Firemaggot (Windrose Chronicles) Read online

  “Unless you’re planning on driving yourself back there,” said Joanna, “you’re going to have to—Damn it,” she added, as a knock thumped loudly on the door. “If that’s the real estate agent again with another paper to sign—” She yanked the backing from an adhesive panel, laid it as gently as she could over the shallow gash just above Antryg’s left elbow. He gasped again and reached for the rum-bottle as Joanna crossed the dark living-room (Ours! All ours!)…

  She flicked on the porch light, and opened the door.

  A very large man stood there in a blue uniform bearing the logo, HOLDFAST SECURITY. In his holster he had a very large gun.

  “Who are you?” he asked, without preamble. “And what the hell is in that maze? It’s done something to my partner. I gotta know what.”

  *

  His name, he said, was Enrique Saldana – “My friends call me Ricky.” In the glare of the dining-room light he seemed younger than he had on the porch. “Please believe me,” he added, looking worriedly from Antryg to Joanna with somber brown eyes, “Che – Officer Esparza – would never have opened fire like that—”

  “Were there just the two of you on duty?” Antryg’s deep velvet voice drawled a little over the rum.

  “Yeah. That’s not enough for that big a place, but both sides on the lawsuit are running out of money—”

  “And did you fire at us?”

  “Jesus, no!”

  “Then I’m afraid we have either an inescapable conclusion, or an unexplained situation.”

  “It’s not that.” Saldana waved as if to clear away their prejudices at being fired upon. “Che, you couldn’t shake him if you turned an army of chimpanzees loose on that rancho with uzi’s. But he’s changed. He’s… He’s weird.”

  Antryg’s gray eyes – normally wide and inquiring behind the Coke-bottle lenses – narrowed sharply. “And what makes you think the maze has something to do with it?”

  The guard considered him a little uncertainly. As well he might, reflected Joanna: the Godzilla earrings and the strings of beads – silver, plastic, cowrie-shell – around his throat combined oddly with the mop of graying curls and the sword-scars on his bare chest and arms. He countered with, “Why were you two trying to get into that maze?”

  Joanna might conceivably have been one of Firemaggot’s die-hard fans – the ones who faithfully trailed Danny Seven, Ted Blitzkreig, and whoever their backup du jour was these days to county fairs, revival shows, and the occasional Vegas gig for the ten-thousandth re-play of “Torment.” Antryg, though clearly not from this universe, had not the air of a man who had nothing to do but obsess about a band that had broken up ten years before.

  “What do you know about it?”

  “Nothing,” said Antryg. “We were going in to find out.”

  “Don’t.” Saldana took a sip of the coffee that Joanna had nuked when he’d turned down Antryg’s offer of some of the rum; Antryg accepted a cup of it as well. “Whatever’s in there — I swear to God, these last two months I’ve started to worry about what’s going to happen when one or the other of The Daemon’s wives finally gets hold of the property, and opens it up.”

  “Did Officer Esparza go into the maze?” asked Joanna.

  “Well, we all did,” Saldana explained. “I mean, it wasn’t – Holdfast took over the Misselthwaite contract from Ventura Shore Security two years ago, in ’85. It was mostly to keep the kids out – you know there’s always people who’re going to want to see where somebody died. The gate’s kept locked, but these sort of shrines that will appear outside it: flowers and album jackets and photographs and… what the hell was the deal with the giant worm?”

  “That was their logo,” Joanna explained. “The Conquorer Worm that transforms and purifies all flesh and frees the spirit to continue its journey … the Firemaggot, in fact.”

  “They took a giant worm for their band symbol?”

  “A giant flaming worm,” corrected Joanna. “It was the ‘Seventies.”

  Saldana rolled his eyes.

  “That Rolling Stone article you found about Firemaggot.” Antryg, who had re-opened the assessor’s map, looked up from it now. “Where did it say The Daemon got the name for the band? From a dream, wasn’t it?”

  “I think so, yeah. He saw the Firemaggot, he said: the thing that awaits us all at the end of time.”

  “Sweet,” sighed the guard.

  “Technically accurate, I suppose, depending upon whether one’s relatives choose to have one buried or creamated – which was The Daemon, by the way?”

  Joanna glanced at Officer Saldana, who shook his head and shrugged.

  “I never found out,” she admitted. She pulled forward the pile of her notes, the accumulation of three weeks of spare-time research in the Los Angeles Public Library and the Records Office of Ventura County, laboriously combing through micro-fiche and micro-film files where they existed, and photocopying reams of articles and records where they didn’t. Added to that were about three hundred pages of printed-out responses from the various ARPANet boards she’d trolled, and on top of the stack, an old Sixteen Magazine she’d found in a used-book store: that iconic shot of Firemaggot in their burning heyday, The Daemon (no last name – although in the legal battles that had followed his death, it had come out that he’d been baptized Harold Nedwick) fallen to his knees before the wall of speakers, his bare, muscled arms stretched skyward, back arched, naked torso glistening with sweat, long red-streaked hair flying in the blaze of backlights in that second before the curtain of fire swelled between band and audience. Immediately beneath it lay the People magazine account of his death in 1980, with late pictures of that crumpled, emaciated face, burning green eyes already sinking into sleepless bruises, looking closer to fifty than to thirty—

  And the still-more-disheartening “Where are they now?” shots of the other band-members on their ever-recurring Reunion Tours, with an overweight Danny Seven trying to squeeze himself into The Daemon’s iconic leather jeans.

  “As late as ’82 three of the wives were still in court trying to sort out who would be the executor of his estate, and his body was in a holding-tomb at Forest Lawn. Wife Number Two – and his sister, I think – were insisting on cremation, and Wife Number Five wanted to build a tomb à la Graceland, So those whose lives he touched could visit him—and stop by the gift shop on their way out, I’m guessing. By that time everybody was tired of reporting it, and I couldn’t find anything that said what finally happened to the corpse.”

  “And the manor originally belonged to a movie-star, didn’t it?” Antryg murmured.

  “Emily Violet,” provided Saldana, with unexpected enthusiasm in his voice. “She was in the silent films. She named the place after her favorite storybook, Che told me. There’s still this big statue of her in the greenhouse at the back, dressed up like some Roman goddess. She was pretty,” he added with a smile. “The whole house musta been beautiful, before it got so run down. Does it say in any of those articles—” He nodded, with an expression of doubt, toward the heap of photocopies and maps on the table, “—that when The Daemon was in High School he worked there?”

  Antryg’s eyebrows shot up, almost comically; Joanna said, “It said he grew up near there—”

  “He was one of the gardeners,” provided the young man with a grin. “That would’ve been in ’64 or ’65—”

  “So he’d have known the place,” said Antryg. “Interesting. And if he was a gardener, he’d have been in the maze. When was that maze laid out, Joanna?”

  “Forty-one.” After ten months of living in Los Angeles, Antryg’s grasp of dates – much less their cultural implications – was still shaky. “Before that there was a formal rose-garden, with a belvedere in the center. Then Emily Violet had it re-arranged in the ‘Fifties—”

  “Yes.” His long, crooked fingers floated across the photocopied map. He turned in the chair to look for his Army jacket, then seemed to remember he’d left the garment thrown over the barbed wire
of the compound fence; leaned across to the pile on the table, to get another copy of the map The Daemon’s contractors had submitted in ’76, when the fountains had been put in. He held the two designs together, curious chains of rings and angles, pools and pits, lines of pillars and wide beds labelled broken glass, copper, salt…

  Nothing like the classic labyrinth of ancient design, or the Elizabethan hedge-mazes popular among the rich in the ‘teens and ‘20s.

  And some of those very strange design elements had been put in by Emily Violet in the ‘50s.

  Ricky Saldana asked again, quietly, “So what do you know about that maze?”

  Antryg replied, just as softly, “Tell me about your partner. Why did he shoot at us?”

  The young man looked aside. “I swear to God he’s not that kind of man! I worked with him two years, three years – he’s the salt of the earth. He’s the one who got me to go back to school, make somethin’ of myself, so I’m not gonna be a security guard all my life. I’d trust him with my life.”

  Antryg picked up one of his pinwheels from among the litter on the table, blew gently on it so the wheel flashed and sparkled as it spun. “And he’s changed, since you’ve been working at Misselthwaite?”

  For a moment Joanna didn’t think their guest would answer. They’ll do anything to go on protecting it, Antryg had said. That’s what mutandion do. The young man sat with hands folded around the coffee-cup, looking like he wanted to keep his friend’s troubles to himself. Then he said, “You know, you don’t notice at first? You just think, like it’s a bad night or whatever. We been working nights there since March, when they cut back security. I asked to take nights ‘cause I can come straight from school. Che took it ‘cause he wanted to send his daughter to dance camp, and we get time-and-a-half. Like I said, the people who try to break in are mostly just kids – or fans who aren’t kids, putting up these little shrines by the gate of the maze. Mostly it’s the swing guys who get them, and mostly they try to get in on The Daemon’s birthday, which was the ninth of June, or the anniversary of the day they found his body, which was the twelfth of September—”

  “Not the day he died?” Even as the words came out of her mouth Joanna realized what the reply was going to be— “How long had he been dead when they found him?”

  “Couple days, they said.”

  “So he must have been the only one with a key to the maze.” Antryg spun the pinwheel again, with his forefinger this time. “Curious, out in the hills like that, that searchers weren’t alerted by carrion-birds. When did your friend start spending more time in the maze?”

  “Musta been May, June—” Saldana startled then, and looked swiftly at Antryg. “How’d you know—”

  “Never mind that,” Antryg replied. “With forty acres of grounds to patrol I imagine it would have been weeks before you noticed anything odd.”

  “He’d disappear,” said the guard unhappily. “Usually we’d stay in touch—” His fingers brushed the hand-sized walkie-talkie holstered at his belt, “—just the usual, Everything quiet here, how’s your end, when the hell they gonna get rid of those stupid-ass uniforms on the Sox…? That kind of thing. Then I wouldn’t hear from him for a couple hours. Sometimes I’d check – Everything okay? And he’s like, Okay-fine, and switch off. But I’d make my rounds, and see little stuff, like maybe a trash-can had fallen over and he hadn’t straightened it up, or once I remember a cat that got caught in a shed. Che would have let her out, he loves cats—”

  “Don’t touch that one,” warned Joanna, as their guest reached to scritch Chainsaw, who had hopped weightlessly onto the table and was regarding him fixedly with demented yellow eyes.

  Saldana rather quickly withdrew his hand. “Nothing big, but it told me Che wasn’t making the rounds. But if I asked him, he’d say he had been, and the second time I asked him, he got mad. There was a guy got onto the grounds one night, not a fan, just some poor homeless guy. He got a crowbar from one of the sheds and broke into the maze, probably figuring he could hide out there for weeks, sleeping in that little temple in there and sneaking out to steal food. Che went in after him, while I sat outside the gate in case he came out that way. Che must’ve spent four hours in there looking, and came out saying he couldn’t find him. We locked it up again, figuring he’d yell to come out sooner or later. The day guys never saw or heard a thing from him, but I figured he’d got out sometime, though we never saw a sign of it.”

  “When was this?”

  “May.”

  “Before or after your friend started acting strangely?”

  “This is gonna sound stupid,” admitted the guard, “but I don’t know. It was only later, when it got real clear to me that Che was—that there was somethin’ funny going on—that I thought, Gee, maybe that homeless guy has something to do with all this? But by then I was just fishing. There was another guy, back in July—”

  The young man’s dark brows twisted down suddenly over his nose, and a look of pain flickered in his brown eyes.

  “Che shot him,” he whispered. “Another homeless, one of those guys who’re so skinny you know they’ve got AIDS or something. I heard the shots from over on the other side of the house and got Che on the mobile, and he said the guy’d attacked him, which is what we reported to the sheriff. But the knife that was in the guy’s hand when I got there – the knife we told the cops was the attack-weapon… It was Che’s knife. The guy was unarmed. And Che – it’s like he doesn’t see you. Like he doesn’t see me. I’ve talked to his wife – she’s my cousin – and she says the same. She’s searched the house and his truck for drugs, and anyhow, Holdfast drug-tests. But it’s like—it’s like I’m a stranger. He’s polite and all that, but it’s just, Hi, how’s it going, and then he heads off and I don’t see him – and don’t hear from him – for the rest of the night. This past week I don’t even see him at the end of the night, he’ll just call me on the mobile unit and say, You head off, I’m at the other side of the grounds, don’t wait—”

  Antryg asked softly, “Not a woman?”

  “No. Erica – my cousin – she swears – and I would, too – that’s not it. I’d see it. She’d see it. So then when you guys showed up tonight, and headed straight for the damn maze, and Che just comes around the corner, takes one look at you, and starts shooting… I thought you’d know something.”

  “Is Che back there now?” Joanna asked.

  Saldana nodded. “I called Dispatch and told them I thought you’d taken something from the house, and to get another guy out there, I was in pursuit—”

  “Oh, great,” sighed Joanna, and glanced at the clock. It read, one a.m. “So the cops are going to show up any minute—”

  “No, I switched off my mobile. I’ll tell ‘em I lost the signal. But you got all this…” He gestured again at the neat stacks of photocopies on the table, the maps of the house and grounds. The charts of the maze. “You say you were there to see what’s in that maze. Is it—It isn’t haunted or something, is it?”

  “If you mean, by The Daemon’s ghost,” said Antryg after a time, “or Emily Violet’s, for that matter—No.” He glanced at Joanna for permission, and she nodded. Might as well.

  *

  Antryg came back from the kitchen with a shoebox wrapped in aluminum-foil between his hands, the shiny foil dimmed by a thick coating of frost. Spock and Chainsaw, who had been prowling through the half-furnished rooms in the darkness, now both magically appeared on the table and regarded the box expectantly, as if, through freezing temperatures and layers of cardboard and metal, Chainsaw still scented her prey.

  “What the—?” Saldana drew back hastily after one look inside.

  Antryg shut it again, wrapped it. “One of the cats brought it in about three weeks ago,” he said. “It was dying, which was the only reason we were able to snap pictures of it—” He brought out the half-dozen prints taken with one of Joanna’s InstaFilm cameras: God knew what the folks at the developers had thought of them. Hoax? Joke? Special eff
ects?

  “As you can see,” Antryg went on, “the creature had embedded itself in a squirrel—was absorbing the squirrel’s body into its own. You saw how the bones and skull—” He touched the box that held the squirrel’s remains, “—had been partially dissolved.”

  “You’re kidding me, right?” In Saldana’s voice was not the slightest suggestion that he actually thought he was being kidded, and he waved the box away when Antryg moved to open it for another viewing. “You’re saying that’s what’s in the maze? What the hell is it? Where did it come from? You showed this to anybody?”

  “To whom?” asked Joanna. “You believe us because you’ve seen what’s happened to a man you know well—”

  “You’re not saying Che’s got one of those – got something like that—” By his eyes, he truly, truly didn’t want to believe that of his friend.

  “No,” said Antryg. “That’s not really how these things work. I believe that what’s in that maze – and what has probably been there since the late 1950s – is some kind of a mutandion – a category of creature that one finds in a number of different universes…”

  The sharp motion of their visitor’s head, and the sudden sidelong look, told Joanna that her erratic roommate had just lost whatever credibility the physical evidence had won him. “Like you mean it’s from another dimension?”

  “Oh.” Antryg sounded a little surprised that there’d been any doubt. “Yes.”

  “And you know this how?”

  “I’m from another universe myself,” said Antryg, a response that seldom failed to elicit precisely the expression that it was now eliciting from the disillusioned guard.

  “And you’re here on Interlibrary Loan?”

  “No – that’s a long story.”

  Joanna sighed. At least he didn’t explain that he’s really the secret Archmage of the Wizards of the West… “He left his credentials in his other robe,” she said, and Saldana glanced at her under frowning brows.