Happy Birthday, Dear One (109)

PSI-5

Erik’s birthday required cake and presents. And smiling. And being very careful. About everything. The way he acted, what he said, and what he allowed himself to think about.

There were good memories. Safe memories. They didn’t have to be on the birthday, just… because of the birthday. First words, first steps, scrawled drawings that were made cards by a judicious fold down the middle. A candle blown out by a sneeze, after which nobody wanted any of the cake.

The first time he played through a whole piece of sheet music, that was new this year. Not well, but that would come later. He’d promised Erik a trip to a music store, where he could pick out whatever song he wanted to learn, after he was able to read music well enough to play it right off the paper. They were going to need to do that soon.

Not today. Today was hard enough with the cake and the presents and the smiling.

Because a lot of the memories were not safe, and he could try to tiptoe around them, but he couldn’t stamp them out or make them go away. A lot of the bad memories were because he couldn’t stamp the memories out. They echoed. Tears hidden in bathrooms and pillows. Dreams. Sometimes he still cried out when he dreamed.

Last year he had spent Erik’s birthday in bed, hiding. With Erik sick too, it was just too much. Because Erik’s birthday wasn’t just cake and presents and smiling. Erik’s birthday was the day Alba died, and though every year he got farther away from that, he had yet to escape it.

But then, escaping the past was never really an option, was it? You just dragged it along behind you like a tin can on an ever-increasing length of twine, and sometimes it caught on things and it hurt to pull free.

———

It’s crying…

He had this mess. This baby.

It’s alive. It’s crying.

Of course it’s crying. It’s cold.

He had these towels. They were white with yellow embroidery. They were 100% Cotton. There was a little wooden sign in the bathroom that said they were 100% Cotton and Available For Purchase At The Gift Shop. It added that if you should prefer the set in your room, a charge would be added to your bill. Hey, jackass, if you steal our towels, we’ll charge you for them.

He thought that was funny, sometimes. He thought a lot of things were funny, sometimes. There were some empty pink packets of artificial sweetener in the dining room. They had musical notes on them. He thought those were funny. On more than one occasion he had attempted to play them. Or, that cat with three legs. Well, all the cats had three legs, at least three legs, but the one with only three legs. He chased it two blocks and it still got away from him. That was funny.

He laughed then he coughed and buried it against his shoulder. It was like bringing up broken glass. It hurt every part of him.

Crying…?

He stared at the baby he was holding.

Oh, gods. I have to do… All that baby stuff…

He had learned about all that baby stuff. He had talked to doctors and medics and read things and written things down. Because, okay, she should have been at the infirmary when it happened. But he had always been in charge of her and she was bound and determined to keep up with the supply runs until the last possible minute, even if it meant they had to tote her in the damned suitcase, and well… Here they were, right? Here he was. Here was a baby.

He seemed to have done some of the baby stuff. He still functioned reasonably well, when he could get up and move, he just didn’t record everything anymore. He had done the cord, and the afterbirth, and he had obviously cleared out the kid’s mouth because the kid was crying. There was a page of handwritten notes with a blood smear running down it like an improvised check-mark.

The notes had been in the suitcase. They had a starcatcher’s suitcase with a balky enchantment — it was still bigger on the inside, it just tended to get heavier at odd moments. Not that heavy, but enough to make it useless for the original purpose: high-altitude stealth flight. Fine for toting around on the ground with a bunch of little knitted things and powdered milk, though. Well, some things crocheted. Kurt could knit, Amy could knit and crochet, and they had attempted to outdo each other. He was pretty sure there were a couple afghans in the suitcase. He would ruin them if he used them now. The kid was a mess.

Does it matter? he thought. He laughed again.

Does it matter? he wondered. Pain and confusion creased his expression. What… What am I doing?

There was a brass lamp on the floor by the night table next to the suitcase. It was shaped like a pelican. He recalled that it had seemed friendly towards him at one point but it hadn’t spoken to him in a long time, like maybe he’d offended it. He kept it in the room because it still seemed like a nice lamp, and a lot of things in the hotel were not nice, even some in the room.

(He could see the bathtub from the room. The bathtub made Alba cry.)

Nice lamp? Do you remember what I’m doing? I think I’m a little mixed up.

(The crying kid was not helping. He wondered if maybe he ought to put it in the bathtub.)

There was a note under the lamp. The lamp said he should write that down, because he wasn’t remembering very well, and he always did what the lamp said. Like, it said there had to be someplace in the hotel with medicine and it might still be there because people didn’t think to go to a hotel for medicine and there was a little. It didn’t help very much, but it was a nice thought. It was a nice lamp.

The note said: Morph, if you get better, if you come out of this, come back to the wall. Go west. Bring Alba, if you can, or just bring you. Go west. I’ll look for you.

Morph? Is that me?

He shut his eyes and bowed his head and cried softly. Yeah. That was him. He hadn’t been a name to anyone since he couldn’t remember. There wasn’t anybody left to call him names, or say it was okay, or say they’d help him. Just the note.

It was his handwriting. He wanted it not to be. He wanted her to have been there. He wanted her here now.

There was no one but him.

He was taking care of Alba in an abandoned hotel called the Yellow Brick Road with a flooded basement and ivy wallpaper and a blue rug with black vines on it. They had been holed up here for three days at the beginning of December. The Gray Wall had come down in mid-November and the chocolate had run out ten days later. They were relying on Cousin Violet, and Cousin Violet said, Nope! No bombs or gas there! But there had been death, which Solange would have seen for them. Anathema, a disease of the lungs which lurked in damp places and spread like wildfire. It loved muddy trenches and cold weather and could take out whole battlefields of men better than bombs and gas and bullets combined — leaving no victors, only plague signs and desertion. But it was perfectly happy in a two-star hotel with 100% Cotton towels and a flooded basement, oh yes.

After three days, Jim and Janice and Alba were coughing up blood spray with a tell-tale red rash at the joints and Morph… Well, he had been coughing up blood pretty much nonstop since it started to get cold, and it had got a lot worse in the hotel. You couldn’t tell rashes on him, not with his color, and he did have bad lungs — but he didn’t want to go with the others and they did not want him to go with them. He was sick and he wanted to stay with Alba — they left him there.

They left the suitcase with him. It was Alba’s suitcase, with her things for the baby. They did not need it. With Alba over a month from full-term and anathema usually doing its work inside a week, it didn’t seem too likely that she was going to need it either, but it wasn’t important where they left the damn thing.

Morph took care of people. He had always done that, anyway. He was able to do that, somehow. His cough was very bad, but his fever was less, even at night. He wasn’t as weak. He could eat better, and drink, though he didn’t really like to. He found ink and paper and a pot of glue in the front desk and he pasted plague signs on all the doors (crosses made of interlocking scythes, they looked like evil flowers that cut) and then he took care of Alba and Janice and Jim.

Janice and Jim went very fast. Maybe mercifully fast. There was pain, and a lot of blood. Terror. (Jim went first and didn’t understand what was happening to him. Janice was a little more together and she seemed to have some idea that was going to happen to her. She screamed. Alba did not want that to happen to her or the baby. She fled the room. She would’ve fled the hotel, if she could’ve gotten that far. He found her on the second floor landing, curled into a ball and sobbing.) He comforted. Jim died and was out of pain. Janice accepted some water and soft talking and stopped screaming. About twelve hours later, she followed after Jim.

Alba slapped him when he tried to comfort her. He had said something about how it would be over quickly and they would be together, even the baby, and she said, never talk that way about the baby, and he said, okay, and he helped her back upstairs and into a bed — not in the same room as Janice and Jim.

When Janice died and he suggested they might do something with pills or a blade, whatever he could find, Alba snatched his coat and dragged him down to the bed. He could feel the heat baking off of her like a stove. She told him she was not going to die, and the baby was not going to die, so he’d better correct his goddamned assumptions and cook something, and he said, okay, and he got a knife from the kitchen and he killed something so they could eat.

And she didn’t die. And she didn’t die. She ate, even when she didn’t want to, and she threw up, and she ate again. And she coughed. Deep, shuddering coughs that racked her whole body and sprayed blood and then tissue and lately terrifying white matter that he could not identify. She drank endless glasses of water that disappeared one sip at a time and she was too weak to hold for herself. She burned, constantly, worse at night. She would sob with pain and exhaustion, or scream and accuse him of trying to kill her and the child, or plead and ask why couldn’t they go home now, please. Sometimes she called him her father.

And he would say, no, or, it’s okay, or, all right. And when she was so hot it scared him, and cold rags and sheets seemed to smoke on her body, he would carry her from the bed and put her in the bathtub, where the rusty water was forming a crust of ice, and she would cry, because that hurt, then she would quiet and every time he was afraid that the shock had killed her, but it never had.

And she didn’t die, and he grew weaker, and more ragged. And he would get lost, in the hotel and his own mind. And sometimes it didn’t make sense and sometimes it did make sense and sometimes he was pretty sure he was crazy now, but not sure in which ways. (Do lamps really talk to people? Is Alba dead? Are hotels real? Did I ever used to be able to leave here?) His cough was worse and he shuddered when he tried to move and breathing was like trying to heft a two ton sack of gravel. He couldn’t seem to get out of the hotel anymore, if he ever could. He would wake up curled into a little ball in a doorway or at the bottom of the stairs. Sometimes with vomit dribbling out of his mouth, sometimes blood. He could make it to the kitchen, in stages, and he’d heat a pan with water and mix in a little powdered milk for Alba. That was all they had left here that was food. It seemed silly he’d been saving it so long. There wasn’t any possible way that…

Yeah, but, he’s crying.

It was a boy, like Violet said. Alba was going to name him after that man in the poster. Erik Rudolph.

Well, then that’s who he is.

He had done another one of those memory-skips, but, again, he seemed to have been competent during it. He was holding a clean child wrapped in clean towels and, let’s see, he was kneeling…

He was kneeling next to the bed. He was trying to give Alba her son.

The woman in the bed was white, like milk, like paper. White was her color, like his was red — like the boy’s was green. You might be forgiven for being a little bit confused about the white. There was a lot of red on her. On her legs and lower half, and on the yellow bedspread beneath her. On her chest and shoulders and hands and arms. She had been coughing, choking, the whole time. It was possible she had vomited blood as well. She was naked, and uncovered. He dared not keep her covered. The fever and the exertion had left her burning like madness and he couldn’t put her in the bathtub, he no longer had the strength for it. He thought she was cooler now. Not cool, but more like a sick human being than the surface of the sun. He thought she could hold her child without killing him.

She was panting and uttering low, soupy coughs like snarls. Her gray eyes gazed at the ceiling and saw nothing. Her white hair was plastered against her in lank waves. He wondered how long he had left her like that. How long he had been holding the child and failing to process the crying. He hoped not too long. He hoped she had at least understood the crying.

He slipped an arm beneath her shoulders. It was hard, he was shaking, but he could rest the arm with the baby on the bed and she was light. Gods, she was so light. Like crumpled newspapers. She almost seemed to crinkle. Maybe that was just the sound of her breathing.

“Alba, look.” He helped her look, like when he got done feeding her a bowl of custard. You made it! “It’s a boy. It’s Erik.”

She drew a breath, Ah, and she wrapped both arms around him and smiled. She couldn’t really hold him. He helped her do that too.

Erik was still crying. She managed a soft sound, Oh, and her mouth pulled into a little bow of sympathy. (She had stopped doing words days ago, it was too hard on her throat. She had stopped doing his name even longer before that, it was too hard on her brain, and then he only had the note.) She lifted a hand and she stroked Erik’s hair, tucking it gently behind one ear. It was too short to need that and too fine to stay, but she did it again and again. He quieted and it seemed he slept.

Alba’s mouth went, There. She laid her burning hand against the baby’s cooler cheek and rocked him gently back and forth. I love you. She coughed again, a guttural sound like a growl. It got blood on the towel, and a little on Erik.

Alba’s mouth was red. I love you, it said silently.

I can’t let her hold him, Morph thought. She’ll get him sick.

No. I can’t take him from her.

He shook his head. It doesn’t matter.

He winced and looked distractedly away. Does it matter…?

He inquired of the nice lamp. He read the note.

He had to cough. He coughed into his sleeve. His coatsleeves were dark and stiff with dried blood. Everything got gray when he was coughing and when it came back he was on the floor.

If I get better, I’m supposed to go west. I’m not better. I will not go west.

Erik was crying again. Morph had to crawl back to where Alba and Erik were. Alba wasn’t holding Erik anymore. Her head had gone back limply against the pillow and her eyes were closed. Erik was still bundled in the towel, slightly stained, and had slid down precariously into the gap between Alba’s arm and chest. He didn’t like it.

Morph dragged himself up on his knees via the bedspread and laid his head next to Alba’s shoulder and the crying bundle. “Alba?” he said. He nudged her with one shaking hand. “Did you go to sleep?”

But he was already crying.

She was cooler. She was already cooler. It was cold in here. He kept forgetting to light the fire.

“Alba? Did you go away so you wouldn’t hurt him?”

She was cooler, and she was so, so quiet. No more coughing.

Oh, good.

I’d like to die now, he thought. Goodnight.

He closed his eyes.

It wouldn’t stop being crying. It seemed to get louder.

He’s going to wake Janice and Jim.

He gave a gasp and opened his eyes.

Erik was bundled in the towel and screaming. Morph stroked a tentative hand against him. “No, dear one, please don’t wake Janice and Jim. They’ll be mad because you’re alive. You’re so little. Please, let’s be asleep now. Shh.”

Erik did not want to be asleep now. He seemed offended at the suggestion.

Morph thought he heard them stirring in the other room. They were stiff because they were frozen, he never lit the fire in there anymore (not even when he went in there sometimes for the company) because it slowed them down. But they were just in the other room. It wouldn’t take them long.

“Oh, please. Shh-shh-shh.” He patted the bundle. He didn’t dare pick it up. He was pretty sure he’d drop it, and then more crying. Louder crying. “Is it because it’s cold? Are you mad because it’s cold?”

He crawled to the fire. He had put a trash can in here, like the kids usually did when they holed up someplace. They were light and they worked well enough, if you put them someplace with brick or stone or tile. There was tile leading from the room door into the bathroom. He put it there.

There were, um… Oh, thank gods, there were still some books piled over here. Books and drawers were all he could carry around anymore. He was in no shape to bust up furniture. He was forever indebted to the Joshua-people for packing flammable material in every hotel nightstand, sometimes multiples in one room. He could coax the books a little so they gave less light and more heat and he did that. It made them go for longer too. He might get three or four hours out of those.

He was pleased with having done that and the warmth made breathing so much easier, but there was still crying. He turned and regarded the bed and the blood and Alba not alive and Erik still crying.

What? Can’t I be done now? What do you want?

Well, the short answer was that he wanted to be alive and have someone take care of him, but his newly-minted uncle couldn’t really grasp that at the moment. He needed to be screamed at until he hit upon basic needs through panic and guesswork. It helped when he started taking things out of the suitcase. He had still been thinking about cold and that there might be a hat in there for the kid when he pulled out a bottle and powdered milk.

Oh, crap, yeah. I guess Erik is going to be one of those modern formula babies.

And he had laughed and cried about that.

Then he buttoned Erik under his coat and took him for a stagger down to the kitchen for a warm bottle. (He wasn’t going to leave him in the room. Janice and Jim might get him. That he might heat up water, and thus a bottle, in the bedroom, with the trash can fire, never occurred. By the time he was down to doing powdered milk for meals, he no longer had enough brain left for that kind of lateral thinking.)

Erik was a bit happier just being under the coat, human contact was better than being abandoned on a bed with a dead woman, but he didn’t shut up until he got a bottle and under the nice coat where it was warm.

Now what? thought Morph, nee Mordecai, sitting sprawled on the kitchen floor in a bloodstained coat, coughing and shivering and nursing a tiny terrorist.

Kill both of us? Knife?

There were knives. He was looking at some right now. They were sharp and silver and affixed to a dark magnet. They killed things pretty good.

But I just fed him.

That — more than all Alba had gone through, more than her snarling assertion that the baby was not going to die, more than the visceral terror of slitting a soft green throat with a cold blade, more than any idea of basic human decency — just that I have gone through all this trouble and he’s just stopped crying — took murder-suicide off the table.

And it seemed cruel to wait until he started crying again and kill him while he was unhappy.

Since there was no point in this flowchart where killing the baby looked like an option, that meant getting the baby out of the hotel, because Morph was pretty sure he was going to die soon himself, knife or no knife.

Not west. East. Into the city. The baby isn’t sick. I have a suitcase with things to take care of him. Someone will take him. A church or an orphanage or just a mother…

There’s a siege on, and the supplies aren’t getting through anymore. Is somebody really going to want a baby? Another human being to feed? A colored one? Even with a few weeks worth of magicked powdered milk to feed him with?

I suppose someone might want him to eat him.

He curled a little tighter around the bundle in his arms. Despite having been ready to kill him a minute ago, he didn’t want someone else to do it. Not someone disingenuous.

He sighed.

But even that’s better than freezing or starving next to me in this damn hotel.

His brain cut out again. When it cut back in, he was holding the child against him and rocking back and forth. And softly singing.

Something about a séance and voices in the dark. He couldn’t remember the rest. He didn’t even know what it was. He thought of Janice and Jim, dead and frozen but smiling and playing the Beatles on the record player. It was crazy and it frightened him.

He stopped doing that. The singing part, anyway.

Oh, gods. I’m losing it. I don’t sing.

He had a violin. He still had a violin. Despite rapidly working through everything flammable and portable in the hotel, he had not put Eileen in the trash can, because he needed her more than heat. Besides, there were probably still some more books or drawers… Or he could burn that little wood sign in the bathroom about the towels! That would give him… Maybe a whole minute!

There was little point to burning any more books or drawers, or the little wood sign, or even Eileen. He was getting sicker and weaker and less rational. He needed to get out of here and burn up what little remained of his existence finding a safe place and someone to care for Erik. He needed to do that now, because it was very hard to hold onto things and increasingly hard to hold onto memory and he thought it was probably something to do with…

Oh, gods. He was kneeling on the floor of the room and sobbing and he didn’t know how long he’d been doing that. It couldn’t have been long. Erik wasn’t crying again yet. Unless he’d left Erik in the kitchen or possibly killed him…?

He looked around for evidence of what the hell he had been doing.

Erik was still wrapped in a towel, although this seemed to be a different towel because there wasn’t a bloodstain. That must’ve bothered him, or he figured it would bother Erik’s potential adoptive parents. However, he was not holding Erik. Erik was beside him on the floor. He was holding Eileen.

There was a vague memory here, or maybe logic. He couldn’t take Eileen, not even in the suitcase, because the suitcase got heavier and Eileen would make it more heavier. He needed all his strength for Erik and Erik’s things. Erik had no use for a violin.

Maybe when he’s older…?

No, that was beyond sentimentality, that was idiocy. If he needed one when he was older he could get one. He needed warmth and food and diapers and safety pins and that was in the suitcase. Nothing else needed to be toted around by a dying man who could barely walk. Eileen needed to stay in the hotel.

Right. So he was kneeling on the floor at Alba’s bedside and cradling Eileen and wishing he could be dead right here right now with the people he loved because all this was too hard.

He couldn’t get up. He was crying and coughing and shaking and he wanted to be dead, and all of that was very strong. Conversely, Erik was not crying. He thought that by the time Erik was crying, he might not be able to get up again for real.

And he was kind of okay with that.

But he thought Alba might not be. And he wasn’t sure if she might be able to do something about it. She had been pretty mad about things when she was still alive. She might be nothing but rage now, just waiting. Cold now, instead of hot. Cold fire. White fire, like when the gods lit her up from the inside.

He was afraid of her. But, he had always been afraid of her, a little bit. It didn’t keep him from loving her.

He knew what to do to make himself get up.

He got up.

He played for her. He played ‘Nights in White Satin.’ He wasn’t really sure what the damn thing meant, but it sounded like the whole world ending and it said I love you a million times and that was what he needed to say. When he was finished he was tear-streaked but able to stand and he laid Eileen on the bed next to Alba, and he buttoned Erik into his coat again and he picked up the suitcase and he set about trying to get out of the hotel.

It wasn’t as bad as he thought it would be. It wasn’t eldritch. He was just sick and he got confused and he didn’t do stairs very well. So he passed out once and he fell down the stairs a bit and one time he got lost and scared and he started crying and he tried to get the lamp to talk to him again (it didn’t) but eventually he found his way out the front door. Being scared crapless that Alba was going to be dead when he got back to the hotel might have been a factor in his inability to get out of the hotel, but he’d really never know. Maybe it just decided to let him go. Or he got away while it was distracted.

He had no sense of direction whatsoever. He attempted to locate the sun. There appeared to be one. It was gray, but there was some kind of sun going on up there. Whether it was rising or setting he had no idea and he couldn’t keep focused long enough to tell which way it was going. He tried to do street signs. If it said E, he would go towards it. If it said W, he would turn and go away from it. So much for the nice lamp which was so concerned for his well-being and which he vaguely remembered. (Was it a duck?) He was a lot more worried about people. People were pretty much in charge of him. They were not really happy with him.

He knew he was sick. He knew he looked sick. He would explain right away that Erik was not sick. He was not fully comprehending that he was a man in a bloodstained coat with a hideous cough who kept staggering up to strangers and into buildings and saying that the baby he was carrying did not have the deadly-contagious disease. In context, this was not a selling point. In context, he was lucky the supply lines had been down for over a month and he did not get back to the wall, or somebody would’ve shot him. As it was, they threw things at him. Nobody wanted to get close enough to stab him.

He couldn’t understand why nobody seemed to be at all interested in the suitcase.

———

He was curled up in an alley in a snowbank. It was cold, but everything had been cold for a long time and he had stopped feeling it. The snowbank was soft. It was kind of comfy. But he was holding Erik against him, under the coat, away from the snowbank.

The weather and the exhaustion and all the screaming people throwing things and the total hopelessness had taken their toll. It was dark. It was cold. It was either going to snow or freeze and that would finish him. He couldn’t stop coughing. Well, probably he would soon. He was tired and he was relieved and he was sorry.

He had left the suitcase… Somewhere. It had just gotten too heavy. Nobody wanted it, anyway. He wished he had it. He could’ve made Erik another bottle, even a cold one. Erik had been crying steadily since… He didn’t know. Seemed like a long time. It was either getting quieter or he was just getting used to it. There were some blankets in the suitcase, Erik could’ve had more blankets… But he had left the suitcase and the bottles and the blankets and walked off trying to find a person and he hadn’t found any of those and now he had nothing. Well, a crying child and a snowbank. He guessed he might put the crying child in the snowbank, that might hasten things, but he couldn’t quite let go of the idea of a person. Why shouldn’t there be a person? Erik wasn’t sick. Alba had been through so much. Maybe, even if he died, Erik might live a little longer, and someone might find him and take him away. And Erik could live and be warm, and he could be dead — like Alba. A happy ending.

“I’m sorry, dear one. I’ll keep you warm as long as I can. I guess you won’t know your name is Erik, and your mother loved you.”

Either he lost hold of memory again or he passed out. Erik was still crying when he faded back in, but Erik was gone. He gasped and scrambled with both arms.

I’ve dropped him!

He began to cough.

“Whoa there. Let’s come out of the icy grip of death, okay?”

Someone had two arms around him, warm under his coat, and was dragging him out of the snow. She was holding Erik too.

“Hey, do you think you can help me? Get your legs under you? I kinda don’t want to leave you to get help…”

He gasped and coughed and gasped again. This time, he managed speech, “Leave me, I’m dying.”

“The dying part is why I’m not leaving you.”

“Please take him with you. He’s not sick.”

“Yeah, I get that. Neither are you. Bad dose of gas, huh?”

“Huh?” he said, blinking. “No, I… Yes, but…” A few. He’d got cornered in an alley not too long ago while he was out chasing cats at the damn hotel, but… “No. I’m sick. I’m dying. It killed her. It’s in the basement.”

“What, the gas?”

She was still trying to pick him up!

“Anathema.”

Oh, gods. Now he’d said it. Now with the throwing of things! He curled both hands over his head.

“Huh,” she said. “Well, that’s not killing you. Will you please walk? I am trying to juggle you and this damn kid!”

“Put me down, you ignorant bitch! Will you look at the blood?” He drew a ragged breath. He tried to show his coat. He collapsed coughing and he sprayed more blood on the snow.

“You are really fucked, aren’t you?” she said softly, as if she respected it.

“Yes!” he cried, choking. Erik was still crying! Why didn’t she do something about Erik? Why didn’t she take him home and feed him and love him and let this broken person die?

She put hands on his coat and began to put hands in his pockets. She was somehow doing this and juggling Erik against her at the same time. “Do you have any gold on you? Wedding band or something? I’m seeing brass, but that’s a really bad idea…”

“Gold…?” he said.

“Okay, here we go.” She had found the locket. She jerked it from his neck and broke the chain.

He felt as if she’d yanked out a tooth, or maybe a piece of his heart. If he cried out, she didn’t seem to notice. He wasn’t sure himself. Erik was pretty loud.

“You can have that if you’ll just take him,” he heard himself say. Oh, good. He was acting sensibly without conscious thought again. Maybe he’d forget this too.

“Cheap crap,” she muttered, regarding it. “Better than straight brass.”

“That thing is very dear to me!” he cried.

“Well, that’s great, ‘cos you’re gonna have it forever. This is gonna hurt like hell,” she said. She pulled open his shirt and laid a hand on his chest. “I’m sorry about it, but I have to do something or you’re never gonna make it back to the house.” She glanced up and from side-to-side, but she guessed it wasn’t very likely anyone was going to call the cops, given the circumstances.

She set him on fire. There was brief fear that she might do that to Erik and certainty that she must not do that to Erik…

(Kill her. Knife…?)

…and then all he could do was be on fire and scream.

In an alley, near a snowbank, at six o’clock at night, there was a blonde woman with frazzled hair and a cheap cloth coat with a shearling collar who was frowning with her eyes closed and holding a screaming green infant in one hand and holding down a screaming red man with the other one while a violent white light pulsed and crackled around her. It smelled very much like hot metal and a little like burnt pork.

Then she removed her hand and the man was merely lying puddled on the ground and gasping with a brand new glowing gold scar in the center of his chest, but the kid was still screaming. Poor kid probably needed a bottle — and a lifetime of therapy.

Her hair was smoking slightly.

Geez. Great.

She grabbed his arm and yanked him up again. She didn’t even give him a minute to button his shirt. “Come on. We gotta go now. Ten or twenty minutes and you’re going to be screaming again. I think you’ll skew more towards ten. You are really messed up.”

“Tried to kill me,” he said faintly. Ah, but no coughing. And his breathing was shallow, but regular. That wouldn’t last either. High fever and soul-rending pain tended to do things to a person.

“No, but I guess you won’t believe me for a while. Come on. If you get up and walk right now I will lovingly raise this infant to adulthood and grant him a full scholarship to whatever profession you so desire.”

He attempted it. She was already dragging him and she had already lit him on fire and she wouldn’t leave him alone. “A violin,” he said. He sobbed. He wished he had brought Eileen. It didn’t make any difference about the suitcase. He could give her Eileen. Here. Tell him I played this for his mother.

“That seems like it might be a little bit difficult, but I understand they’re doing wonderful things with magic these days.”

“You’re a crazy person,” he said.

“It has been remarked,” she said. “Fewer opinions, more forward momentum, please.”

“His name is Erik. Will you tell him his name is Erik?”

“I imagine one or the other of us will. It is starting to seem like the talking is a function of the moving.”

“His mother loved him very much.”

“They do tend to, don’t they?”

“I can’t remember which way the nice lamp said to go.”

“And I’m the crazy person?”

“You set me on fire.”

“More or less,” she allowed. “No. Keep moving.” It seemed he had reached the point where the exhaustion was starting to register. She still had about a block to go. She could’ve yelled for help, but, under the circumstances, that might’ve got about as much a reaction as yelling for the police, even from her own house. Hey, it’s me, Hyacinth! I have more sick people to annoy you and eat up our resources!

Yeah! Piss off, Hyacinth!

“I’m so tired,” he said.

“Come on.” She pulled him. “Erik wants his bottle.”

“It’s in the suitcase.”

“Let’s go get the suitcase.”

“Can’t remember where it is.”

“I know where it is. Come with me.” That got him going. When he slowed, she invoked the suitcase. When that failed to register, she extended that to, “Erik wants his bottle, it’s in the suitcase. Let’s go get the suitcase,” and that was enough. She walked him up to the front yard that way. There was no gate. They’d had the gate off ages ago. Most of the pipes and the wires had gone too.

The kid was getting quiet. She didn’t think he was in any danger of checking out on her like the man, but she felt bad for him. She hoped there was someone with a baby in there who could just give the poor little guy a breast and have done with it. Instant service.

He looked up at the house. He had lost his name again. The note was back with the lamp, a vague memory that someone or some thing once cared about him. He expected to be dead soon, anyway. Asleep, and then dead. That would be nice. Comfy.

The lights were on in the house and there were shadows moving in the windows. There were voices. Some of them were singing Yule songs. Laughter. There were people in the house.

It wasn’t just the crazy lady.

I’m sick. I will kill all those people.

He pulled back from her and attempted to run. He sat down. She crouched beside him and tried to pick him up. “Come on. It’s only a little bit more.”

“I can’t go in there! I have anathema! I’ll kill them!”

“Oh my gods, please do not go mental now. Not that way. Couldn’t we talk some more about the nice lamp?”

“Let go of me! You have to let me go! I’m dying!”

She set the baby down (gently!) beside her in the street. She had to. She seized the man by both ears, which was painful enough that he quit trying to pull away from her. Thus, he had to look at her. “All right. Now please listen and try to understand me, weird stupid man. I believe you that people had anathema where you came from. You do not have that. I can touch you and know that. I am a medic. Your lungs are badly damaged because you have inhaled a great deal of chlorine gas. I have fixed a little of it. You have an increasingly small amount of time before adjusting to that repair starts to hurt you as badly as me putting it in. I want you in the house, and I want to feed your damn baby. Now will you let go of this nonsense about dying from anathema?”

“Don’t say I won’t be dead like she is!” He began to sob like a child. “That’s mean!”

She sighed. This person was not at an intellectual level where logic was going to do anything. She moved her hands to his shoulders and spoke gently, “I have something very nice to kill you at the house so you won’t hurt anyone, and Erik will be safe.”

He blinked at her. He smiled. “You’re kind.”

Oh, he was her best friend now. She needn’t have bothered with all that stuff about the suitcase. He would’ve followed her anywhere if she just told him she was going to take him home and shoot him. She got him through the yard and up the porch steps and into the front room, at which point there were plenty of people happy to be exasperated with her.

“Don’t worry,” he told the first of them (Gregory) without prompting. “I’m going to die!”

“Hyacinth, you went out looking for metal!” said Gregory. Nevertheless, he accepted the unhappy infant she offered him with practiced resignation.

“I found some brass buttons!” said Hyacinth, indicating the man’s coat. “Do you think you can find that kid something to eat? We have any moms in the house?”

“Maybe a couple, but I’m not sure they’re going to want to share…”

“Hand him to them, they’ll share. I gotta find this guy a place to lie down before he starts screaming. I just hope the pain kicks in before he figures out I’m not going to murder him. Do you think we’ve got space for a cot in the dining room? He’s going to be loud…”

———

Erik discovered him in the downstairs bath, sitting on the toilet that didn’t work with his head in his hands and a pile of wadded up tissues at his feet. But it was past midnight, so he’d made it through the birthday all right.

As if it made any difference.

Erik had a frowning look at the tissues before attempting any kind of a hug, and Mordecai knew he was looking for blood. There was a little bit. Mordecai started shaking his head, though he knew that wouldn’t make much of a difference either. He wasn’t sick, he said. He blamed the cold

Erik wanted him to come back to bed, where it was warm. He did that, and he let Erik put blankets on him, and give him tissues, and he promised that he was fine.

Erik wanted to know if it was his fault.

No, he explained, between tissues. It was not Erik’s fault, not that he was sad now and not what had happened then. Alba had been sick. She had lived because of Erik. It was the sickness that killed her.

He asked, worried, if the Invisibles had been talking about it.

No, they had not. Erik was careful and he tried not to think about it so they wouldn’t. He knew it was bad. He didn’t want to know more.

“That’s good, dear one. That’s very smart.”

“…Uncle? Do you like my birthday?”

“I like you. I like that you have a birthday and I want you to have a hundred more of them and I want to be here for every one. You’re the best thing about your birthday, dear one. It’s just everything else. It’s just hard sometimes.”

It was heavy, the memories. And every year, more of them. So much pain, for Erik and for him. It was hard for him to carry these things and unfair that Erik had to as well. Every year he knew a little more and he grew a little more. One of these years, he was going to find out everything about what had happened to his mother, and probably even worse things.

But it was better than the alternative.

Carry that weight.