Phantom Pains Read online

  “Shall we?” Caryl said with a tilt of her head toward the door.

  I patted the heavy key ring clipped to my belt, giving it a jingle. “Let’s.”

  As we took the stairs down to the lobby, she watched the way I descended step over step at a relatively normal pace and gave me a raised eyebrow. “You’re hardly touching the rail,” she said.

  “I’m a lot slower going up,” I said, taking a compliment with my usual lack of grace.

  Outside, perfectly parallel to and equidistant from the white lines in the parking lot, was Caryl’s midnight-blue SUV. I smiled a little wistfully as we walked past it, remembering the day she’d made it disappear.

  “How are things?” I said to fill the silence. We didn’t need to confer about where we were headed; it loomed like an event horizon.

  “Which things?”

  “Arcadia Project things.”

  “Every day is full of things, Millie. I wouldn’t know where to start.”

  “How is everyone at Residence Four?”

  Caryl paused. “Residence Four is a problem,” she said.

  “Still shorthanded? I thought by now you’d have replaced Gloria and everyone.”

  Her eyes flicked toward me; aside from me there were two people missing, and the name I hadn’t said hung between us. Teo. My partner that week, and Caryl’s best friend.

  To my relief, she didn’t say the name either, and her eyes slid away. “I have not found suitable replacements. Hiring is always difficult. And Tjuan has been too ill to work, meaning that Phil and Stevie—”

  “Tjuan’s sick? What’s wrong with him?”

  She glanced at me again and said nothing.

  “Right, I’m sorry, none of my business. I’m just—it’s not serious, is it? Do you mean physically ill or—?”

  Caryl shook her head. “A relapse of sorts, brought on by the events here.”

  Tjuan had been there when they’d died too. Gloria had been his partner. “I’m so sorry,” I said. “Tell him I send my sympathies.”

  Not that he’d care; we hadn’t been close. I had no idea what his diagnosis was. Everyone at the Arcadia Project had some sort of sketchy mental health history, but we weren’t supposed to talk about it unless people felt like sharing. Tjuan had not.

  The soundstage blocked the sun as we approached, throwing us into its shadow. I shivered and wished I hadn’t left my jacket hanging over the back of my chair.

  “So it’s just Phil and Stevie then,” I said, unclipping my key ring from my belt and sorting through it.

  “And Song,” Caryl reminded me.

  I flinched a little at the Residence manager’s name; I’d treated her pretty badly and for no good reason. “Agents, I mean. Two people to manage everyone coming through that Gate.”

  “We’ve diverted some of the travelers to LA5 in Burbank, but it’s still not going well. Phil has risen to the occasion fairly well, but Stevie isn’t suited for some of her new responsibilities, and there is only so much one man can do.”

  “I don’t suppose National is coming to help?”

  “Certainly not. They only appointed me in the first place because they had no other options, and they’ve been looking for an excuse to replace me ever since. This visit is clearly part of the twice-yearly lockdown the Project does before the—” She hesitated. “As you’re not an employee, suffice it to say that at this time of year, any potential security weaknesses are shored up or eliminated. It seems I have been identified as such a weakness.”

  “Is there anything I can do?”

  “No.”

  We were standing at the bottom of a short flight of steps now, looking up at the door that had nearly killed her. It wasn’t cursed anymore; the excess iron in my body had ruptured the lethal spellwork when I’d touched it back in June. But the memory was fresh.

  “You saved my life by killing her,” Caryl said, sounding bored. She always sounded bored. “I never thanked you.”

  “You were a little busy,” I said. “Plus, you’d specifically ordered me not to kill her. I don’t think you were in a thanking mood.” I climbed the steps, leading with my only remaining knee, and Caryl followed.

  I unlocked the door and pushed it open, then switched on the floodlights. Rather than build an entirely new studio, Valiant had moved into a derelict one in Manhattan Beach, tearing down only those buildings that were beyond repair. Stage 13 was one of the oldest remaining structures; its lights flickered fitfully for a full three minutes before settling into a dull, steady glow.

  “The paintings are still here,” Caryl observed, looking around. The walls of the soundstage were covered with a gorgeous mural that made it look like a desert landscape. It had been painted by iconic, now-retired director David Berenbaum and was probably worth a fortune; Inaya and I had gone several rounds about whether or not it would all have to go.

  “According to Inaya,” I said, “no one’s come in here since David heard some weird whispers during cleanup. We’ve been waiting for you to give the all clear.”

  “I have been seeing Dr. Davis again,” said Caryl, not a direct response but a sort of oblique apology. “For post-traumatic stress.”

  I was stunned. “She never said anything.”

  “Of course she wouldn’t.”

  “We have the same therapist? That’s kind of awesome.”

  Caryl tugged on the cuff of one of her gloves, then looked around. “The good news is, I see absolutely no traces of lingering spellwork. All the same, I’d like to take a look at the Gate. Has anyone damaged it on this end to prevent further attempts at transit?”

  “No, we haven’t touched it.”

  “I’d be alarmed by its remaining open, but the census hasn’t shown any activity, and it’s fairly well locked down on the Arcadian side due to—recent unrest on that side of the border.”

  “No one can get in the building on this side,” I reassured her. “Only I have the key.” I shuddered and followed her deeper in.

  When we’d been here before, the Gate had been disguised as a well in the center of an 1850s-style ghost town. Now it was a large, perfectly circular hole in the floor of a cavernous empty room. The buildings, the sand, the decaying bell tower; all of it had been in our minds, suggested by the murals and a few painted cardboard flats long since taken down. Real Hollywood magic.

  Caryl and I approached the hole. The crates that had been stacked around it to keep people from stumbling in, as well as the crank used for lowering a platform into it, were gone; David had apparently disposed of them before pissing off to an emu ranch. The floodlights penetrated only about ten feet down into the darkness.

  “I can’t figure out how we’d disassemble it,” I said. “Is there even a bottom?”

  “Certainly,” said Caryl. “The trapped fey were sitting on it, remember? The shaft is a perfectly normal cylindrical shape; the illusion of infinite depth comes from the fact that the space bounded by the circumference is interdimensional, and the visual cortex cannot process the paradox. Removing a single piece would create enough difference between the two structures to keep them from merging along the v-axis and transform it into an ordinary hole in the ground.”

  “Right, of course.”

  If she noticed my sarcasm, she paid no attention to it, circling the well and looking down it meditatively.

  I was about to ask her another question when the floodlights flickered and the muscles along my spine tightened. I had the sudden dismaying thought that Naderi had followed us in, and I turned.

  Teo stood there, half in shadow.

  You hear, sometimes, about being “frozen” with fear. I’d had no idea what it meant until that moment. My skin went icy; I was paralyzed; speaking was impossible.

  There was no moment where I mistook him for living; I could see the mural behind him through the slouch of his shoulders. He held his pocketknife clutched in his right hand, its blade dark and dripping. His left wrist spurted erratic pulses of blood. Stringy hair and shadow v
eiled his eyes; his lips were gray and pressed thin.

  I tried to say his name, but my muscles still weren’t working. I managed to feebly move the arm nearest to Caryl, to clutch the edge of her sweater and tug a little.

  She turned to look at me and instantly stepped back. “Millie, what’s happening?”

  I weakly pointed toward the apparition; he was about fifteen feet away, still motionless.

  “What is it?” asked Caryl, looking where I was looking. “Millie, whatever you’re seeing, it isn’t real. Something must have—”

  “Teo,” I said. “It’s Teo’s ghost.”

  “There are no such things as ghosts, Millie. The Arcadia Project has thoroughly investigated all reports of—”

  “I’m looking right at him!”

  Teo dropped his knife. I heard it clatter to the floor, almost felt the vibration in the floorboards. He swayed slightly, as though about to fall, and my fear was replaced with a sudden rush of pained tenderness. I started toward him but felt Caryl’s gloved hand close around my elbow.

  “There is a spell cast upon you,” she said, releasing me as soon as I’d stopped. “Psychic spellwork; I can see its fabric. What I cannot see, however, is a caster. Another of Vivian’s metaspells?”

  Vivian was the mantis-woman I’d killed. She could do some crazy fractal shit with magic, as I had unfortunate cause to know.

  “But no,” Caryl continued. “There was no fabric here before, not anywhere. Unless it’s somehow hidden in the well.”

  “It’s Teo!”

  “Close your eyes,” she said.

  I did and instantly saw what she meant. Teo was still there. As though painted on the back of my fucking eyelids. I started to cry. “Make it stop, Caryl.”

  “I can’t,” she said. “You can’t either, as there is no physical anchor point for the fabric, nothing for you to touch. Perhaps if you leave the area—”

  She didn’t have to say that twice; I bolted for the door.

  “Millie!”

  Not Caryl’s voice calling after me, but Teo’s. It stopped me in my tracks. It sounded just like him, reverberated the way his voice would have in the empty space.

  Somehow he was still fifteen feet in front of me, head bowed, arms slack.

  I stared through him at the soundstage door, and then my gaze moved to the posse of mounted cowboys painted on the wall beside it, the ones a spell had made me think were riding me down four months ago. It’s just like that, I tried to tell my panicked self. It’s not real.

  “Don’t leave,” said Teo softly toward the floor.

  “I’m sorry,” I said aloud, weak and hoarse.

  “It’s not Teo,” said Caryl’s voice behind me. “Teo is gone.”

  My sadness had now completely overwhelmed my fear, not that it was a vast improvement.

  Teo slowly lifted his head, and the light showed me his eyes, the sleepless shadows under them. “Everyone always leaves,” he said.

  “They fired me,” I choked out. “I had no choice.”

  “Not then,” he said. “Here. You left me here, bleeding out.”

  I sucked in a breath like I’d plunged my arm into ice water.

  “Remember that day in the car?” he said. “You told me you were different. That you weren’t going anywhere.”

  “Oh God,” I whispered, squeezing my eyes shut, for all the good that did. “Teo, I meant it. I did. I wanted—”

  Words abandoned me. I felt the way I imagined Elliott feeling when Caryl’s emotions started to overload him. There were a thousand tiny cracks in me about to give way, and when the pressure broke, it would end me.

  “It’s too late,” I finally said. “I can’t do anything for you now.”

  “Let me in,” he said.

  My eyes opened. That wasn’t a very Teo thing to say at all. My skepticism was like a breeze dispersing a fog.

  Then I felt a hand on the back of my neck, and I screamed.

  3

  Even as I whirled around, I realized the hand on my neck had been warm, and that it was Caryl’s.

  She’d taken off one of her gloves, and she stood there with tears streaming down her cheeks, her eyeliner smudged, her face as open as a child’s. She’d dismissed Elliott, or he’d broken.

  She reached for me again, put her bare hand to my cheek, on the good side with all the unscarred nerve endings. It wasn’t magic, but it may as well have been. I could still see Teo fifteen feet in front of me, but the warmth of her palm against my skin made me feel I was listening to two songs at once.

  It was enough. As though the phantom had been feeding on my undivided misery, it vanished.

  “Thank God,” I said. “It’s gone. How did you do that?”

  Her eyes slid away from me, but she left her hand on my cheek. “I didn’t expect that it would end the spell; I just—skin contact is calming.”

  “It doesn’t seem to be calming you,” I said, looking down at her.

  “It’s difficult for me,” she said, her voice even rougher than usual. “Everything is difficult for me.”

  “I know,” I said, taking her hand from my cheek and holding it. “I know, sweetie. Did Elliott break?”

  “I dismissed him so that he would not.”

  “That means you can get him right back. It’s okay. Let’s go outside.” I reached out with my free hand to wipe the tears from her cheeks, and she closed her eyes.

  “I love you,” she said.

  I resisted the instinctive shock of warmth that tried to wipe out my higher thought and looked away, blowing hair from my face. “You’re going to be so embarrassed when you sober up.” I tugged at her hand, leading her to the door.

  “I do, though,” she persisted as we left the soundstage. “I didn’t say it when I had the chance. If I had, would you have come back?”

  “Caryl, don’t,” I said. “You are nineteen fucking years old, if that, and I am a really poor choice for a first crush.”

  The fresh air was more than welcome; it was a gorgeous crisp day. Even though the seasons don’t change in L.A. quite the same way they do back east, there’s still a palpable shift in the atmosphere in October; a subtle autumnal clarity. I didn’t want to sit down, but I wanted her to sit down, so we sat. She fell against me, but when I put my arms around her, she tensed and pulled away.

  “Sorry,” I said. “Your claustrophobia thing.”

  “Don’t be sorry,” she said, sliding her hands into her hair as though her head were about to burst. “I’m such a mess, I can’t—”

  “I know, sweetie. Call Elliott back.”

  “I don’t want to.”

  “What? Caryl, you have to. You can’t figure out what to do about the soundstage if you’re freaking out.”

  “You have to listen to me,” she said with the kind of profound urgency only teenagers and Borderlines can feel. “I really do love you.” She searched my eyes, and then hers brimmed over again. “But you don’t. I thought maybe you did.”

  Please let this be a really surreal, awful dream. “Caryl, I’ve got borderline personality disorder. Even if I did return your feelings, this would not be some sunset happy ending. It’s going to take years of therapy, probably, before I can trust myself not to abuse you.”

  “You’re evading the question,” she said, sounding a little more like her adult self despite the wobble in her voice.

  “I can’t think about you like that,” I said. “You’re a child.”

  “I’ll be twenty in January.”

  “That’s exactly the sort of thing a child would say.”

  “If I were older? If I weren’t—broken?”

  I shrank against the stair railing. “God, Caryl, don’t do this! You’re going to force the issue right here? Now? After that?”

  That silenced her for a moment, but then she set her jaw. “Just say it. Don’t treat me like a child. Say you don’t love me.”

  Before I even quite knew what I was doing I seized her head between my hands, holding her
at arm’s length.

  “I will never say that,” I said. “I killed someone for hurting you. So shut up. If you pushed me, I’d probably sleep with you. But then I’d treat you like shit and leave you, because that’s what I do. So don’t put your fragile little eggs in my fucked-up basket, all right?”

  She tried to draw away, looking frightened, and I released her.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, putting my hands in my lap. I was suddenly acutely aware of how awkwardly my prosthetic legs were sprawled on the steps.

  Caryl began to murmur unsteadily under her breath in a language I didn’t understand: the dark, nauseating cadence of the Unseelie tongue. A breath of foul air swept over us, and then her face became expressionless. She wiped the last traces of moisture carefully from her cheeks and lashes.

  “I apologize for that,” she said. “I’ve been having trouble with the Elliott construct recently. It may be a side effect of the trauma in June.”

  It could give a girl whiplash, watching Caryl switch back and forth from child to adult. Now she was all elegance again, except for the smudged eyeliner. As irony would have it, I found her suddenly and devastatingly sexy.

  “What kind of trouble?” I asked.

  “My emotions seem almost to be rebelling against constraint. The construct has begun to display behavior that makes no sense.”

  Normally the little illusory dragon served as a visual indicator of what she was feeling. If she was sad, he drooped. If she was happy, he flew in exuberant loops.

  “What kind of things is he doing?”

  “He gets agitated around Tjuan, for example. Or sometimes goes completely haywire and attacks me.”

  “That’s disturbing.”

  “To say the least.”

  “Is there some kind of expert in familiars, someone who could help you sort it out?”

  “I consulted with Mr. Spielberg, but—”

  “Mr. Spielberg. Steven.”

  “Yes, Steven; it was the very devil to get a meeting with him, but he’s the only other practitioner on this side of the country. He said the problem likely isn’t with the spellwork; it’s with my emotions. He’s the one who suggested I seek therapy.”