Chapter 23 – Aftermath
Hours earlier, the body that was Myria LeJean had drifted down God Street. It had remarked the presence of the canine without comprehension and continued its way, little more than a darker grey presence in the foggy night.
Up God Street it floated, then Heroes, before finding itself pausing before... what?
A demolished building stood on the corner of Baker Street. Bits of clockwork could still be seen in the rubble, gears and springs looking like the exposed bones and spilled organs of a clockwork army slaughtered in some bizarre war. But no life stirred in what was once the shop of Jeremy Clockson.
There was nothing here for an Auditor seeking… something. It paused motionless for many minutes. Time was immaterial. It was not alive, after all. But after some moments, the sound of a ringing bell blocks away drove it to put more distance behind it. There was no real intent, merely motion.
Jonathon Knäcke was a busy man. It was early morning, and he expected the usual full day of baking and selling the results of his labor. His uncle was working the front counter, which allowed Jonathon to stay in the back with its ovens, pantries, and work surfaces.
Away from people. Jonathon Knäcke did not trust people. He preferred bread. You added this much flour, that much water, a pinch of yeast. If it called for it, you added some sugar or other more esoteric ingredients. You made sure the oven was the right temperature, and watched the time. And out came the result, perfect each time. Bread was something you could rely on.
Jonathon Knäcke was a very busy man. For one thing, his cousin Jessica had not been able to help in the bakery since the kidnapping. That had been two weeks ago, and his Aunt Rosemarie was still spending a significant amount of time tending to Jessica instead of helping with the baking. And his uncle was often distracted, even during heavy traffic hours. Uncle Pars would be taking an order, or in the back of the bakery getting something, and he would pause as a wave of sadness washed over his features. Sometimes he stayed that way for several minutes, until someone physically demanded his attention. Other times he would come back to the matter at hand, and shake his head with a sigh.
The other reason Jonathon was busy, so very very busy, was because it distracted him from dwelling on other things. Like the fact that Jessica was still sick, and had panic attacks from time to time. He had also caught her, a few times when she thought no one was looking, staring at her hands and shaking. Most of the time she put on a brave face for the family, probably because she didn't want them to worry. She should be getting better, but it was hard to see any improvement, and in ways she seemed to be getting worse.
And there were other reasons, reasons that drove him to work himself to exhaustion, always focusing on the task at hand. Wandering thoughts were dangerous, and a stroll down recent memory lane could land him very quickly in the emotional equivalent of The Shades[1].
He was just finishing icing a tray of pastries, when he discovered a fundamental truth about avoidance.
"Mr. Knäcke, I believe you and I have some matters to discuss, and I warn you I am not best pleased."
As Jonathon Knäcke's second worst fears were realized, he turned to find his uncle, eyebrows and hands raised in apology behind a familiar and visibly angry female figure.
Sometimes, trouble comes looking for you. And when it comes in the form of one Miss Susan Sto Helit, you know you are in deep batter indeed.
Two people sat at a small table having tea, but there was little in the way of pleasantries taking place. One figure radiated impatience and disapproval. The other wallowed in wary unhappiness.
"I would be angry with you for not notifying me sooner," Susan was saying as her fingers tapped the tabletop, "but it would not have mattered. I was… unavailable for some time for reasons of my own. When I returned and realized that my warning had never been delivered, it was too late to do any good." Susan shook her head. "I went by the house on King's Way, and found it an absolute shambles, and the watchman very obviously monitoring it was not effusive in his explanations. What I did learn is that my concerns regarding Myria's… spending habits… were justified, and as a result your cousin had been kidnapped and later recovered." She frowned more deeply. "I also understand that Myria has still not been found."
Susan's words were salt in open wounds. They burned into places Jonathon had been trying to cover over with work and avoidance, and he resented it. "For someone who says they are not angry with me, you seem to be expressing it well, Miss Susan."
"I did not say I wasn't angry with you, Mister Knäcke. I said I was not angry with you for not notifying me. That is by no means the same thing. You told me you would keep an open mind. You gave your word that you would be Myria's friend. Now you have decided you want to do neither?"
Bitterness from weeks-old wounds bled poisonous ichor into his tone. "You don't understand. You don't understand what we went through." He gritted his teeth and his fingernails dug into the table's surface. "What my cousin is still going through. When I made those promises, I didn't know what it would mean. Do you have any idea what Myria did?" He watched as Susan's disapproval waned somewhat, replaced by discomfort of her own. "You do don't you? You know what she is, what she really is. You could have told me." He added another spoonful of sugar to his tea; it was the fourth so far, and at this rate he would have to use his teeth to break off a slab of tea if he really wanted some of it.
Susan's tone softened slightly. "And what would you have had me do? What do you believe would have been the result had I explained exactly what Myria had been before she became what she was when you met her?" She shook her head. "It wouldn't have done any good. I didn't lie to you. If I was vague, it was because Myria desperately needed someone, and if you couldn't be that friend, she would have been dead within days. I told you as much as I could, and I would have answered any questions you asked. Forgive me if I didn't volunteer more than I believed you could accept all at once." She paused and took a sip of the rather nasty tea, considered adding more sugar to hers as well. "Fine, I accept that I am as much at fault as you are. The question is not who is to blame for what happened to your family. The question is, what are you going to do about it? Or more specifically, are you going to make it all for naught?"
Jonathon sat quietly, misery evident in his fidgeting and the way the muscles of his face worked. "I don't know where Myria is, Susan, no one does. Even the Watch said they were unable to find any trace of her."
"Be that as it may, that is not the question that I asked."
There was an even longer pause as Jonathon examined his lukewarm tea, the table, his hands. "Honestly, I don't know. I just don't know."
Some her anger returned. "Well then I suggest you find the answer to that question Jonathon. Frankly, I expected better of you than wallowing in pity and self-recrimination."
Jonathon jerked at the accusation and the criticism, and in the process knocked over his cup. He watched the viscous mess ooze slowly from cup to table, then stood without looking at Susan. "I have baking to do. Please excuse me."
"Do you mind if I finish my tea?"
He frowned but still did not look at her. "Fine. Feel free to see yourself out."
Susan sat at the table for another minute, watching her tea cool. She was frustrated, and upset at herself and at Jonathon all at once. Had she misjudged him? Had she misjudged Myria? What in the world had Myria done?
Finally she sat back and sighed, then spoke to the air in the room. "You can come out if you like. I know you were listening."
A door creaked slowly. "How did you know?" came a quiet, tired voice. Susan turned to find a young girl regarding her from the partially opened door to the room opposite. She looked tired. Not the kind of tired you get from a hard day's work, but the bone-deep weariness you show after an illness. There were dark smudges beneath her eyes, and her cheekbones were far too prominent.
"I saw your shadow moving around in the gap at the bottom of the door during at least the last half of the conversation." Susan shrugged. "You would be Jonathon's cousin? Should you be out of bed? Jonathon's uncle led me to believe you were still convalescing." The girl definitely does not look well, Susan decided. Had she known Jessica from before the kidnapping, she would have trebled that opinion.
"Yes, I'm Jessica. I'm fine, I just…" She paused as she realized Susan's eyes had been drawn to motion near her waist. Jessica had been gently rubbing her hands over each other with subtle movements as she spoke. It had become a ritual. Rub back of left hand with right thumb, then palm across fingers. Let fingers of left hand move over those of the right. Then up across the back of the right hand. Thumb of left hand across the back of the right. From time to time, her thumb would stray to her wrists with a slight tremor. She stopped as soon as she realized she was doing it. "Some days are better than others. I've overhead Doctor Lawn talking with my mother. He says that it's a head sickness, that there's really nothing wrong with me." She dropped her eyes. "I want to believe him, but it's hard sometimes, to forget what I thought I saw."
Susan's inherent prickliness and cynicism, honed despite her silent protestations on what was in fact a heaping midden-load of her own self pity, ran full on into a twenty-camel caravan of actual suffering[2]. What was left when the wreckage cleared was a good portion of pity, seasoned slightly with a bit of self-disgust at her own pettiness.
"I'm sorry Jessica. I truly am. I had no idea that by helping Myria, or involving your cousin, that anything like this could happen. If I had…" She would have what? Allowed Myria to commit the suicide she had intended? Found some way to be a friend, despite the fact that Susan frankly often didn't like herself much?
"It's not your fault Miss Susan, and it's not Myria's fault either. And it's not my cousin's fault for that matter. Can you help me to that chair? I don't feel very steady and I think if I let go of the doorframe I might end up causing another panic. Every time I have a little stumble, they hear the thump downstairs and they all come running like it's the end of the world." She gave a bitter and low laugh.
Susan hurried over and let Jessica lean on her, leading her over to the chair Jonathon had recently vacated. "Jessica you really should be in bed. A head sickness the Doctor says? Does he have no eyes to see you are obviously physically ill?"
"That's probably my own fault." Jessica gave a wan smile as she gratefully lowered into the seat. "I have a hard time eating, and I'm not sleeping well. I've had some… nightmares." She shuddered. "They always involve knives, and creatures that I can't really see, but they…" she began trembling, and Susan put a hand on her shoulder as her suspicious intellect kicked into gear.
"Jessica, these creatures, they would not perchance be grey-coloured, cloaked figures? Did they tell you things? Like how easy it would be to just give up?"
Jessica stared at Susan as her mouth worked silently. Susan had described it exactly. The nightmares, they always started with the three men. The horrible men with their leering and crude suggestions, and their obsession with the gold. And in her dream she would keep telling them that she didn't know where it was, with growing panic as nothing she said satisfied them.
And then there would be the knives. Sometimes it was her hands. Sometimes fingers, or toes, but always there were the knives and the associated horror. On nights that she was lucky, she would wake up screaming at that point.
On other nights, she was not so lucky, and Myria would come. But it wouldn't be Myria, not really. She knew Myria, she had talked with her; she understood Myria. The thing would look like Myria, but it would be just one more flavor of horror. And then it would change, or it would be replaced by a multitude of other things. Cold dark shapes that radiated disapproval and loathing. And they would tell her how pathetic and insignificant she was. How all she really needed to do was just stop existing, and the universe would be a better place.
On those mornings when she awoke with that lingering cold presence, she couldn't seem to muster the energy to eat, much less get out of bed.
Over the next few minutes, Jessica poured out her terrors to the most unlikely of confessors. And in the process, as she watched Susan's face tighten with anger and her mouth set in a grim line, it eased something inside Jessica. It made the grotesque a bit more bearable.
"I know those creatures, Jessica, and that is not just your imagination." Susan said curtly when Jessica had finished. "They can't really do anything to you, but they can convince you to do some pretty horrible things to yourself if you let them." She shook her head. And I may have an idea that will help, but we won't know until tonight. "You said something else. I don't want to make you relive what happened, but it could be very important. How exactly did Myria find you? Did she say anything?"
Biting down on her revulsion, Jessica described what she had gone through. The long hours with her hands painfully bound at the wrist. Of how the terror of what the men would have done to her was finally replaced by hope, and then hopelessness as Myria appeared to be just as much a captive as she was. And then the terror multiplied as the man called "Butcher" had taken her throbbing hands, still tied behind her back, and prepared to create a clear and bloody message of what happened when "Snakes" was defied.
She told Susan of the cold numbness that washed over her as she watched Myria change, and described the transformation of the men to clouds of dust. The sudden absence of feeling at her wrists.
Jessica stared at her hands. "It took them three days to convince me that my hands had not been dissolved away, like those men had been. The doctor had to convince me that the ropes disappearing, combined with the long time my hands had been bound and what I had seen, had made my mind play a nasty little trick on me. I still have a hard time believing it sometimes. My hands just don't feel like… like mine sometimes." She shook her head and smiled sadly.
"I didn't see Myria leave, I don't think I could have seen anything at that point. And no one can find her. I heard the Watch even has a werewolf, and that they said there was nothing to track. It's like she never existed."
"We'll see about that." Susan regarded her with some concern. "The question is, do you want me to find her? Your cousin doesn't seem to know his own mind, but you at least deserve some consideration in the matter."
Jessica shook her head again, and to Susan's surprise seemed amused. It brought some life to her drawn features, and gave Susan an inkling of the joy-infused girl she must have been before. "My cousin is an ass, and I'm probably not helping. Every time he sees me like this, it's like someone's hitting him in the stomach with a mallet. He blames himself, you know. He blames himself for 'getting above his station', and he blames himself for 'getting involved' and putting the family at risk. He blames himself for me. And the idiot blames himself for not going after Myria as soon as he found out I was safe. Ass. Thrice an ass. He's so busy blaming himself for… for everything… the whole family is a mess still." Jessica looked at Susan, more steadily. "You know what Myria is, right? She told me some things. More than she told Jonny." She reached out across the table and grabbed Susan's hand, then looked down at her own hand in surprise before again meeting Susan's eyes and tightening her grip. "Can you find her?" She whispered intensely. "Do you know where she might have gone?"
Susan returned her grasp, offering assurance. "If she is alive, I should be able to find her, but I think you understand that she has nowhere to go, nowhere to be, if she has no place here. If Jonathon wants nothing to do with her, then finding her might make things worse, not better."
"Find Myria, Miss Susan." Jessica hissed. "Jonny won't forgive himself, no matter what he says, if she just disappears and no one knows what happened. He can lie to himself all he wants, but I think he still cares about her. And I think… I need to know too. She saved my life, no matter what else happened. I need to say thank you to her, regardless of what she is."
"Just find her."
Standing outside a few minutes later, Susan reflected on what she had learned. Maybe there is hope here, but there is risk too. Considering what Myria had done, had likely become if she was still alive, Susan showing up on her doorstep and reminding her what she had lost might be the worst move she could possibly make.
[1] Getting mugged by your own conscience might, at first, seem preferable to the physical version, until you realize that your garden variety mugger will probably pass you by when he realizes you don't have any money left. The existential variety, on the other hand, has no qualms about kicking a man inna fork when he is already down.
[2] No matter whose fault it is, when you have a smashup of that magnitude everyone ends up covered in it, and quite the worse for wear. Unless of course you enjoy a thort tharp thower of thit.