Harry, struggling to wake up after his ordeal, thinks about his father. This, if I remember rightly, is our first real information about him. He was a stage magician, good, according to Harry (who was like six at the time of his father's death and not necessarily objective), but too charitable to ever be very financially successful, although it is worth noting here that in the late 1970s, people employed full time in "amusement and recreation industries" made, on average, in the neighborhood of
$10,000 a year, about the same as teachers, a bit more than hotel workers and a bit less than auto mechanics. In today's money, that's about $48,388.50 (although differences in cost of living make accurate comparison difficult), enough to live on in the less expensive parts of Missouri, but hardly in line with conventional notions of "making it big". Harry spent his earliest years sleeping in the back of his father's station wagon, which is interesting inasmuch as it means that even during his very earliest years, when he still felt safe and okay and had a living parent, he didn't have a home in the conventional sense. I'd be genuinely interested to know if that station wagon had any kind of threshold worth talking about. Also of interest here, Harry started having nightmares shortly before his father died. Harry isn't particularly sensitive, magically speaking, and he doesn't have any innate capacity for prescience beyond the limited amount that all wizards seem to possess, although I believe it's implied throughout the series that children are broadly more sensitive than adults. We know Malcolm's death wasn't natural, but don't have any of the particulars, so we're left with four possibilities that I can think of. 1. Little Harry was just more sensitive than grownup Harry is. 2. Someone or something was actively trying to warn him, but the message didn't get through very clearly. 3. Whatever got Malcolm has some specific tendency to cause nightmares in people near its victims when it's like, approaching. 4. Whatever got Malcolm was just so fundamentally big or spooky that it caused a
serious disturbance in the force.
Harry wakes up dizzy, nauseated, wracked by abdominal cramps, and in considerable emotional distress. It takes him a minute to get his eyes open, but when he manages it he sees that he's in a small, horrible smelling laundry room, naked and crusted in his own vomit. Justine is also there, looking disheveled and unsettling, and as soon as she notices Harry noticing her, she starts making some fairly unkind accusations about what he's thinking - and scratches his face about it. Harry asks what the vampires did to her, which, I think, says something about him. He's injured, he's poisoned, he just went through an immensely harrowing experience, this young woman he doesn't know well, and with whom he's had what I would charitably describe as mixed experiences up to this point is accusing him of ableism and misogyny and physically assaulting him, and his first response is "Oh no, what happened to you?". (Obviously, in the broader sense, Harry is not like, wholly innocent of either, but he wasn't doing them here). She shows him the vampire bites on her wrists and thigh, and explains that while she was fed upon, that's not the reason she's unstable. This is her baseline, some kind of poorly defined hormonal condition that prevents her from having the emotional control other people do. Medication didn't help, but Thomas feeding on her emotions does, which is part of why she's with him. We'll come back to this when we get to White Night, and probably again when we get to Battle Ground, but I always found Justine's assertion, in White Night, that her stability at that time was due to medication suspicious because she'd made it so clear in this book that meds don't work for her. On a first read I sorta figured were meant to attribute it to the (not insubstantial) advances in psychopharmacy between 2000 and 2007, but at the time of this writing it seems far more likely than otherwise that her newfound emotional control was in fact because it wasn't her, it was He Who Walks Beside, and I am vindicated.
Harry tries to force open the locked door, collapses, vomits again, and loses consciousness for a while. He wakes up with Justine trying to wipe his face with a dirty towel, and asks how long they've been there. Justine says the vampires had him for about two hours, and that it's been around another ten hours since then. He says they need to get out of there, and she says they can't, that this is the larder. Harry tries to explain that he's been poisoned, and needs to go to a hospital soon if he's going to survive, and Justine just kind of...shuts off. Dissociates. Almost immediately, the ghost of Paula, who is referred to in this chapter as Rachel, materializes. She isn't strong enough to speak so that Harry can hear her, but they manage to establish enough communication for her to explain that Bianca's fixation on her death is keeping her here, that she's tired, that she doesn't blame Harry for her death, although Harry apologizes anyway, for his role in it. (As an aside, she indicates "Bianca" with a "bottle-shaped curving gesture". Just, y'know, in case we didn't get that there was a gay thing happening between Paula and Bianca). She looks past him at something that scares her, or more likely that she wants Harry to know should scare
him, and vanishes. It's Kravos, now wearing Justine's body, which is interesting, as far as how his ability to possess people works. She wasn't asleep, just kind of absent, which implies that sleeping people are similarly absent from their brains or their bodies or whatever Kravos needs access to. That tracks with what we already know, but it's an interesting way to confirm it. Harry challenges Kravos to try to possess
him instead, to come in for a battle in the center of the mind. Kravos, who, while not nearly as smart as he thinks he is and inclined to really catastrophic overcomplication, was not actually born yesterday, refuses. He also tells Harry that several of the Red Court became ill after feeding on his blood. This implies that Reds have the necessary internal anatomy to die of amantin poisoning, which would be mildly intriguing on its own, but also it's Kravos's impression that Bianca was hoping would die as food for her children. He doesn't quote Bianca directly here, he's not trying to be helpful, but that Bianca may have meant for Harry to die earlier in the evening, and that she certainly left him in a room with half-turned Susan, knowing that Susan would try to feed on Harry and that this could very possibly kill
both of them, seems to me to reinforce that starting a war with the White Council was a stretch goal at best, and more likely a legitimate accident. If she needed Harry
or Susan alive for her plans to come to fruition, and knew this, she would not have left them together.
Harry insults Kravos's intelligence, provoking him into pinning Harry against the door. He doesn't really do anything, although it's clear that he could, just makes some threats about making Harry's last moments a nightmare that seems to last years, and then leaves Justine's body. She kinda collapses into Harry, who isn't currently in any condition to be collapsed into, and they both end up on the floor, with Harry stroking her hair and trying to comfort her while she cries. She eventually relaxes, and Harry starts trying to make a plan, but he hears something in the laundry pile and of course he has to go investigate, although Justine tells him not to, that he won't like what he finds. She's right, of course - it's Susan, half turned and thirsty for blood.
The post is a lot shorter than the chapter on this one, because a lot of this chapter is buildup, atmosphere, and emotionality, and there's not a lot for me to say about that other than that it's there and it works. It's sad and spooky and suspenseful - I feel for Harry and Justine, and I'm appropriately concerned about Susan's situation at the end. Also, these posts are considerably easier to write when I'm not directing most of my mental energy to other nonfiction writing. I'm not prepared to commit to a schedule or anything just yet, but the trend it gonna be in favor of More Posts. Until then, be gay, do crimes, and read all the things!
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