First Interlude Gwen, Underfoot #4
shining silver hilt of a sword, the sword of a king, and his chin rested upon it. The blade was pointed straight down, probably
buried in the floor. The black muslin over his eyes was semitransparent, and he seemed to be drowsing. His tunic was made
of the same rough, black stuff.
In the big shard on the right-hand side she could see the door to the hall, slowly yawning open once more.
A night sky waited on the other side, a vast darkness filled with cold, ancient stars.
The butterflies in the shadow boxes began to twitch and shiver, and then one by one they lifted free, sliding off their pins and flying in a bright, whispering storm to escape into the Long Dark.
And that was when she knew her task. She had to look after the dead until they were ready to carry a message of fire to King Sorrow.
In the sliver of glass in the crotch of the Y, she could see herself, and her eyes had become the yellow, slitted eyes of
the serpent. Her reflection threw her a wink and sent her on her way.
10.
Colin had a twelve-page handout, stapled at one corner, for each of them. The first page was a spreadsheet, with a row of
names running down the left. Other columns noted age, current place of residence (if known), crimes suspected or confirmed,
and a number ranging from 1 to 100 that described “Ongoing Threat Valence.” Most were in the 90s, although a small number
were in the middle 50s, and one, an incarcerated child murderer, scored a mere 12.
He was brisk, sunny, and all business. Gwen’s mother had made a pot of tea and fluffy, buttery biscuits for their “study session.”
The curtains were pulled back from the French windows and the room was flooded with daylight. The way they sat around the
card table, they might’ve been at a meeting for a charitable foundation, gathered to decide how best to distribute their money.
Arthur, just back from Vermont that morning, began turning through the pages with a crease of concentration—or maybe bewilderment—between
his eyebrows. He looked as if he had been presented with an exam for which he had, uncharacteristically, forgotten to prepare.
Van pushed the handout away. “I’m too sober for this.”
Colin looked amused. “It’s one in the afternoon.”
“No, it isn’t,” Van said. “It’s murder o’clock. Drinkin’ time.”
“Dragonedy o’clock,” Allie murmured.
Van walked around to the bar. “Anyone else?”
“Me too! Me too!” Allie bounced on her stool and waved one hand.
Van found beers in the mini-fridge and opened them with his back to the rest of the group.
Donna said, “Gilbert Carmichael Quinn. Let’s do him.”
Colin frowned, looked at the first page of the handout.
“He’s not on the list,” Colin said.
“No,” Donna said. “He’s in Powledge Prison, in Texas, for possession of child pornography. Back in 1979 he kidnapped my best
friend, raped and strangled her, and left her in a ditch.”
Van drank half a Dos Equis, then lowered the bottle and said, “Fuck he did.”
Donna turned odd, watery, burning eyes on her brother. “He confessed. Told one of his cellmates all the details.”
“Jailhouse snitch don’t mean nothin’. Some old boy looking to knock a couple years off his sentence by throwing a perv under
the bus. I mean, you want to blast this Quinn dude off the face of the earth, be my guest. He’s sixty-two, he’s got diabetes
so bad they had to amputate one foot, and he’s never getting out of jail, but suit yourself. Only don’t kid yourself he’s
the one took Cady. It was looked into. Twelve hours before Cady got took, Quinn was in Los Angeles, hitching his semi to a
load of bananas going to Denver.” He said it Los Anga-lees.
“If he didn’t do it to her, he did it to some other child,” Donna said. “Count on it.”
Van shrugged. “Whatever.”
Allie snuck her hand over to take Donna’s, but Donna twisted her wrist and pulled away.
“How do we do this?” Arthur asked. He went back to the beginning of the handout and then slowly leafed through the pages once more. “Do we hold a vote? Are we all going to raise our hands for the person we most want to see dead?”
“We could put their pictures on the wall and throw darts,” Allie said.
“You go to church every weekend, Allie. You sing in the choir. You believe in salvation and mercy. How do you stay so damn
perky?”
Allie said, “Alcohol.”
“Should we go through,” Colin said, “and discuss each in turn?”
Donna looked at Gwen. “My vote is for Gilbert Carmichael Quinn.” She tossed the handout, got to her feet, and went around
to the bar to fix herself a drink.
Colin looked forlorn. “Gee, I worked on this thing all week. How dumb am I?” He looked at Arthur and Gwen hopefully. “Do you
guys want to talk through the options?”
“It’s a lot to take in,” Arthur said, in a slow, unhappy voice. “You’ve definitely found some first-rate bastards here. And
all men!”
“I thought this first time,” Colin said, “it might be too psychologically stressful to wipe out another woman. Maybe in a
few years?”
“A few years,” Arthur repeated, dismally. “A few years of picking people to die.”
For once Colin looked fatigued. “It’s the nature of the beast . . . quite literally, Arthur. There’s no good option here,
only the possibility of settling on a bad option we can live with. There’s no such thing as an ethical murder. Might as well
believe in unicorns.”
“Or dragons,” Arthur said, and laughed without humor.
Gwen folded up the handout. “Thank you, Colin. I know you worked hard on this. I’m going to give it a good close look now.”
Colin offered her a smile that seemed to mix gratitude and relief. “I hope it helps. In the end, I suppose it’s going to be
up to you.”
11.
Gwen was putting their teacups in the dishwasher when Arthur came looking for her.
“Did you just clean up after us?” he asked.
“I had to come through here anyway before I go up to sit with Mr. Wren.”
“Colin and them treat you like the help,” he said. He glanced past her into the dishwasher and saw his own mug. “Christ. I treat you like the help.”
“I’m on the payroll now,” she said. Like her mother. Like her mother before her and her mother before her.
“Who are you going to pick?”
“I don’t know. How could I know? Colin just gave me twelve pages of homework.”
“Maybe I can help. Maybe we can find someplace to do your homework together?”
“With our clothes off?” she asked.
“Shit,” he said, and looked away and laughed.
“I can’t,” Gwen said. “I have to sit with Mr. Wren until five, then get out to Gogan so Tana can get to work.”
“Are we still a thing?” he asked, without looking at her.
Her insides seemed to squeeze together in a sudden shock of feeling. She wanted to hug him, she wanted to kiss him, she was
scared of him, she was scared of the future, she wanted to be pressed naked against him, she wanted to be holding his hand,
she wanted to know the right thing to say, she wanted to think, she couldn’t think. Being in love was such a complication
of emotion, it made a person feel half-drunk and half-sick and half-giddy, which was three halves, but math went to shit when
you cared for someone the way she cared for Arthur.
He had written her two letters a month for almost half a year.
She kept them all together, folded into the front of a book of Sunday crosswords, and sometimes when she was feeling lonesome had to get them out and look at them again, even though they made her eyes sting with emotion.
He signed all those letters “love.” She knew that was a formality, like signing a letter “regards” or “best,” but she wanted to believe it meant more, felt it was his way of saying it without really risking saying it, which suited her fine. She didn’t dare say it herself.
“You’re there and I’m here,” she said. “But there’s still an ‘us,’ if that’s what you’re asking.”
“Oxford was a mistake,” he said, quietly. “It’s the kind of mistake you can only stumble into when you figured your life out
at twelve years old and refuse to deviate from the plan. I was going to show them they fucked up when they didn’t hire my
father. I was going to get my master’s and then I was going to get hired there and then I was going to have the chair they
should’ve given my dad, the chair they gave C. S. Lewis. I could see it in my head, how it would be. Psyching myself up. But
when I was twelve I didn’t know about you. I don’t think I’m going to finish my thesis.”
“You have to,” she said. “You’ll regret it if you don’t.”
“I’ve had five months to learn plenty about what I regret.”
She had not felt so lightheaded, so muddled up, since the night she caught a contact high off Colin’s blue weed and they summoned
the serpent. She was telling him to stay because it felt like the right thing to do, but she didn’t want him to stay, didn’t
care about Oxford. In her mind, the whole school smelled like an old man: farts and wet tweed.
“What’s your thesis about, anyway?” she asked.
“Dragons,” he said, and laughed. “They’re everywhere, when you start to look for them, especially in England. They’re on money
and flags and stained-glass windows. What I was wondering, is there a way to stop King Sorrow from hurting anyone ever again?
I was just curious, but suddenly it seems like something we might want to know. Maybe I’ll find some old book leading me to
a sword jammed into a stone.”
“You want to read up on dragons,” Gwen said, “you might want to make a stop in Boston before you sally back to Old Blighty.”
“What’s in Boston?”
“The Enoch Crane journal,” she said, and then, when she saw the look on his face, added, “Maybe. There’s some old bag, Bridget Fleming, slings books out of her apartment. She sounds like if lung cancer had a Boston accent.”
Arthur looked taken aback. She might’ve just told him she had decided to marry Colin.
“There was more in that book,” Arthur said.
“I know there was.”
Neither of them said what they were both thinking: that Enoch Crane had written about how to drive King Sorrow away, be rid
of him. Maybe even how to kill him.