Wounds, page 3
Patrick shakes his head. “You didn’t, though. Truth is we barely ever thought about you. I didn’t even know your name until you knocked over that poker game. Eugene had to remind me.”
This is hard for Tobias to hear. He stares at the floor, his jaw tight. He looks at me. “See what I mean? Nothing. You just have to take it from these guys, you know? Just take it and take it and take it. It was one of the happiest days of my life when that kid finally got wasted.”
He goes on. We have nothing but time. He robbed the poker game in a fit of deranged anger and then fled south, hoping to disappear into the bayou. The reality of what he’d just done was starting to sink in. He’s of the vermin class in criminal society, and vermin come in multitudes. One of the vermin friends told him about this shack where his old granddaddy used to live. He got a boat and came out here, only to find a surprise waiting for him.
“The skull was in a black, iron box,” he says. “Sitting on its side in the corner. There’s a hole in the bottom of the box, like the whole thing was meant to fit around someone’s head. It had a big gouge in the side of it, like someone had chopped it with something. I don’t know what cuts through metal like that though. And inside, this skull . . . talking.”
“It’s one of the astronauts,” Johnny says.
I rub my fingers in my eyes. “Astronauts? What?”
Johnny leans in, grateful for his moment. He tells us that occasionally there are men and women who wander through Hell in thin processions, wearing heavy gray robes and bearing lanterns to light their way. They are invariably chained together and led through the burning canyons by a loping demon: some malformed, tooth-spangled pinwheel of limbs and claws. They tour safely because they are shuttered against the sights and sounds of Hell by the iron boxes around their heads, which give them the appearance of strange astronauts on a pilgrimage through fire.
“I recognized the box,” Johnny says. “This skull is from one of the astronauts of Hell. The box was broken, so I guess something bad happened to him.”
“Where is it?”
Tobias shrugs. “I threw it out in the bayou. What do I need a broken box for? I started asking for things, and it sent them. The rock, the shard of bone.”
“Hold on. How did you know to ask it for things? You’re leaving something out.”
Tobias and Johnny exchange a look. The extending bone around Johnny’s head has grown further, into a kind of bowl, while the burning embers seem to have gathered more life, spitting little tongues of flame. It looks like a brazier, and it gives him an oddly regal aspect. The bone growing from his face has sprouted little offshoots, like a delicate branch.
Patrick picks up on their glance and retrieves his gun from the floor. He holds it casually in his lap.
“Everything that’s brought here has a courier,” Tobias says. “That’s how Johnny got here. He brought the bone. And there was one already here when I found the skull. It told me.”
“It?”
“Well . . . it was a person at first. Then it changed. They change over time. Evolve.”
Patrick gets it before I do. “The thing in the water.”
“Holy Christ. You mean Johnny’s going to turn into something like that?” I look again at the fiery bowl his head is turning into.
“No no no!” Tobias holds out his hands, as if he could ward off the idea. “I’m pretty sure that’s only because the other one never went away. I think it’s the proximity of the skull that does it. There was one other courier, the girl who brought me the rock. I sent her away.”
“Jesus. Where?”
“Just . . .” He waves, vaguely. “Away. Into the bayou.”
“You’re a real sweetheart, Tobias.”
“Well, come on, I didn’t know what to do! She was just—there! I didn’t know anybody was going to be coming with it! I freaked out and told her to get out! But the important thing is I never saw any sign that she changed into anything. I haven’t seen or heard anything from her since. You notice how the plants get weird as you get close to this place? It’s gotta be the skull’s influence.”
“That’s not exactly airtight logic, Tobias,” I say. “What if it’s not just the skull? What if it comes from them, too? I could tell something was fucked up about Johnny as soon as I saw him.”
“Well, I’m taking the fucking chance! If there are going to be people coming out, they need to have a chance at a better life. That’s why I got Johnny here a job. He’ll be far away from that skull, so maybe he won’t change into anything.” He looks at his friend and at the lively fire that’s crackling inside his head. “Well, he wouldn’t have if you guys hadn’t fucked it all up. I’ve got this all worked out. I’m going to find them jobs in little places, in little towns. I got money now, so I can afford to get them set up. Buy them some clothes, rent them out a place until they can start earning some money of their own. A second chance, you know? They deserve a second chance.”
He’s getting all worked up again, like he’s going to break down into tears, and I’m struck with a revelation: Tobias is using this skull as a chance to redeem himself. He’s going to funnel people out of Hell and back into the world of sunlight and cheeseburgers.
Tobias George may be the only good man in a fifty-mile radius. Too bad it’s the most doomed idea I’ve ever heard in a life rich with them. But there are several possibilities for salvaging this situation. One thing is clear: Eugene cannot have the atlas. The level of catastrophe he might cause is incalculable. I need to get it back to my bookstore and to the back room. There are books there that will provide protections; at least I hope so.
All I need is something to carry it in.
I know just where to get it.
“Patrick. You still want to bring this thing to Eugene?”
“He’s the boss. You change your mind about coming?”
“I think so, yeah. Tobias, we’re going into the room.”
~ ~ ~
He goes in gratefully. I think he feels in control in this room in a way that he doesn’t out there with Patrick. It’s almost funny.
The skull sits on the moss-blackened stool, greasy smoke seeping from its fissures and polluting the air. The broken language of Hell is a physical pressure. A blood vessel ruptures in my right eye and my vision goes cloudy and pink. Time fractures again. Tobias moves next to me, approaching the skull, but I can’t tell what it’s doing to him: he skips in time like I’m watching him through strobe lights, even though the light in here remains a constant, sizzling glare. I try not to vomit. Things are moving around in my brain like maggots in old meat.
The air seems to bend into the skull. I see it on the stool, blackening the world around it, and I try to imagine who it once belonged to: the chained Black Iron Monk, shielded by a metal box from the burning horrors of the world it moved through. Until something came along and opened it like a tin can, and Hell poured inside.
Who was it? What order would undertake such a pilgrimage? And to what end?
Tobias is saying something to me. I have to study him to figure out what.
The poor scrawny bastard is blistering all over his body. His lips peel back from his bloody teeth.
“Tell it what you want,” he says.
So I do.
~ ~ ~
The boy is streaked with mud and gore. He is twelve, maybe thirteen. Steam rises from his body like wind-struck flags. I don’t know where he appears from, or how; he’s just there, two iron boxes dangling like huge lanterns from a chain in his hand. I wonder, briefly, what a child his age had done to be consigned to Hell. But then, it doesn’t really matter.
I open one of the boxes and tell the boy to put the skull inside. He does. The skin bubbles on his hands where he touches it, but he makes no sign of pain.
I close the door on the skull, and it’s like a light going out. Time slips back into its groove. The light recedes to a natural level. My skin stops burning, the desire to commit violence dissipates like smoke. I can feel where I’ve been scratching my own arms again. My eye is gummed shut with blood.
When we stumble back into the main room, Patrick is on his feet with the gun in his hand. Johnny is sitting on the bed, the bony rim of his open skull grown farther upward, elongating his head and giving him an alien grace. The fire in the bowl of his head burns briskly, crackling and shedding a warm light. Patrick looks at me, then at the boy with the iron boxes. “You got them,” he says. “Where’s the skull?”
I take the chain from the boy. The boxes are heavy together; the boy must be stronger than he looks. Something to remember. “In one of these. If it can keep that shit out, I’m betting it can keep it locked in, too. I think it’s safe to move.”
“And those’ll get us past the thing outside?”
“If what Johnny said is true.”
“It is,” Johnny says. “But now there’s only one extra box.”
“That’s right,” I say, and swing them with every vestige of my failing strength at Patrick’s head, where they land with a wet crunch. He staggers to his right a few steps, the left side of his face broken like crockery, and he puts a hand into the rancid scramble of his own brain. “Put that down, Jack,” he says, “Don’t be stupid.”
“You’re dead,” I tell him gently. “You stupid bastard.”
He accepts this gracefully and collapses to his knees, and then onto his face. Dark blood pours from his head as though from a spilled glass. I scoop up the gun, which feels clumsy in my hand. I never got the hang of guns.
Tobias stands in shock. “I can’t believe you did that,” he says.
“Shut up. Are there any clothes in that dresser? Put something on the kid. We’re going back to the city.” While he’s doing that, I look at Johnny. “I’m not going to be able to see. Will you be able to guide me out?”
“Yes.”
“Good,” I say, and shoot Tobias in the back of the head.
For once, somebody dies without an argument.
~ ~ ~
I don’t know much about the trip back. I open a slot on the base of the box and fit it over my head. I am consumed in darkness. I’m led out to the skiff by Johnny and the boy. The boy rides with me, and Johnny gets into the water, dragging us behind him. His personality is diminished, and I can’t tell if it’s because he mourns Tobias, or because that is changing too, developing into something cold and barren.
The journey takes several hours. I know we pass the corpse flowers, the staring eyes and the bloodless faces pressing from the foliage. I am sure that the creature unleashes its earth-breaking cry, and that any living thing that hears it hemorrhages its life away, into the still waters. I know that night falls. I know the unfurling flame of our new guide lights the undersides of the cypress, runs out before us across the water, fills the dark like the final lantern in a fallen world.
I make a quiet and steady passage there.
~ ~ ~
The bar is closed upstairs and the man at the door lets us in without a word. He makes no comment about my companions, or the iron boxes hanging from a chain. The world he lives in is already breaking from its old shape. The new one has space for wonders.
Eugene is sitting behind his desk in his darkened office. I can tell he’s drunk. It smells like he’s been here since we left, almost twenty-four hours ago now. The only light comes from the fire rising from Johnny’s empty skull. It illuminates a pale structure on Eugene’s desk: an immense antler, or a tree made of bone. There are human teeth protruding along some of its tines, and a long crack near the wider base of it reveals a raw, red meat, where a mouth opens and closes.
“Where’s Patrick?” he says.
“Dead,” I say. “Tobias, too.”
“And the atlas?”
“I burned it.”
He nods, as though he’d been expecting that very thing. After a moment he gestures at the bone tree. “This is my son,” he says. “Say hi, Max.”
The mouth shrieks. It stops to draw in a gasping breath, then repeats the sound. The cry is sustained for several seconds before stuttering into a sob, and then going silent again.
“He keeps growing. He’s going to be a big boy before it’s all over.”
“Yeah. I can see that.”
“Who’re your friends, Jack?”
I have to think about that before I answer. “I really don’t know,” I say, finally.
“So what do you want? You want me to tell you you’re off the hook? You want me to tell you you’re free to go?”
“You told me that before. It turned out to be bullshit.”
“Yeah, well. That’s the world we live in, right?”
“I guess it is. You’re on notice, Eugene. Leave me alone. Don’t come to my door anymore. I’m sorry things didn’t work out here. I’m sorry about your son. But you have to stay away. I’m only going to say it once.”
He looks at Johnny and the boy, and then he smiles at me. He must have to summon it from far away. “I’ll take that under advisement, Jack. Now get the fuck out of here.”
We turn and walk back up the stairs. It’s a long walk back to my bookstore, where I’m anxious to get to work on the atlas. But I have a light to guide me, and I know this place well.
The Diabolist
For many years, we in the town of Angel’s Rest knew your father. Our monster. He was a middle-aged man, prickly of temperament and reclusive of habit, but of such colorful history, and of such exotic disposition, that we forgave him these faults and regarded him with a fond indulgence. He was our upstart boy. Our black sheep. He lived in a faded old mansion by the lake and left us to gossip at his scandalous life story. It was a matter of record that he’d been drummed out of his place of employment at the university down in Hob’s Landing some years ago, his increasingly eccentric theories and practices costing him his job, his reputation, and—it was whispered (and we believed because it was too wonderful not to)—the life of his own beloved wife.
Dr. Timothy Benn, metaphysical pathologist.
Theomancer.
Sometimes the sky around his house lit up after dark with whatever wicked industry kept him awake, bright reds and greens and yellows igniting the bellies of the clouds like a celestial carnival show, or like an iridescent bruise. Once he seemed to tip the axis of gravity, so that loose objects—pebbles in the road, dropped key rings, babies tossed into the air by their fathers—fell sideways toward his house, instead of toward the ground. This only lasted a few minutes, and we responded with bemused patience. It was just one of the quirks of sharing a small town with a known diabolist.
And so it was that we enjoyed the company of our resident monster and the particular glamour he afforded us, until the day he died, and you found him slumped in his favorite chair.
Dearest Allison.
We didn’t know you like we knew him. Like him, you were sullen and withdrawn, but you lacked any of the outlandish characteristics that made him so charming to us. You did not puncture holes in time and space. You did not draw angels from the ether and bind them with whores’ hair. You only lived, like any awkward girl, attending high school in a cloud of resentment and distrust, hiding your eyes behind your bangs and your body beneath baggy clothes and a shield of textbooks clutched to your chest. We saw you in class, sitting in the back row with your head down; we saw you weaving like an eel through hallways choked with strangers; we saw you when you came down from the mansion on pilgrimages to the grocery store, where even the items you bought were disappointing and mundane. Not even the minor spectacle of a kumquat.
After school, after shopping, we’d watch you climb into your father’s car with the tinted windows, engine growling at the curb, and disappear up the hill into the mansion.
For all the attention you paid us, you might as well have been moving through a world erased of people.
We loved your father, but we did not love you.
~ ~ ~
The miracle began the night of his death. We imagine the scenario: He bid you good night as you went to bed, with a light kiss on the forehead. You asked him a small, domestic question: about high school, or about something you might have seen on TV. He answered you noncommittally; he wanted to be present for you, but after all there was work to be done. He walked downstairs and retired to his study, in the room overlooking the lake. He poured himself a healthy measure of single-malt Scotch and retrieved a crime novel from his bookshelf. We like to think that he enjoyed these small pleasures for a little while, as he reclined in his easy chair. Then he closed his eyes, leaned back, and quietly died, felled by the surrender of some mysterious inner function.
You came downstairs the next morning, Allison, and you found him there. Oh, how we would have loved to see your expression. To watch that tide of grief.
Instead, there is only this frustrating period of darkness in our narrative, lasting that whole day, in which you might have said anything, done anything, and there was no one there to see it. All that beautiful sorrow, lost forever.
You did not call any of us for help.
What did you do, Allison?
Did you cry? Did you scream?
Did you think of us at all?
~ ~ ~
We found you again the next morning. A Saturday, early. We saw your feet and ankles poised at the top of the cellar stairs. You paused there, at the edge of this dark gulf, uncertain of yourself. A quiet, unsteady hiss emerged from somewhere below, like an unending exhalation. You’d never been allowed in your father’s laboratory before; simply standing there was a transgression. But after that pause, you descended with purpose, and we saw you: pale white legs, pink shorts, wrinkled black shirt; and finally your face, moonlike and frightened. You swept your hand over the light switch and threw the laboratory into flickering clarity.
Rows of shelving and workbenches filled the vast work space, each one crowded with repurposed wine boxes or milk crates, holding overstuffed three-ring binders or notebooks or jars of formaldehyde densely packed with biological misadventures. There was an aquarium empty of fish, but with two severed blue eyes lolling on the bright blue gravel, tracking you as you passed; a massive telescope dominating the cellar’s far corner, its wide glass eye raised toward the closed root-cellar doors; a broken, bloody mason jar sitting at the center of a pentagram chalked onto the floor beneath one of the workbenches; and six large double-stacked dog crates with children’s names and ages stenciled on the outsides, all empty save one, which was home to an abandoned stuffed lion. The walls were covered with parchment bearing a strange pictographic alphabet. Hanging among them were your own endeavors, paintings your father had retained from your elementary school days.
