It was 3 o'clock on Wednesday afternoon, and Sebastian stretched across the couch, one leg slanted up the backrest, folded hands pillowing his head. He had just gotten out of the shower after a brief but intense workout. Today, it was squats and pull-ups, but as usual, the muscles that ached the most satisfyingly were the ones that he overtaxed two days before.
He felt deliciously languid, and as he paged through a yellowed, time-worn copy of Terra Incognita, his mind was in that state of semi-trance where the text on the page was more felt than read, and it passed unobstructed through the filter of his conscious mind into a landscape where concepts had shape and weight and the words became the things themselves.
He had picked up the book to satisfy his curiosity about Evangeline's strange story: her encounter in the woods, the leering face seared into the rock by the panicked unleashing of her powers, the same face seared into his brain when he grasped her memento. His reaction had frightened her, maybe more than the flash of psychic memory had frightened him. But where Evangeline retreated into doubt, Sebastian was stirred with wonder. There was something familiar about her tale and the sounds and images he saw in his mind's eye. It was the indistinct shadow of a memory, but a memory not his own. Eventually, it came to him in her own words — the gravel moved like sand in the wind — and he recalled the fragment he had once read.
It recounted some details of Dr. Goodwin's ill-starred expedition to the Rub' al Khali and the sand-drowned ruin that he believed might have been Irem of the Pillars. As Sebastian reread Goodwin's account, the words became sights, blurred into the images he gained from touching the stone. His thoughts swirled alongside the airish denizens of the wasteland, first moving sunwise in wisdom with those Jinn classified Deiseal, and then tumbling in savage melancholy with those called Widdershins. He was alongside the Bedouins as they marked the scaly faces of stone that groaned in the kiln of the desert. He was with Goodwin, staring in mute terror at the whirlwind of boulders that formed the giant, circular maw set against the red clay sky, helpless as its grinding, saw-pointed teeth of gypsum and marl rent the tents and crushed the bones of the camels. The thing's hot breath buffeted him with thunderous words, a vocabulary made of tempests and earthquakes. With the weightlessness of pure thought, his body tumbled through the air into the gnashing jaws of living earth.
His eyelids snapped open, awakened not by his imminent mastication but by his buzzing wrist. He was in that awkward, transitional state of consciousness where it was impossible to tell if he'd only drowsed for a minute or slept for five hours. For a moment, he wasn't even sure where he was. The mobi buzzed again as he fumblingly inserted the earbud.
"Hello?"
It was Evangeline. "Sebastian? Did I catch you at a bad time?"
He drew in a deep breath as he rubbed his eyes. "No, no. I was napping. I think. What's up?"
The line was silent. Just as he was about to ask if she was still there, Evangeline's voice came back, high and brittle. "Were you trying to scare me last night?"
"Do you—" He cleared his throat. "Do you mean with the rock on your key chain?"
"Yes. Be honest."
"No. No, I wasn't."
A somewhat shorter silence followed. "I was afraid of that," she finally said. "What did you see?"
He thought about it for a moment. "It's... hard to explain. Some of the things you described to me. Dust. Lots of dust and rocks blowing around, like in a storm. It reminded me of something. And I felt the heat. Maybe even..."
"What?" she said, urging him through his hesitation.
"Words. Maybe. I don't know. They felt like words, but I couldn't understand them. I'm sorry, I don't think I can explain it any better than that."
"What did it remind you of?"
"I was just re-reading it, actually," he said. "Your dad's old employer, but a long, long time before he was even born."
"The Compass Society?" Eva asked.
"Yeah. Do you know who Dr. Walter Goodwin was?"
"No?"
"He discovered the Ponape Scriptures and, uh, that thing in the Himalayas. He also searched for Irem, the City of the Pillars."
"I don't know what any of those are, Sebastian," she replied, a little testily.
"Anyway, he was an explorer, an early member of the Society. He was digging for this lost city in the Arabian desert. When he thought he'd found it, a ferocious dust storm kicked up, and something supernatural, maybe, came with it. He called it a Djinn—you know, like a genie. Said they swirled and moved in living rock, and sometimes the rocks, when they were blown around, would take on the outline of larger bodies. Or parts of bodies, mouths and hands—"
"That's enough. I don't want to hear any more."
"That's fine. I understand."
"I'm sorry, Sebby," she sniffled. Her voice was so mournful that Sebastian even let the hated nickname pass without comment. "For acting like this and accusing you of trying to scare me. And for kicking you. I just can't seem to..."
"Come to terms with it?"
She choked. "Yes."
"Eva," he said solicitously, "believe me, I really do understand. It's unsettling."
"That's a good word for it. The thing is, I had to know. No, I did know, but I told myself it was the wind or an animal knocking the rocks around, even though that doesn't make sense. I wanted to believe the lie so much I forgot it was a lie."
Sebastian sat up, his eyes sweeping the room suspiciously. He didn't see or hear his parents or his sister, but still he whispered. "You know, it's entirely possible that all I picked up was your excitement and fear. Psychometry doesn't always pick up what really happened." Quite the contrary, in fact. The sensations were always second-hand and usually filtered through intense emotional states.
A profound sigh came through the telephone. "I have to go, or I'll be late for work. Sorry for interrupting your nap."
"I don't mind waking from one dream to another," he said. The line was corny as hell, but he thought he heard her crack a smile anyway.
"If you're not too tired later, do you think you could pick me up?" She added in a small voice, "I miss you."
"Really? Even though I'm cursed with knowledge of that which man was not meant to know?"
"Even so."
"I'll be there. Seven thirty?"
"Eight-thirty. I'm trying to make up for last night."
"Got it. See you later, Eva."
Even though he arrived five minutes late, Sebastian still found himself pacing the sidewalk in front of the Allegheny Grill for a quarter of an hour waiting for Eva. It was unusually crowded for a Wednesday night, and he spent a lot of time dodging those annoyances peculiar to early spring in the city, like slow-motion joggers and men shaped like bowling balls 'taking their exercise' on gyropedes. The most obnoxious, though, were the panhandlers. The streets were thick with loud, aggressive, ill-mannered moochers of both sexes and myriad races, many with suspiciously similar hard luck stories. (Apparently, Pittsburgh was a sort of Bermuda Triangle for travelers from Erie and Cleveland, a dead zone that no automobile or hopper could hope to escape from. There were also an incredible number of 'veterans' of the Keystone Rebellion. They were weak on finances but unblemished by age; most looked younger than Sebastian's father, though his dad was but a lad when the Westpennsyltuckians flung their boots into the cogs of the Unionist enterprise.)
Someone tugged on Sebastian's sleeve and he turned on his heel, ready to give a piece of his mind -and maybe his elbow— to the grabby deadbeat. Instead, he stopped mid-snarl, surprised and disarmed by Evangeline's big eyes looking up at him. Her head was tilted slightly, her lips pursed as if biting back a smile. There was the look of something mysterious and mischievous in her eyes.
"Well, it's about time," he said.
She rolled her eyes and sighed. "Tell me about it! I don't like to leave before all my customers have paid because the other waitresses tend to forget about them. This lady took forever finishing her meal!"
"Was she at least a good tipper?"
"Lousy," Eva whined. "Eight percent!"
"That's what you get for being conscientious." Sebastian took her by the hand and pulled her through the throng. "Let's get out of here. I'm starting to get itchy. I had to park about three blocks away—"
Evangeline leaned in the opposite direction, trying to anchor him, but Sebastian stepped off so forcefully, she was carried along with him. "Wait, wait, wait! Let's take a walk first. I want to go somewhere quiet, away from all these people."
He looked at her over his shoulder, tilted his head. "Lead on."
They turned down the first side street they came across, a narrow alleyway that reeked of wet garbage. "Eww," Eva said, her nose wrinkling. "Maybe you should have led."
He smirked. "I can think of some better places to get frisky."
"I just wanted to talk to you." She leaned her head against his arm and stroked his hand. "OK, not just talk, but for now.
"Thank you for being honest with me, Sebastian. I was mad at you; I didn't want to think that—" Evangeline's throat tightened, choking off her voice.
Sebastian felt Eva's pulse throb as she clenched his hand, and his own quickened to match it. He knew why she hesitated, for he had also felt the cold breath of the uncanny prickling at the nape of his neck. The shadows of the alleyway grew long and malevolent, crowding in on them.
"To think that Rusty was real." Her words flew out as a gasp. Almost immediately, the oppressive weight of the darkness seemed to weaken. Naming and confronting a fear sometimes had that power. Or maybe it was just the streetlight at the end of the alley.
Evangeline's grip slackened, and Sebastian moved his hand to the small of her back. "It may not have been, you know. Don't put too much stake in my lesser talent. I sure don't." He knew that that was a perfectly reasonable thing to say, and he sounded perfectly confident in saying it, but in this case, he didn't really believe it.
And neither did Evangeline.
"No, it happened," she said firmly. "And I need to stop running away from it. I need to stop running away from a lot of things."
"Don't be too hard on yourself," Sebastian replied. He knew all about building protective walls of rationalizations.
She took a deep breath and straightened up, a tenuous smile crossing her lips. "There are all these wonderful and scary things out there. Heck, I'm one of them! I guess I've always known it, but you helped me see it. It's amazing how much my perspective has changed in the last few days."
Now Evangeline bubbled with excitement and energy, but Sebastian felt dizzy. His thoughts still lingered on the perils and mysteries of the invisible world, and her sudden shift in demeanor left him feeling like he'd missed something. He certainly hadn't come to expect mood swings from Eva, who had always acted like a very balanced, level-headed young woman. Seeing her act as erratic as some of his previous girlfriends raised an alarm, and yet, looking into her eyes, it was hard to hold anything against her bounding effervescence.
Evangeline laughed suddenly, then turned her head and put her hand bashfully over her mouth. "You look so confused," she said. "I'm acting like a weirdo right now, I know, but I don't care! I'm too excited! Listen, my dad has to go out of town for work. He'll be gone ten whole days. He's leaving Friday, so I'll be home alone all weekend. I want to do it, Sebastian!"
Eva's mouth kept moving, but her words were mere background noise to the pornographic romp unfolding in his mind's eye.
Sebastian was, somehow, both giddy and disappointed. He recalled an old memory of his dog toppling over a grill covered with T-bones but escaping only with a flank steak. Fwuffers wasn't about to give up that flank steak, but you could see how crestfallen he was about not biting into a porterhouse.
"I want to go out on patrol with you guys!"
Sebastian stared back in mute surprise. Somehow he'd lost track of this conversation.
"I want to go on patrol with you!" she repeated. "Since dad won't be home, I won't have to worry about curfew!"
"Oh," Sebastian said, unable to say much else. Eva was a porterhouse after all. But she was still on the grill.
Evangeline looked stung. "Did you change your mind?"
"No, of course not! I'm just... well, I'm stunned. I kinda doubted you would, actually."
She hit his arm playfully. "You thought I was a boring little 'fraidy cat. I can be full of surprises. So we're on, then?"
Sebastian smiled sheepishly. "Yes, totally."
"Awesome! I'm so excited." Evangeline jumped up and down and hugged him. "I even have an outfit picked out. I can't wait for you to see it."
Sebastian raised his eyebrow, newly excited by that image. "Me neither."
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