This choice: Concentrate on the expedition • Go Back...Chapter #6The Call of Cuthbert by: Seuzz   Cuthbert. A hillbilly town a few hundred miles from your home town. As if that coincidence wasn't enough, it's populated by a few hundred of your distant relations. You wonder if Hyde-White knows that fact; he seems to know so much.
You make the trip in a specially equipped RV, joshing and playing cards with the six-man infiltration crew provided by Project Diana: team leader Paige Knotts; second-in-command Terry Kipper; Desmond White; Sean Cox; Harry Muniz; Peter Stoddard. You've only had a little experience with them, and are a little put off by their escapades, especially when Muniz strips, turns himself into a platinum blonde beach bunny, and gives Kipper a lap dance. You're glad Paige is on hand to ride herd on them. She's may be half the size of Kipper, but she can yell and cuss as loud as them, and she forces them to mostly behave. It embarrasses you a little that she's clearly disciplining them for your benefit; you accidentally lock eyes with her after she forces Muniz to change back into his usual tattooed form, and winks.
But you would rather be with them than in the five chase vehicles with their burly, Nerio-provided crew. The Diana guys unnerve you. Nerio scares you.
Around eleven the driver--who comes courtesy of Spartacus, Fane's special ops team--shouts that the town is only five miles ahead. "Pull over," you order, and grunt your way out of the little dining nook. "Back here, Tabb," you tell the driver once the RV is stopped, and lead him into the tiny bedroom at the back of the vehicle. "I'm gonna be stretched out here. You know how to run the feeding tubes?"
"I'm not an idiot."
"That's not what I asked."
"He's checked out for medical work," Paige says from the doorway. "He can do it."
"Good. Because I'll probably be out for a couple of days, until all this is over, and I don't wanna wake up with scurvy or something. Knotts, radio the car that's got our 'grad students' in it." She barks a laugh: none of the Nerio crew, even in their civilian garb, look like college kids. "Have them follow, swarm out to study the church, but don't go in. They'll get noticed, and I'll send a cop around to investigate. Don't make any overt moves if you don't have to--"
"I know how to run an infiltration, Prescott," she says, rolling her eyes. "Who do you want going in first?"
"You make the call. Yourself, if you can trust your knuckleheads to behave themselves."
"Send me a pretty one." She winks.
"They're none of them pretty. Don't you remember? You did the first recon through the mask."
"No."
"Well I do. I've seen squids that look prettier than the people in this town." Your stomach rumbles unpleasantly, and you belch. You delay the inevitable a few moments longer, then reluctantly crawl onto the bunk. Paige hands you a satchel, and you draw a mask from it. It looks almost exactly like all the other masks you've made or dealt with--except for the sigil on its inner surface. But you know it's safe to wear. Paige Knotts put it on after you'd hazarded a theory about its nature, and she got out of it safely.
"Okay, see you on the other side," you say, and lower it to your face.
* * * * *
You are sitting in a chintzy living room. Your mouth is moving, but the words slur. You grunt and blink.
Mae--one of the mousy girls who keeps house--leans forward cautiously. "Are you alright, Grandmother," she asks.
You were the best at infiltration work, even without training. That's what Julian Dey said. And he's right. It's been years since you've slid into another form, another mind, as part of an impersonation. But almost as soon as you feel the web of Florence Shabbleman's mind materializing around yours, you are scuttling comfortably around it.
"Mind your business, girl," you snap. You grumble again, for she still peers intently at you. "Touch of indigestion," you improvise. "Melody!" you scream, and Mae scrambles back into her chair. "Melody!"
Footsteps, and another girl-- Girl? She's at least fifty. "When's the last time you changed the grease in the fryer?" you ask the girl in the doorway.
"Yesterday, Grandmother." You glare at her balefully, and her eyes drop. "Maybe I didn't scrub it out as well as--"
"Your chicken isn't sitting proper." You fake a belch. "Fetch me my powders. Eyes back on your knitting, Mae," you add as Melody scurries away.
You sigh and sit back, and finger the twin canes with your gnarled hands. Your ample bosom sags before you, resting on your even more ample stomach. Your knees hurt. Your ankles hurt. The joints in your hands throb. You're deaf in one ear, and you can barely see out your piggy eyes for the folds of fat around them. Ninety-something years have treated this body badly, though not as badly as its owner has. You shudder, and all the fat ripples. You feel a headache coming on.
Melody returns with a glass of water and a sugar bowl. You direct as she stirs some of the bowl's contents into the water, and hands it to you. You gulp it down, flinching at the bitter taste. "Help me into the parlor, girl," you say, and struggle to your feet. "I'll watch some stories until it passes."
Melody's support is useless--she touches your enormous arm, when she should be holding you up--and you lurch along slowly on your twin canes. Your swollen feet scream inside the shoes. Step by step you totter out the living room and through the entry way and down the hall to the north parlor, to fall in the chair before the enormous console TV. Melanie turns it on, and adjusts the ancient dials when the fuzzy picture finally appears. She turns it up very loud, but leaves the door open when she leaves.
You settle back in the chair and close your eyes. There's a lot to think about.
There's where you are, for a start: Cuthbert, a mountain town of maybe a few thousand souls, though the misshapen frames of its inhabitants don't look like the kind of creatures that might have souls. They scurry about, scratching out their meager livings by selling and trading their poor goods and services to each other; most of the money for the town comes from the "cash crops" grown in the greenhouses in a nearby valley. The Shabblemans control those crops, but that's not where Florence Shabbleman gets her power. That comes from being that family's matriarch--and because the Shabblemans are intermarried with all the other families, that makes Florence the "grandmother"--or great-grandmother, or great-great-grandmother, or great aunt or cousin of various degrees--to almost everyone in it. Obedience to the matriarch is deeply instilled in the town. And where loyalty doesn't suffice--and in Florence Shabbleman's experience it never does--there is the terror of the arcane arts that she controls.
Arcane arts that Fane would dearly like to seize. Bless Steve Patterson for seeing, in Paige Knotts' report, how valuable they could be, and for deciding to share the report with Project Vulcan.
But first you have to take them.
Seizing control of the mind and body of Florence Shabbleman is the first step, and the product of a stroke of luck. Among the many items that Fane got when it seized the Libra Personae--and you and Patterson--was a mysterious mask discovered by two agents of the Stellae Errantes shortly before you yourself had imprisoned them. Once Fane had it, the conglomerate, acting as usual with commendable caution, had done nothing with it until just a few months ago. By that point, your own mastery of the art of sigil-making and sigil-reading had caught up to it, and when you had some empty days you had taken the mask down and given the sigil inscribed in it a very close reading. "It's a kind of remote control," you'd told Professor Hyde-White. "Somewhere there's another mask--or there was another mask--and if you put this one on, you'll find yourself inside the person who's wearing the other one."
"What if no one is wearing it?" he'd asked.
"Then you'd just have a hunk of occult ceramic sitting on your face," you'd shrugged in reply.
You'd talked a little more about your deductions, and Hyde-White had conferenced with Patterson. A few days later, under close supervision, you'd put the mask onto Paige Knotts, first to test if it worked, and then to explore the person on the other end. She'd returned after an hour with a report about Florence Shabbleman and the town of Cuthbert.
Naturally, the church and the thing in its basement had been the first to catch your attention. There's also that thing out in the barns. And all the stuff inside Grandmother's head.
You could copy down notes, but it would be better to just copy her mind. That's why you also brought along one of the Libra's mind bands. At the conclusion of this adventure, you'll get a copy of her mind and take it along. That'll speed your examination of the loot you'll be taking to London.
"Grandmother?"
You snap your eyes open. Nate Shabbleman, the town constable, is leaning in the doorway. "Sumthin' troublin' yew, Nate?" you ask.
"Strangers in town. Sittin' out by the church, peerin' all over it."
"Who they be?"
"Say they're from some college or other. Ain't takin' my hints."
You peer at him closely. There can't have been time for a substitution to have been made. You have the following choice: 1. Continue |
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