Disclaimer: All recognizable characters, places and events in the HPverse are property of J.K. Rowling, Scholastic and Bloomsbury Books, and Warner Bros., Inc.
Don Flack belongs to the CSI:NYverse, and is property of Anthony Zuiker, Jerry Bruckheimer, CBS, and Alliance-Atlantis. In neither case is infringement intended, and no profit is being made. For entertainment only.
A/N: The end. Thank you to the four people who have left feedback on this story. It has been a long and discouraging road. We will soon be returning to Flack and life post-Junior.
Seamus Finnegan was bloody well knackered and more than a little tempted to kip a biliwig from the illegal shipment he and his men had seized earlier in the day when his bollocks had not been dragging the dusty, pocked floor of the squad room. Instead, he settled for pouring himself a cup of lukewarm tea from the pot that squatted on a table near the entrance like a bellicose, gouty pensioner. A drizzle of milk, four sugars, and a bitter-tongued swallow, and he shambled back to his desk and plopped disconsolately into his chair.
There was an untidy jumble of parchments piled atop his desk like sloughed skin, and he knew he should see about setting them in order, but it was easier to let them be, and so he did, slumping in his chair and taking a slow, slurping sip from his teacup. Odds were that the Ministry clerks would not even begin to process the assorted writs of arrest, writs of search and seizure, and evidentiary declaration until mid-week at the earliest; the machinery of justice, torpid under the best of conditions, grew more lethargic still when the men charged with its due administration were logy with the memory of roasted geese, rich puddings and toffees, and mulled wine from the New Year's revels. The writs would wait, either here in the relative safety of his desk or stuffed unceremoniously into the tray of a post-pissed MLE bureaucrat. He was in no hurry.
In truth, his mind was far removed from the papers on his desk. It was back in the Shrieking Shack, watching the unspeakable handiwork of the woman Dean Thomas had called Lucifer's whore. It had been nine days since he had stumbled upon her madness by the silver light of the bloated moon, and the vision of her unleashed and unrepentant fury had consumed his mind. It found him in dreams and superimposed itself over the landscape of his waking consciousness with ruthless, throttling efficiency. Sometimes he passed the wizards and witches locked in the various holding cells, and it was his face that he saw, fleshless and lidless and frozen in an eternal scream. It was worse when they smiled; the exposure of tooth and gum only made them look more like anguished, grinning skulls. After a few days, he had stopped peering into the cells when he passed. Now he pretended to read the Prophet and inspected his wand holster in a fit of paranoid vigilance that would have done old Alastor Moody proud.
The smell of him had stayed on his hands for days, and the robes he had worn that night had been consigned to the licking flames of a char pit he had hastily dug behind the Shack. He had been tempted to set the Shack and the atrocity in it alight as well, but that would have prompted uncomfortable questions he could ill-afford. The Ministry was oddly attached to the ruined pile of wood and stone and counted it as a treasure of local lore. Even wizards delighted in a shiver or two beside the warm hearthstone, and he supposed that the Shack's preservation was the Ministry's bumbling atonement, an attempt to salvage something for the children who had lost mothers and fathers and entire family trees. They might not be able or willing to resurrect the dead, but they could offer them empty tales of rattling ghosties like sugarless sweets. So he had simply reinstated Rebecca's concealment wards and left the Shack undisturbed.
He should have killed him, should have burned his body like a living wick and granted him the mercy of death. But Rebecca Stanhope was and ever had been an incubus, and she had sapped him of both conscience and mercy with her bloodless, wise, pitiless face. Each time he had raised his wand to set the wreck that had once been a man named Lessing ablaze, he had seen her face, pinched and wan and wet with furious tears. He blew him up, and the cold got into him, too.
I fixed it. As though flaying a man alive were the most logical act in the world. To her, mayhap it was. The outside to match the inside, remember, and Rebecca Stanhope was as raw as scraped beef.
Not Stanhope. Not these days. It's Flack now, if you'll recall, and she bears the burden of it with teetering grace. It's the delirious weight of her new name that tipped her into madness in the first place.
Stanhope or Flack, the woman behind the name was as he had remembered her, china and ivory and intoxicating madness. She rendered cruelty a perverse, compelling justice. It was because of her that he had withheld his mercy and left Lessing to hang on the tenterhooks she had laid so carefully for him. She did nothing without forethought, and he had wanted to be sure that he would not upset the sensitive scales of greater justice by releasing the guilty before due had been tendered.
He had gone back to his flat that night and drunk himself into a blissful stupor, watching the flames of his tapers dance as the flames of the char pit where he had burned his robes had done, and when they had doubled and trebled in his vision, he had snuffed them with numb, careless fingers. The next morning, their ashes had coated his mouth in a bitter paste, and he had still been scouring it away with the probing tip of his tongue when he had Flooed the Aurory in New York to ask about a Muggle named Don Flack. Off the record, naturally. That had cost him a few pretty favors, and his coin purse wept at the thought of how many pints he now owed to his more libatious counterparts, but he had to be sure.
And what will you do if she's mad, if friendship and childhood nostalgia cannot hide the ugly fact of her insanity? Will you be going to New York to clap her in handbills in front of her husband? A fine picture that will paint. You with your rediscovered sense of righteous indignation, and her bloke with a gun pointed at your head because he thinks you're barking. An international cock-up of legendary proportions is what it'll be, and won't you be in a fine mess trying to explain why you withheld evidence of multiple felonies and failed to carry out your sworn duty as an Auror? You'll join her in Azkaban, you will, and it'll be a race to see which of you swings first.
If no evidence of an explosion involving a Muggle police officer named Flack existed, then there would be no choice. He would go to the Chief Auror and confess everything. He would turn in his wand and his embossed and crested robes, and he would lead them to Rebecca. He would be an Auror for the last time, and then he would walk with his friend for the last time, side by side to the gallows, where his former superior would kill them softly with two words and six syllables like shifting shale on the tongue and throat.
That's rich now, isn't it? His inner voice suddenly reminded him of Snape, a silky, baritone sneer that reverberated in his solar plexus, the warm tickle of croup before fever set in. Last week, you were only too happy to harangue her for using you as her means of escape, but now you're only too happy to turn the tables. Then again, I shouldn't be surprised. Gryffindor opportunism has always masqueraded as morality when it suits. After all, the vicars can hardly proselytize to their fearful, obedient flock if they're caught with their rods of life plunged into the fertile valleys of whores. If you wish to leave the drudgery of moral rectitude, Mr. Finnegan, turn in your robes and totter to the nearest pub that calls to your shanty blood. Why take her with you?
"Bugger off, Snape, you miserable sod," he muttered under his breath, and drowned the disagreeable, needling voice into silence with a gulping swallow of tea.
It was just like the sour, soulless twat to stir up trouble where there was none, he thought as he got up to refill his teacup. His black eyes were so jaundiced that he could find the darkest of motives in the purest of intentions. The bastard could think as he liked, but his decision to investigate Rebecca's story was nothing more than the fulfillment of his duty as required by magical law.
Rubbish, Mr. Finnegan, snorted Snape, obviously none the worse for wear from his drenching in cheap tea. Such pretentious, self-serving twaddle might satisfy that insufferable tartan baggage, McGonagall, but we both know that duty is a convenient shield for the conduct of selfish, unpleasant business. Your conscience is as callused as the palms of a bricklayer's hands, but your fear of dying alone is raw and undiluted. You would fashion her noose along with yours so as not to die alone.
All who might have noticed and mourned your absence from the world are gone. Your mother disappeared into the Irish mist, and Merlin knows what ground she treads now. Maybe she stumbled onto a faery wrath and was swallowed up. Your father retreated to the Muggle world to soothe his wounded pride with ale and wine and Merlin knows what or who else. Maybe he is dead, pushing up poppies in some ill-tended and forgotten potter's field. Dean Thomas left his brains smeared on the end of a troll's indifferent club, and you are not at all certain where you will spend your eternity. Maybe you'll ascend to heaven and indulge in spirits with him and the others you've lost, but there exists the greater possibility that you'll roast in Hades-Hell, if it appeals to your Muggleborn sensibilities-until time itself unravels.
Rebecca Stanhope is all you have left, and never mind the name she has taken. She is the last remnant of the days when you still believed in the ridiculous myth of truth, justice, and the Gryffindor way, and for all the damage the tenderest of poisons has wrought in her small, translucent veins, she is the most unchanged. She lives her life with stiff-necked, pop-eyed resolve, and she marches on even as her wounds grow deeper. She loved you, then, and she loves you now. She said so herself on that night you caught her out. Gryffindor vainglory demands a witness to its noble sacrifice, someone to mourn its passing, and you know that she will mourn you, even if only in the fleeting seconds before judgment comes in a brilliant flash of green.
Maybe so, but such ruthless conjecture was a moot point. He was sure to his marrow that there had been an explosion involving the near-death of a Muggle police officer named Flack, and if so, he would leave Lessing where he was, trapped in a hell of his own making and consider it a favor repaid. Rebecca had guided him through the nightmare of war, and though he could not properly call himself unscathed(there were too many nightmares and too many breaks beneath the skin), he still possessed his bollocks and all of his limbs. He numbered among the fortunate. The thought made him laugh.
He stood from his desk with the intention of calling it a day and drowning his sorrows in a draught of Dreamless Sleep, the better to escape the restless ghost of memory. He had just fetched his heavy traveling cloak from the back of his chair when a scruffy, nondescript owl landed atop the jumble of parchments on his desk and thrust a scaly talon at him with a desultory hoot.
"Yeah? Well, I'm not fond of my job, either," he muttered, and unlaced the loosely rolled parchment from the creature's leg. The leg was dry and warm to the touch, elephant hide and old book leather, and he frowned.
He conjured a biscuit and cup of water and nudged them toward the owl, who gave a grateful, weary hoot and hopped forward with the papery scrabble of claws. He sat on the edge of his desk, unfurled the thin parchment, and read the straggling, laborious lines.
The poetry left by spiders' legs in the dust, he thought nonsensically, and swallowed a tight knot of apprehension. He recognized the writing at once. He had seen it before in the Gryffindor common room, watched as Rebecca had wrenched each line from palsied fingers because Snape had forbidden the use of a Dicta-Quill on his essays.
Seamus,
Forgive me for the lack of endearments. After our last meeting, I am unsure as to their propriety. As per our agreement, I will not speak of what happened(and Merlin's bollocks, isn't that an irony? For years, we lived in the shadow of He Who Must Not Be Named, and now we live with That of Which We Must Not Speak. Life is a circle at its great and terrible heart, a serpent that forever swallows its tail but never throttles on it as it decently fucking ought.)
You allowed me my peace, and for that, you have my most profound and undying gratitude. But then, you had that already just by having the unabashed balls to befriend me back then. However, your kindness has left me with a debt, and like the man who shaped me in his pitiless forge, I am loath to carry it any further than I must. Unpaid debts are heavy and only grow heavier with time, and I am too tired and too damn selfish to live with them. So, allow me to return the favor.
The fleshless Madonna sleeps in a bower of green, unknowing of her lost time. She waits to be found where stone meets wood and leafy shadow. Travelers pass her without seeing, and children have stood upon her shoulders and laughed. She is a mother still and always. Her little shadow must venture into the faery wraths whereupon his dreams were built when the sun was warm upon his back. He will find her sundered from herself and ever reaching, and when he does, she will speak to him with her fleshless, soil tongue and bear witness against him who sent her to her slumber. The man whose face holds only eyes.
I rolled the bones for you, my friend, the first time I have done so since I kicked the dust of the wizarding world from my bruised heels and fled to what would become my Gotham paradise. I will not do it again. It was too fraught with old, deep temptations and the pungent, earthy taste of shame, like the first time you put your hands between your legs and felt want flutter beneath your exploring fingers. Of course, maybe it's different for you; I don't have the same equipment, after all, and I'm not inclined to press my dearest upon the matter. He would think me lewd, not too mention a trifle mad, and on both counts, he would be correct.
I have a good life now, a safe life. In truth, I've come closer to the fairytale life I once dreamed of than most girls, and certainly closer than most with whom we learned, revised, and killed. But if I have learned anything in recent days and months, it is that my precious fairy tale is fragile, that everything I love can be stolen from me by a shrug from God's mighty, indifferent shoulders. I no longer have the recklessness and blind courage of my youth, and most of my convictions have withered and died. Only one remains to me now, and I cling to it with bared fangs of the asp and the tenacity of the lioness the Headmaster so dearly hoped me to be: I fought hard for the happiness I have found with my Muggle love, and I will surrender it for neither ideal nor man. He knows nothing of Hogwarts or magic, and I intend to keep it that way. For him, ignorance is surely bliss.
The bones have chattered their last. Make of their words what you will. Use them to find your peace or your vengeance or cast them aside as the ravings of a lunatic whose bones have grown brittle. I can be of no more help.
I doubt that our paths will cross again in this lifetime. That is one of my sincerest regrets about the choice I have made, maybe the only one. I loved you, Seamus Finnegan, and there is no fiercer and hotter a love than that found in childhood. It burns white and clean and forever, and you will have it as long as I draw breath. Know that even if you never hear another word from me. I never lied to you, not even when you needed me to. My way of paying it forward.
I miss you, Seamus, and I'll go on missing you.
R.
Little shadow, he thought numbly as he turned the letter in his hands. That's what my mam called me. How would she know that?
That's simple enough. The bones told her.
He examined the letter in his hand. The margins were covered in patterns and shapes and doodles. One of them featured a skull in a nun's habit, and beneath the drawing was his mother's name.
Bone Madonna. Oh, God in his heaven.
Snape inside his head again, but this time, there was no sneering mockery, only bland statement of fact. You gave her her peace. Now she gives you your truth. A Slytherin always pays her debts.
He folded the parchment and stuffed it into the pocket of his robes. The delivery owl, feather-fluffed and contented as it nibbled on the conjured biscuit, paused in its feast to offer an inquisitive hoot. He absently scratched beneath its damp beak and was rewarded with an affectionate nip.
"Safe journey back," he said, and Disapparated.
It was two days before he deciphered the clues left in Rebecca's riddle and found himself standing in a heather field ten minutes outside Cork. It was dark and cold, and his fingers throbbed inside the snug fit of his dragonhide gloves. His left hand was stuffed into the deep pocket of his overrobe, the fingers curled around the polished shaft of his wand. His right held the shaft of a long-handled spade.
Your left hand belongs to the Devil, he thought, and your right to God. The thought fled through his parted lips, scouring them as it went. Later, he would taste blood on his teeth, and it would be the taste of gall and vengeance.
He should have waited until daybreak to come, but once the answer had come to him, he had needed to see it, to be absolutely sure. He had dressed without lighting the candles in his room, retrieved the spade from the vestibule wardrobe, and Apparated as fast as he dared and faster than was prudent. He suspected he had left a few toenails behind in his haste, and maybe even part of a toe, but they hardly mattered. Not now, when he was so close.
Despite his eagerness, he sat down, wrapped his cloak more snugly around his shoulders and throat, and cast a Warming Charm. It was folly to blunder about these heaths in the dark, more so when the circulation in his feet was dubious at best. He would wind up tripping over some blasted snake den and snapping his idiot neck. His mother would rot here, unfound and unmourned, and his fellow Aurors would chuck him into the ground with due pomp and ceremony and then squabble over who got his desk.
He stamped his feet to keep the blood flowing and set the spade across his knees. It was heavy and slumberous, his wand magnified. Magic coursed through the thick shaft, and he wondered if it was coming from him or was part of the spade's manufacture, an enchantment to help it cut through hard, flinty soil like that found in cemeteries. The soil of a hard, Irish winter.
He made ghosts with his breath with every exhalation and watched them drift towards the horizon. He had come here often as a boy, first with his mam, who took him to romp and pluck fistfuls of heather with his chubby, toddler's fists, and later with Dean during the Christmas and summer hols. He had played hide-and-seek with his mam and footie and Quidditch with Dean, and with the latter, he had dreamed of glory on the pitch with the Kenmare Kestrels, or better yet, the Irish national team. After both were gone, Dean to his grave and his mam to Neverwhere, he had come here alone and played a child's game with an old man's body, pushing off from the dead earth and pretending that Dean Thomas was behind him with Beater's club in hand. He had stopped coming not long after completion of Auror training, when the evil that men did swallowed him whole.
Her little shadow must venture into the faery wraths whereupon his dreams were built when the sun was warm upon his back.
It was mention of the faery wraths that had thrown him at first. There were no wraths here, and never had been. No sane Irish parent ever let their child wander near faery wraths, lest they be snatched and replaced by a changeling. Most people with a shred of sanity refused to live in the line of a faery wrath. The faeries were powerful and not inclined to share their magic or their land with either wizard or Muggle. Faeries were best left alone.
So, no, there were no faery wraths here, of that he was sure. Now, any road. But he had thought there were, once upon a time. He had gone to his cradle and cot lulled by stories of the faery folk, and he had been enamored of them as a boy, had looked for them with avid, hopeful eyes everywhere he went. Each hummock or straggly copse of trees was a faery wrath, and he had announced its discovery with glee. To his mind, the hills and lumps of earth that rippled through this heather field had represented the great faery kingdom. His mam had laughed and run her fingers through his hair, and his da had chuckled and reminded him that there were no such things as faeries. He had been a good boy and nodded his head dutifully when his da had asked him if he understood that, but in his heart of hearts, he had believed, and when he was ten years old, his mam had rewarded his unwavering faith by taking him to see a real faery wrath.
Eventually, stamping was not enough to stave off the looming threat of frostbite, and so he set his spade aside, stood up, and began to stomp and flap to and fro like a house elf in the throes of a contrition fit. For some reason, that made him think of Rebecca, his sibyl of china and bone, and he pushed the thought aside.
Best not to wake the faeries, he thought with stupid, feverish glee, and stomped and flapped with stubborn abandon.
He was still stomping and flapping when a seam of light appeared on the horizon, Helios thrusting his lance of fire into the belly of the sky. The wound bled pale green at first, the death of night, and then a deep, weeping red that ebbed to rosy pink. He turned his head before pink faded to grey. It reminded him too much of Dean Thomas' brains on the end of a troll's club.
Helios' crown rose majestically over the horizon, but the old god was tired after millennia of battle, and his light was weak and gave little warmth, smothered by thick, leaden clouds. It was enough to see, though, and though he had lived here all his life with the exception of his seven years at Hogwarts, he never failed to be amazed by its harsh beauty. He stood on a hillock that had once held the loftier title of faery wrath and surveyed the field whereupon his dreams had been built.
Demeter had come in the night as she had for most of the past four months and seeded the ground with snow. It blanketed the earth in a thick, billowing sheet and covered the denuded branches of the oak tree at mid-field and the ranks of trees that comprised the woods across the way. Some of the oak tree's sturdiest branches sported icicles that refracted the sunlight and cast tiny, faint rainbows that danced in the snow.
It was to the oak tree that he went, spade held at his side like a spear. The riddle had said that his mother would be found where wood met stone and leafy shadow. There were no leaves now, but in the spring and summer, they would make the ancient branches droop and creak with their weight and provide enough shade for two boys to lie on the heather with their heads pillowed on their hands and build impossible futures in the passing clouds. Or at least they had once upon a time. Maybe it was dead like so much else of his past. He wondered if any boys came here any more to play Quidditch and dream of firm breasts and everlasting glory, or if he and Dean were the only ghosts to walk its desolate borders.
Wind soughed through the barren branches as he approached, and the tree waggled its immense fingers in gruff greeting.
"Hello, Dean," he murmured without realizing that he had spoken, and circled the tree. Spent breath coiled around the tree, the herald of incipient flame, and his gloved fingers brushed the frozen bark of the tree as he made his lumbering, contemplative circuit.
He sank the blade into the unforgiving earth beside a smooth, grey stone the size of a bludger. The ground was entrenched and loath to cede its measure of centuries. It resisted fiercely, and within two minutes, his heavy woolen robes warmed and clung to his back. He swore and dug on, gloved fingers slipping over the shaft of the spade. Within three minutes, steam rose from his body, and in four, his heart was a dull hammer inside his chest. Spittle flew from his mouth as the soil flew from the end of his spade. As the hole grew, so did his urgency, and so he was panting, a ragged, frantic gulping that rasped his throat and the insides of his cheeks like sandpaper.
At ten minutes, his arms throbbed with liquid fire beneath stiff, cold skin, and he was tempted to give it up as a bad job and chalk the entire affair up to a wild goose chase orchestrated by a woman who had spent her life walking the knife-edge of lunacy with feline grace. But each time the shovel went slack in his grip, an image arose in his mind of his mother's fleshless fingers clawing at the earth from the inside out, reaching for her little shadow and looking for him with eyeless sockets. The thought crushed his burning chest, made him keen and bleat and sweat from the eyes, and he kept digging, relentless and desperate.
A meter into the earth, the blade of the spade struck something solid. He crouched over the gash he had made and peered into it, and then he reached out with trembling fingers to stroke the rounded curve of what he had found.
A stone, he told himself. Just another bludger stone like the one that lured me to this buggerated nest of roots in the first place.
But sometimes the body knew what the mind refused to accept, and he prised the object free of its resting place with scrabbling fingers. It came loose with the release of a long-held breath, his mother sighing for the earth that had held her to its bosom for so long. He sat back hard upon the ground, the skull cradled in his lap in the basket formed by the fabric of his robes.
"Hunh hunh hunh." He fumbled with its hard smoothness and turned it with clumsy fingers, and when he saw its face, the sound became a single syllable of understanding. "Hunnnnnhhh."
The tooth was twisted.
"You bitch," he said. He wasn't sure if he meant his mother or Rebecca, who had stolen his dead but tenacious hope. "Oh, you bitch."
He cradled her to his chest and rocked to and fro. "You bitch, youbitchyoubitchyou-," He chanted it and sang it and sobbed it between thick gobbets of ropy snot when the tears finally came in wrenching, ululating sobs that tore him open and emptied him onto the pristine whiteness of Demeter's blanket.
I'm a virgin no more, mam, he thought stupidly, and laughed. He had not been a virgin since he was sixteen. He spat green phlegm into the snow and sat with his mother's disarticulated head in his lap. It was a long time before the crying stopped, and even longer before he staggered to his feet, picked up his shovel, and began the search for the rest of her.
She came up in the end-most of her, anyway-wrested piece by piece from her unmarked tomb to be re-interred in a small plot he paid for. That it was her was beyond dispute. Her kinked finger had turned up shortly after her skull, and if that were not proof enough, her wand quashed the last doubts. Members of the Aurory who examined it said she had gone down fighting, but would elaborate no further, and part of him was glad. She had died trying to shield herself from Dark magic, and that told him enough. Too much.
Her memorial service was sparsely attended, a fact which surprised him not at all. She had been ten years dead in the minds of those few who had remembered her at all, and they had already said their goodbyes. Tonks came, though, for which he was grateful. His father, whom he had owled the day after his mother's remains were identified, did not, and that did not surprise him, either. Tonks was indignant enough for both of them, and after she got him good and drunk in his dismal living room, she took him to his equally squalid bedroom and fucked him until he could not feel. She was gone the next morning, not even a note, and though he had slept twelve hours, he was too tired to care.
The last answer to the riddle came to him three weeks after he had Apparated into the Aurory precinct house with his fingers torn to ribbons and his mother's skull clutched in his bloody hands. His mother's was not the only body to be found after a long disappearance, and he was paging through moldering editions of the Prophet in a futile effort to match a name with the pile of brown bones lying in the cool damp of the Ministry vaults. Ten years in the ground at least, according to the harried, disinterested Healer from St. Mungo's who had examined them. Probably more.
He was thirteen years into the archives when he saw the picture, grainy and stuttering and torpid in its dotage. His fingers clutched the yellowed page in a convulsive, white-knuckled grip as he stared at the scene before him with eyeballs too hot for their sockets. He was dimly aware that he had torn the page, and that his carelessness would be summarily docked from his wages by the stub-nosed, bandy-legged curator of the Ministry archives who made Madam Pince seem the paragon of forgiveness, but he was transfixed by the face captured by the photograph.
Walden Macnair stood in the center of the picture, double-bladed axe slung over one beefy shoulder. Lucius Malfoy stood beside him, and between them, he spied the podgy, squat bulk of Hagrid's pumpkins. Lucius was smiling his thin-lipped, aristocratic smile, obnoxious, serpent-headed cane held in one hand. Walden Macnair had no expression because he had no face. It was obscured by the black fabric of his executioner's mask.
Except for his eyes, which peered from ragged, uneven holes in the cheap fabric. They were piggish and beady and filled with the perverse delight of the impending kill. Minutes after that photo had been taken, Buckbeak the hippogriff's head had rolled merrily into Hagrid's compost heap with the final thwock of descending steel.
"The man whose face holds only eyes," he murmured, and Augie Babcock, a rookie who still thought truth shone out of the Minister for Magic's arse, looked up from his desk across the aisle.
"All right there, Mr. Finnegan?" he inquired brightly, poised to leap out of his seat were he required.
Seamus found himself thinking of Colin Creevey, bright and eager and dead as shite with his arm blown off. "Hmm? Yeah, I'm good, mate. Just thinking."
As he stared at the picture of Walden Macnair, he understood two things. The first was why Rebecca Stanhope cum Flack had lost her mind and sought her vengeance on the Muggle who had tried to shatter world. The second was that she had spread her madness to him like contagion, Typhoid Mary with her bone mask and her rage. He sat back in his chair and began to make plans.
While Seamus Finnegan sat at his desk and made plans to pay the darkness forward, orderly Jack Stanton trudged down the hall of Bellevue in his rumpled whites and crepe-soled sneakers. It wasn't supposed to be his shift, but that jaking little dickbag, Crandall, had called in sick, and as usual, it was Jack Stanton who got boned in the ass. Good thing he hadn't had a date, or the waterheads and mooners would've been shit out of luck.
His mood was not improved by the fact that he was being dispatched to Lessing's room. A freak, that guy. He'd seemed okay when they'd first hauled him in for killing six people and blowing up a cop. He'd been polite, hadn't tried to shit on his shoes or jizz on the walls, and he'd never had to rattle his head for screaming in the middle of the night and stirring up the rest of the crazies. The only thing he'd ever asked for was a pen and a postcard so he could write his wife and kid. He'd gotten a postcard and a soft-tipped pencil instead and never complained.
But that was before his nocturnal excursion outside the hospital. The brass still hadn't figured that one out, and he doubted they ever would. Fuckers couldn't find their asses with both hands and a flashlight. Him, he had his theories. He was fairly certain that the cops who'd "found" Lessing outside the hospital had worked him over, gotten a little back for one of their own. Sure, there hadn't been a mark on him when they'd stripped him bareass and inspected him for injuries, but cops knew how to beat your ass with impunity; he'd seen those Charles Bronson movies where the cops kicked the shit out of some poor bastard in an interrogation room until he copped to murder. They always came out as sweet as you pleased. So, yeah, he figured they'd gone in for some five-fingered payback and hit him once too often.
Ever since his jaunt, Lessing had been a living ghost, slack and quiet and unresponsive. He ate when ordered to eat, but he sat like a lump under the shower spray and left a film of grit over everything when he got out. Occasionally, he pissed in the shower, and the urine was dark brown and smelled like river mud. The muckety-mucks had checked him out eight ways from Sunday, but every test came back clean as a whistle. Lessing was fine except for the fact that he wasn't.
He stopped in front of the door to Lessing's cell and peered through the square pane of double-sided plastic. Lessing stood in the center of the room, slack-jawed, and between his feet was a pile of shit. It was soft and dark brown, and he knew how it would smell. Like river mud. His nose wrinkled in disgusted anticipation as he unclipped the key from his belt loop, fitted it into the lock, and opened the door.
"Dammit, Lessing," he muttered as he stepped inside. "I ought'a make you fuckin' eat it." He unclipped his walkie talkie and radioed Janitorial for a mop and bucket.
Lessing said nothing. He just stood astride his puddle of shit and swayed drunkenly, shit coating his thighs and ass like runny greasepaint. The smell was deep and rich, and Stanton breathed through his nose to keep from puking on his shoes.
"C'mon, asshole," he barked, and seized Lessing's wrist to pull him out of the mess.
And then he stopped. Dust rose from Lessing's skin with every undulating current of air and danced in the air before settling over the floor and the pile of shit in a fine layer of dust.
Jack Stanton shivered and waited for Janitorial to turn up with the mop and bucket.