2: Decker
Silas Decker needed Joshua to live with him.
In the middle of the last century, his housemaid’s jealous suitor had burned down Decker’s home in Philadelphia. The poor girl had died trying to rescue him from the fire. It prompted his move to Boston, fleeing anyone who might know that he was a vampire who was dead to the world during the daylight hours. He thought the change of city meant little since he’d been a monster when he first arrived at Philadelphia. He had rarely ventured out of his home. Rarely, though, was not “never.” He had had frangible relationships scattered through the families of the gifted that he’d abandoned wholesale.
After the move, Saul Grigori and then later his daughter, Lauretta, had been his only associates.
Decker had fallen into a cold, dark emptiness after Lauretta had been killed. It was a darkness that her daughter couldn’t banish. Unlike Lauretta, who’d come to Boston as an adult, Elise had grown up underfoot. She was more an estranged stepdaughter than a possible lover. She kept her distance, as if she blamed him for the death of her mother. Her visits were limited to when she needed his help to track down dangerous monsters.
Joshua was a bright star to guide him out of that soul-crushing darkness. Their cohabitation, though, came with a price. Decker used to know all the noises that his house made at night and what they meant. There had been the gentle rumble of the gas furnace as it fired up. The soft purr of its blower, forcing heated air through three stories of ductwork. The creaking of the metal ducts as they heated up and then cooled down. Beyond that, there had only been the wind and the rain and the occasional creak of settling timbers.
The addition of a hyperactive ginger kitten and dozens of new mechanical devices—refrigerator, washing machine, dryer, rice cooker, computers—filled the house with all sorts of random noises.
The ice maker unleashed a load of ice cubes at random times; the noise totally mystified Decker until Joshua explained it. The new fancy washing machine would finish by playing a cheerful tune and clunking open the lock on its door. Even the rice cooker had a song that it played. Decker wouldn’t call the noises frightening—but they often startled him after decades of silence.
The ice machine could be ignored. Decker was slowly mastering the new laundry machines. The dryer currently was rumbling softly. At some point—probably soon—it would stop and play a song to indicate that his bed linens within it were dry. There was something in the kitchen that occasionally ran water which Decker hadn’t identified yet. (The mysterious running water always stopped before he got to the kitchen.)
The kitten—aptly named Trouble—was the problem. It was determined to live up to its name. The kitten would suddenly—unpredictably—decide to zoom about the house as if monsters were after it. Its claws skittered on the hardwood floors, sounding like breach-borne creatures that Decker had hunted down and killed in sewers. Sometimes the kitten would fearlessly attack Decker’s ankles. Other times it made random—vaguely alarming—noises in some far corner of the house.
Like tonight.
The kitten was doing something in the kitchen. Somehow it was making a surprising amount of noise as it rattled and thumped whatever it was playing with. How did two pounds of fur make so much commotion?
Decker was in his library, organizing his books. His collection had overflowed his shelf space decades ago. Some of it had to go. It had been so long ago since he’d read most of the volumes, though, he no longer remembered if he liked them or not. Tucked between the pages of many of the books were poignant reminders of Saul. The man always used whatever was at hand as bookmarks. A torn piece of newspaper. An envelope. A playing card. They served as a reminder of the peaceful winter nights they used to spend, sitting and reading. Decker sorted through the books, trying to ignore the emotional pains triggered by the random bookmarks and the weird sounds from the kitchen of the kitten playing with something.
The noise became very unsettling when Decker realized two things: the first was that the refrigerator door had just been opened; the second was that Trouble was in the chair beside him, sleeping.
What was in the kitchen, raiding the refrigerator?
Decker’s house was magically warded against everything but a narrow spectrum of creatures that included angelic beings, normal humans, werewolves, and himself. Joshua was the only werewolf in Boston. Elise was the only Virtue, and she always used the front door. (The backdoor had been unusable due to clutter until recently.) Decker could see the foyer from where he stood.
“Joshua” was the obvious answer to the question of “what is raiding the refrigerator,” but the bottom of the stairs was even with the door into the library. There was no way Joshua could have come down from his bedroom without Decker noticing.
There was a loud, wet noise like something large slurping up a liquid. That really sounded like a very big wolf.
“Joshua?” Decker called softly as he drifted into the hallway. “Is that you?”
The living room and kitchen had been what the real estate agent called “an open-concept floor plan.” The two had been merged to created one large space with only changes in flooring to mark where one ended and the other started. Decker could see perfectly well in the dark; he had turned off all the lights out of habit. Most of the room was cave dark but in the very back, a shaft of light poured out of the open refrigerator. A human—not a wolf—was leaning halfway into the appliance, eating.
Decker was fairly sure it was Joshua but equally sure that it wasn’t the boy digging through the food stored inside the refrigerator.
“Joshua?” Decker half sang the name as he edged closer. “Are you awake?”
The answer was a mix of grunts, slurps, and whines.
No, the boy wasn’t awake. It was the wolf half of Joshua who was currently awake and at the helm.
How did the wolf get past Decker? Joshua normally slept with his bedroom door closed. Between the soft rattle of the loose doorknob, the click of the old latch, and the quiet squeak of the hinge, Decker could tell when Joshua opened his door. Half the steps creaked loudly when Joshua went up or down the stairs. Even if the wolf managed to open the door and walk downstairs without hitting any of the normal noisemakers, he would have come within five feet of where Decker had been standing. How did Decker miss a large magical creature coming within arm’s reach of him?
“Joshua?” Decker half sang again. He wasn’t afraid of the wolf hurting him; it seemed to like him. He feared that the wolf might take Joshua out into the night. A single bite from the werewolf could spawn an entire pack of feral wolves. “Wakey. Wakey.”
The werewolf turned to look at him. Its face was human, but its eyes gleamed in the dark kitchen.
“Joshua?” Decker tried again, carefully extending his hand. Because it was funny, he couldn’t resist adding, “Who’s a good boy?”
That got him an armful of squirming furry wolf puppy and a face covered with puppy licks.
“Yes, yes, what a good boy!” He carried the puppy to the couch, still murmuring praises. The danger of the wolf escaping in the night was most likely over. Probably. He just needed to keep the wolf distracted until Joshua woke up. “We should watch television. What should we watch?”
Decker settled on the couch, picked up the remote, and tried to remember which of the many buttons turned the television on. Once upon a time, he was smugly proud that he’d kept pace with the advances of technology. All the new appliances in the house made him realize how simplistic the machines of the last century had been. You turned on his old television with a button that was much like a light switch and manually turned a dial to change stations. Channel 2 was two. Channel 11 was eleven. There were no numbers on the “universal remote” to the new television, just arrows and stars and “OK” as if he should just understand what would happen when he pushed the button. “OK” to what?
This was another reason he needed Joshua in his life. He was losing knowledge of the world around him. He was already hopelessly confused by something as simple as turning on the device that he’d used for half a century.
Decker was randomly pushing buttons when Trouble suddenly tackled the puppy on Decker’s lap.
Puppy and kitten tumbled to the floor, landing with a thump.
“Ow!” the puppy muttered sleepily. “What the hell?”
The puppy shook itself and became normal-sized Joshua wearing a T-shirt and boxer shorts. Trouble seemed unperturbed that his victim had changed size; the kitten maintained his death grip on Joshua’s head.
“Decker?” Joshua peered around the living room. “Where’s the penguin?”
“The what?”
Joshua rubbed at his eyes. “Oh. Never mind. I must have been dreaming. That was so weird. What am I doing downstairs?”
“Fighting with the cat,” Decker said.
The kitten bit down on Joshua’s ear.
“Ow. Ow. Ow. Trouble!” Joshua disengaged Trouble from his head. “Seriously. I have school tomorrow. Why am I down here at”—he paused to squint at the clock—“five-thirty in the morning?”
“You were raiding the fridge,” Deckard said.
“Oh, that stupid wolf!” Joshua shouted and headed for the kitchen. “Oh, geez. What a mess. He better not have gotten into my lunch meat. I need it for sandwiches!”
“I can clean that up,” Decker offered. “Why don’t you go back to bed?”
“No, I don’t want to go back to bed. I might have another bad dream. A real dream.”
“Real dream?” Decker echoed, feeling a mix of confusion and fear. Did Joshua mean what Decker thought he meant?
“Do you remember that weird nightmare I had about the Wickers in the Frog Pond? How I saw the Boston Commons and the frog statues and everything when I’d never been there before?”
“Yes,” Decker said carefully. He knew very little about werewolves. Prophetic dreams might be one of their normal powers. Joshua, though, had become a werewolf by a very abnormal route and seemed to have odd powers compared to his younger half brother.
“Well, I had this dream about a penguin. It felt very weird—as in ‘might be real’ kind of weird. Anyhow, I was on a field trip to an aquarium, and I was looking at these penguins when one of them started to talk to me.”
There were lots of words in that last sentence that Decker didn’t know. Field trip? Aquarium? He decided to focus on the one that seemed most important. “What’s a penguin?”
“A penguin. You know. The Penguins of Madagascar? Skipper, Kowalski, Rico…” Joshua stopped and looked at Decker closely. “You’re three hundred years old. How can you not know what a penguin is?”
“I’m not sure. Is it a tribe of natives like the Iroquois?”
“No!” Joshua wiped off his hands and picked up his impossibly slim electronic device that he called an iPad. He tapped on it a moment before holding the device to Decker. “Here. This is a penguin.”
The iPad played a video of some very odd-looking creatures that seemed a weird cross between a seal and a bird. Four of the animals stood on a rock in what appeared to be some kind of exhibit, perhaps in a zoo. (Decker had never actually been to a zoo. The first one in America opened long after he became a vampire.)
The stoutest of the black-and-white creatures turned and said “Just smile and wave, boys. Just smile and wave.”
“I’ve never seen anything like these—these birds?” Decker wasn’t sure that they were actually birds.
“Never?” Joshua echoed with surprise.
“I’m assuming that they’re not native to New England.”
“No. They’re from the South Pole. I guess it makes sense you’ve never seen one before.”
“What exactly are they? They look like they might be birds. They have beaks but they can’t possibly fly. Not with those limbs.”
“They’re flightless birds.”
“Do they have fur or feathers? It looks like fur in the video.”
Joshua gave him an odd, panicked look. “I have no idea. Here. Let me check.” He put his hand out for his iPad. “I’ve never seen a real one in person, but I know that they’re birds, so they should have feathers. Right?”
“There are platypuses,” Decker said. “They’re animals but they have duckbills and lay eggs.”
Joshua paused, confused. “How do you know about platypuses and not penguins?”
“Blinky Bill.”
“Who?”
“It’s a children’s book from before your time.”
Joshua tilted his head as he read what he found on his iPad. “It says penguins have black-and-white plumage…so…feathers. I think. Plumage is feathers, right?”
One mystery solved.
Joshua had returned the screen to the video of the four penguins in the zoo.
Decker pointed at it. “This suggests that penguins talk.”
“No, they don’t. At least I don’t think they do. These aren’t real penguin—they’re a cartoon, like…like…Mickey Mouse. You do know Mickey Mouse—right?”
“Yes.” Somewhere he’d picked up that knowledge, although he wasn’t sure where anymore.
“Parrots talk but that’s just…parroting,” Joshua said. “It’s not really talking-talking. Although there is that one video where the parrot tells Alexa to turn the lights on and off.”
Decker wondered who Alexa was. He didn’t want to derail the conversation more than it already had been. Why were they discussing the communication skills of penguins again? Oh, yes, Joshua had had a possibly prophetic dream.
Joshua tapped on his iPad some more, murmuring “Do. Penguins. Talk?” He squinted at the screen before tapping again and reading aloud, “Penguins can produce loud, noisy, or shrilling sounds. Ah, there’s a recording.” Joshua made odd honking noises come from his iPad. “It doesn’t seem like they do more than…whatever you call that.”
“They sound slightly like a swan or a goose,” Decker said.
“I guess. I’m not real familiar with geese.”
All of Decker’s firsthand knowledge was hundreds of years old, based on shadowy memories of a childhood long gone.
The iPad honked some more, sounding more gooselike.
“You’re right.” Joshua held up the slick rectangle of metal and glass. “They do kind of sound like a goose.”
It showed a picture of a goose. No wonder the second honking sounded more gooselike.
“Tell me more about this dream.” Decker tried not to sound worried. He no longer dreamed. When the sun rose, he lost all semblance of life, which included dreaming. Considering the truth hidden within Joshua’s last “real” dream, though, Decker could not dismiss it lightly.
Joshua snorted. “There wasn’t much to tell. I was on a field trip to an aquarium and there was a penguin that talked to me.”
At least this time, Decker knew what “penguin” meant. “What exactly is a field trip? Is it a trip to an actual field or are you going afield as in going aboard?” Did this mean that Joshua was leaving?
Joshua tapped at the iPad some more. “It’s a thing you do in school. You go to someplace educational for the day instead of having classes. At my old school we would go to the Hudson River Maritime Museum or the Henry Hudson Planetarium or the Utica Zoo. You take a bus to wherever, and generally get set loose to do whatever you want for a few hours. In my dream, I knew that there were other students at the aquarium, but I was alone. Huh. Boston does have an aquarium—although its official name is the New England Aquarium. Where is that? Boston looks like a bunch of jigsaw puzzle pieces that don’t actually fit together.”
Joshua was looking at the map of the harbor, which did kind of look like puzzle pieces on a blue tablecloth. He zoomed in and out, frowning. “Where are we on this thing?”
Decker leaned over to peer at it. The streets had changed so much over the half century, it took him a minute to get his bearings on the shifting map. There was a marker on the Inner Harbor, down by the ferry docks. “We’re over here in Cambridge…” He started to point and accidently tapped the screen, making the map zoom in tight on the Hawaiian restaurant at the end of their street. “There’s our house and over here is your school.”
“Stupid map!” Joshua growled softly as the marker had vanished when Decker tapped the screen. He swiped more at the iPad, trying to get it to a scale where he could see where the aquarium was in relationship to the house. “I think that I didn’t know about the aquarium before my dream. Maybe I saw a commercial and forgot.”
It was unsettling, but there wasn’t much Decker could do. He felt that first creeping numbness that signaled the rising of the sun. In a half hour or so, he’d be literally dead to the world. So far, he had avoided the subject as much as possible with Joshua. Usually, the boy was safely asleep so Decker could go unseen through the secret door that led down to his hidden bedroom.
“It’s after six,” Decker said pointing to the clock that he didn’t need to look at to know what time it was. “You need to get ready for school and I need to go to bed.”
Joshua swore softly. “I need to shave, take a shower, get dressed, and pack a lunch.”
“We’ll talk this evening,” Decker said because it was all that he could do. He needed to get to his bedroom and locked safely in his coffin before the sun rose.