about the hooker’s lifeless body being dragged to the river and dumped unceremoniously. That wasn’t the worst of it, Rick was being dragged in with her.
Rick couldn’t swim, not that it mattered in the dream. The current would drag him down. Down past the banks, down past the abandoned shopping carts and other detritus that people piled into the river. Down and down, impossibly deep for it felt like he travelled for miles. In Rick’s dream he flailed and floundered, his lungs filled with water as he had passed things that hadn’t swam in the oceans for aeons.
At the far bottom it had found him, the monster of his dreams. Crushing tentacles and a crusted shell, a maw like beak filled with row upon row of needle like teeth. The creature had wrapped a tentacle around Rick, but it hadn’t crushed him, or delivered it to that snapping jaw. It had just held Rick gently until he woke up.
By that point the dreams were affecting his work. He was tired and irritable, his face haggard and he was going without shaving. His buddies had noticed it. Rick persevered though, because Sam had told him to and because the job was important to him. When he first saw one of the creature’s tentacles in his waking life, drifting out from a side alley, he’d chased off after it, leaving his partner trailing behind him. The tentacle had led him to a second hooker’s body, cut the same way as the first.
“There’s someone that can help you,” Sam had said when Rick had phoned him that night. “Name of Margaret Dillon. Jes’ get yourself a couple of weeks leave and get yourself to England.”
And now Rick was here, in Oxford, England. He hated every minute of it. The Dillon woman just sat and stared at him as he talked. He would have to explain his latest dream to her.
“It was my old man,” Rick had told her. “He came in stinking drunk, like he used to when I was a little older. I thought he was going to beat on my mom, but his eyes started to bulge, his hair fell out and his skin turned scaly. Like he was some sort of sea monster.” Rick had sighed when Margaret had said nothing as usual. “You know, I used to respect him. The old man, I mean. He was a beat cop and when I was just a little squirt I wanted nothing more than to be just like him – catching bad guys, protecting the innocent. The job got to him. I think he started drinking just to dull the pain. Later on it became habit to him. I swore I’d never end up like that.”
“Drinking helped him forget,” Margaret had asked at that point. “Should he have stopped?”
“Sure,” Rick had answered. “Once he knew how to forget without it.” Rick had hesitated then, he’d felt as if something was crystallising around him. “Is that it.” He’d asked. “I need a crutch, just to get used to what Eldibria wants to show me?”
*****
“And that’s it,” says Rick, draining the last of his water. “Margaret helped me cope with Eldibria. The drink dulls my senses and I see with my subconscious rather than my own eyes. I’ve always felt a little guilty that I haven’t been able to put that crutch aside, but I guess I owed it to Margaret tonight.” He makes a gesture with his glass and Fyodor brings the jug of water back over.  You have the following choice: 1. Continue |
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