Page 59 of Spelunking Through Hell

“He wouldn’t like that,” said the boy.

“That’s fine. I don’t likehim.”

“You seem angry,” said Cer, sounding confused, like she couldn’t understand why I would be.

“I mean, you’re the Lilu. Can’t you tell?”

They both shook their heads. I didn’t groan. It was a near thing.Their unwillingness to take us at our word when we’d been telling them the truth suddenly made a lot more sense. Lilu can control the emotions of others via their pheromones, which makes them ineffective against people who lack nostrils, or personal pheromones, or have head colds or sinus infections of any kind. If they want you to feel something, you’ll feel it. A surprising number of them have won Tony awards. An unsurprising number of them have failed to make the transition into screen acting. They need to be in the room with the people they’re trying to influence.

Most Lilu can also read the natural emotions of the people near them, feeling what needs to be twisted and amped up, figuring out what stimuli their targets will have the best reactions to. If these people had been able to read our emotions when we approached them, they would have realized that we were sincere—not that we were telling the truth, because feeling emotion isn’t the same as detecting lies, but that we meant what we were saying. It would have helped them trust us. But they couldn’t, and so they didn’t.

Anyone with even a drop of Lilu blood seems to get the poison resistance and the lack of allergies as part of the package—back when I spent more time with the Campbells, they had a geek whose whole act was based around drinking assorted various toxins, including mercury mixed with arsenic. He never got sick, not once, and when he did eventually die, it was of old age, not liver failure. He was one-eighth Lilu on his mother’s side. He didn’t have any of the empathy or pheromonal control, just the poison immunity, and he learned to work with what he had.

He was a fun guy. Knowing him is probably why I had such an easy time accepting Ted. Well, that, and Jane had long since made it very clear that I had no authority over her life, not even down to questioning the species of the man she married.

But like poor dead Oliver, or my own grandchildren, many Lilu crossbreeds seemed to lose part or all of their empathic and pheromonal abilities. Just to verify, I asked, “So you can’t read people at all?”

They nodded glumly, looking like they expected to be punished for their weakness. I silently reminded myself that going off to find and murder their Patriarch would not only be antisocial but counterproductive, since we were trying to convince these people that weweren’tall maddened killers. Instead, I sighed, and smiled.

“That’s fine,” I said. “My grandson reads just fine, but he has virtually no control over his pheromones. All he does is make people lustover him, sometimes so badly that they can’t do anything else. We keep hoping he’ll get better as he gets older, but so far, no luck in that area. We don’t care what you can do, only that no one’s forcing you to do anything.”

“You’re forcing us to march,” said the boy.

“No, I’m asking you to keep moving if you don’t want to die out here,” I said. “It’s a shitty choice, but it’s still a choice, and it’s yours to make. If you want to stop here, knowing you can’t go back, that’s up to you. We’re offering you a chance. That’s all we have. That’s all any of us have.”

He frowned, then inclined his head. “My name is Lyn.”

“Well, we’re glad to have you with us, and it’s nice to meet you, Lyn,” I said. “I hope you’re both okay with surviving and being fed and maybe finding a less shitty place to live.”

“It doesn’t sound real,” admitted Cer. “You say you speak for a monster, and that you’re going to give us everything we ever wanted. Are you the avatar of the unanswered prayer?”

The idea was repulsive, but also entertaining, in a terrible way. The crossroads wouldhateto have people wandering around the cosmos who thought I somehow spoke for it. I wasn’t nearly enough of an asshole for that. “Not necessarily, but I’m trying to clean up the mess they made,” I said. “So if you can’t read emotions, and you can’t tell when we’re trying to deceive you, I’m guessing you also can’t tell whether or not we have bad intentions.”

“You’re leading us to the undying wizard,” snapped the boy. “Of course you have bad intentions.”

“I guess we’ll know one way or the other soon.” We had almost reached the compound. Both of them paled when they saw it, realizing that they were passing the point of no return. “Come on. Give us a chance.”

Sally and the guards were hurrying toward the wall, sweeping their share of Murrays along with them, until only the three of us were malingering at any distance. Cer gave me a half-desperate glance, eyes searching my face for any indication of how this was going to go. Finally, she sighed, and offered her brother her hand. He took it, and together they followed me toward what I knew was safety, and they still half-expected to be certain death.

Good to see my knack for making friends was still alive and well.

Seventeen

“Sometimes the right thing and the best thing and the good thing and the thing you want are four different things, and you have to try to figure out which one of them will do the least amount of damage.”

—Enid Healy

Approaching the wall of the compound belonging to the man I’ve been seeking for the last fifty years, pretty well ready to go the fuck home

Sally and the otherswere waiting for us at the wall. She gave me a sardonic look.

“Can’t go back in without the Bride of Frankenstein.”

“He was a mad scientist, not a sorcerer,” I said.

“Sure, but ‘the Bride of Gandalf’ doesn’t have the same ring to it.” She gestured to the door. “You get to do the honors.”

Meaning she was concerned that if I wasn’t visible when the door was answered, she’d have issues. That was something I could respect. I stepped forward and knocked, smiling to myself at the familiarity of the action. It brought back the echoes of years of trips to see Thomas when he’d been “Mr.Price” and I’d been the library lady delivering cake or cookies to his door. I don’t have much to be nostalgic about from the gap between the end of my college days and the beginning of my marriage. What I do have is precious to me.

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