*
THE DARKENED GREENERY enfolds Negator and I as we glide over the ancient-looking wall and into the deep glade surrounding the main residence, but any thought we’re about to lead a raid on another mansion similar to the one in which Twilight lives evaporates as the trees part and I catch a glimpse for the first time of a series of sodium lights pointed heavenwards. The blue beams dissect the night. Any sense of the stars above is obliterated by the earthly constellation of lights, each one positioned in its setting on an angle to suggest a grander though mysterious design.
Beyond the lights hunkers the squat metal chassis of an observatory, the split in its shell open despite, one senses, it having been closed throughout many years of disuse.
Negator and I are on the ground by this stage, booted footfalls crunching through the pine and oleander leaves, and he clutches my shoulder at the edge of the tree-line.
“Is Streethawk serious your guy’s in there?”
“If that’s where he says Twilight is, that’s where we’ll find him.”
“You’re taking it on faith,” Negator says.
“No. Experience. C’mon.”
I pour on a burst of super speed to cross the open yard and flatten myself against the basin wall of the main building. Negator glides after me like my shadow, jaw tight to avoid loud breathing.
“What’s with the lights?” he asks, craning his neck as much as our position allows.
I can only shake my head in shared puzzlement.
We creep around the circular base of the hemispherical building. The first of its inevitable sentinels pop into view, just two suit-wearing silhouettes juxtaposed against the brilliance of the strangely-arrayed lights.
The first sentry whips about at some tinkling of his intuition and despite appearing nothing more than a black shadow, glowing red eyes open in his face.
The shadow of the man wavers like ripples on a pond, each arm splitting into two, the paired legs now more like a squid walking upright. The guard beside him echoes the transformation, though his appendages simply unfold into two great weighty tentacles, thumping upon the ground, legs bunching like the rear end of a horse.
“Demons,” I say in a voice barely above a whisper. “OK man. Do ‘em.”
“My pleasure,” Negator says.
*
NEGATOR STEPS OUT from the shadow of the observatory and his own unique brand of radiant attack boils out, not just channeled through his arm, but emanating like a cannon from his entire body. The sparkling disintegration beam is counter-point to the background radiance as it hits the first demon and leaves very little behind. Negator then simply hoses the beam at the second wavering figure and the other demon gives a brief demented howl before its head and upper torso vanishes with a scorching noise, leaving the rest of the mess to flop down wet and smoking on the grass.
Another demonoid pops out the observatory door which is invisible to us around the curvature of the wall. Like the others, it’s a thing of nightmares writ small, head resembling a sideways Venus fly trap, walking not on two, but four giant sinewy insect legs. It turns to orient on Negator and I and I open my palm like a magician and channel current into it relentlessly until the thing flops and twitches on the path, then starts to rapidly dissolve.
“In here,” I tell Negator.
Racing ahead, we reach the observatory entrance and dive inside.
It is dim beneath the dome, just the impression of inner architecture and the huge cannon-like erection of the telemetry housed within. Whatever purpose the place once served, it has seen better days. Barely visible in the gloom, graffiti marks the curved, verdigris-colored walls, while stacks of old doors, car batteries, broken appliances, 80s-era dead Macintoshes, pinball machines, car engines, spare tires, metal office lockers, antique window and picture frames, and a riot of metal boxes filled with old circuit boards and obsolete spare cables are stacked to create a neck-high maze within the main chamber, surmounted by a series of timeworn old wooden steps leading to a dusty observation balcony and access to the telescope mount itself.
However, the labyrinthine inner structure serves only one real purpose: and I can hear it banging across the intervening space.
“Twilight?”
“Over here,” comes his exhausted reply.
After a few seconds I give up trying to negotiate the haphazard corridors of junk, pushing shit out of my way instead and joined by Negator, who handily disintegrates gaping holes in the puzzle so we can stride through the tinkling detritus to where Twilight hangs seemingly crucified against the bare brick wall glimpsed on the security monitors earlier.
He’s been stripped to the waist and the hands above his head are pinned to the wall seemingly of their own volition, though Twilight’s ruinous appearance suggests otherwise. The culprit is likely to be the faint, white-painted sorcerous seal dominating the wall behind him.
Worse though is the thing enveloping his lower half. At first I mistakenly think Twilight’s been submerged in a drum of porridge, because that’s what it kind of resembles. It’s only when I realize the substance in the container spills out and over the edges of the drum and spreads across the whole floor, has a discernable if chaotic bone structure, the occasional blinking eye or gawping mouth looking back at me, that I understand part of what’s going on here.
“Fuck,” I exhale softly and meet Twilight’s look as he strains to lift his shattered visage. “This is getting eerily familiar.”
Zephyr 17.12 “False Confidence”
“GET ME OUT of here, Zeph,” Twilight groans.
“Seriously? Again?”
“Please,” he says, wiggling fingers to show he’s completely and utterly trapped.
I take another deep breath, hands on hips in a moment of genuine disaffection, feelings at a crossroads as I look back down at the fallen antihero and he stares back, wounded gaze slowly hardening into irritation as I fail to immediately obey and his true colors unfold yet again.
“What? You’re angry I cut out on you? I’m sorry, OK?” Twilight growls. “I knew you’d be alright. You always are. I wasn’t so sure about me, OK? It was selfish. I’m sorry. You can’t just leave me like this because of that, Zephyr. I’m the fucking antihero? Got it?”
“You’re just a fucking asshole, is what you are, Twilight.”
“That’s partly the general idea, yes,” he replies. “Plus: takes one to know one, right?”
And the fucker grins, trying to interpelate me into his exclusive coterie, as if being an asshole is either a) new to me, or b) particularly fucking appealing.
If you can’t tell, I’m pissed off.
I take my brief flash of anger out on the brick wall behind him, sinking a fist through the middle of the magickal sigil. Twilight’s dead weight does the rest as the power of the circle collapses along with the brickwork, most of it on top of him as he slumps to the “ground” which writhes and, if I’m not mistaken, makes a moaning noise as Twilight and the rubble pile atop it.
Negator and I swap a look as we take in the dilemma of Twilight’s lower half sunken into the primordial ooze that belongs to whatever nefarious creature Danica Azzurro has summoned to contain him, but I’m distracted by what looks uncannily like a human forearm that rises from the morass about five paces away, reaching up and grabbing a crank handle that makes a red sensor button light up, followed by a corresponding klaxon ruckus outside.
“OK, what the fuck was that?” Negator asks.
I stare down at Twilight, laying there on the living carpet like he’s exhausted at the end of an extra-long debauch.
“What is this thing? Some kind of demon?”
“No,” Twilight says weakly. He reaches out, grabbing a handful of the flesh-colored mass in what looks disturbingly like a ruff of human skin.
“Meet Farmakon.”
I blink.
“It’s a . . . person?”
“If mutants are people, yeah,” Twilight says.
“Fuck.”
&nb
sp; “And the noise outside?” Negator asks.
Twilight only tiredly shakes his head and drops again, pulling his lower body from the treacly slime almost reluctantly. Negator and I don’t have to be told twice. We alight to the first floor landing, jogging a bit in the tradition of mall cops everywhere, afraid to actually be the first to arrive in case the trouble’s serious.
Upstairs, the gaping empty telescope aperture is open to the heavens, but it’s the arrangement of the various spotlights that draws our eyes – spotlights that are now sending dazzling red beams of light into the night sky instead of their earlier sodium glow.
And from our vantage we can see now the order in their apparent chaos.
The lights spell out an enormous magickal seal on the black-looking grass which even now starts to buckle and writhe with a terrible adumbration.
*
WE WATCH THE lawn between the esoterically-placed beacons for a long moment, intuitively if not actively aware the ground feels pregnant with a looming manifestation; and then the thing itself is suddenly there, somehow morphing up through the earth at the same time it seems to materialize out of the ether, plunging upwards like every Jack-and-the-Beanstalk nightmare rolled into one, a protuberance of huge thick cylindrical columns made of otherworldly organic matter, a dozen big ones twisted together, each wider than the base of the biggest Redwoods, scores of other smaller ones as thick as regular trees writhing in and out of the others as the bulk of it ascends looming to a height of about three hundred yards above us; and at that awful peak, the whole alien contraption unfolds in a ghastly pulsing, implicitly sexual flowering of huge shadow-fronds, small white-glowing pseudopods twisting about for its sensory organs that from this distance resemble more a cloud of fireflies or clusters of glow-in-the-dark lilies wavering on the fetid breeze that emanates from the heart of the thing – which is to say it channels from between spaces as it enters our quaint, not-quite New England setting – and echoes between the enormous pipes of its body like a hellish organ playing at low, droning and painfully repetitive frequencies that would make almost anyone shudder and void themselves.
It is not my first brush with demons of this age and order, veritable Great Old Ones whether one believes they come from Hell or the Abyss or Beyond or Hades or Deep Space or our collective Unconscious or places conterminous with all of the above. But a swift look at Negator paling beside me brings me back to the daunting magnitude of not just the thing itself, but the task now before us.
“Wh-what the fuck is it?” he says.
“It doesn’t need a name,” I tell him.
“You mean it’s, like, Nameless?”
“No,” I snap. “Or, maybe, but that’s not the point.”
“It’s like a fucking mountain, man.”
“The bigger they are, the harder they fall,” I say with a glibness I frankly don’t feel, but fuck it, a little false confidence never hurt anybody, right?
I swivel back at the observatory aperture and holler, “Yo! Twilight! A little help out here much appreciated.”
The weak reply barely carries to us given the symphony of organic wheezing playing over the scene like a vacuum cleaner tuned to a hellish cello bass string.
“Streethawk wasn’t so stupid after all,” Negator says in a shaky voice.
“It’s gonna take more than karate chops to take out this fucker, but we can do this, Danny,” I say, tentative use of Negator’s real name rewarded by watching my black-eyed pal wince and shake his head with discomfort.
“I never really got you back for fucking up that hamburger shoot for me,” he says, suddenly wistful.
“Let’s not let those be your famous last words, buddy,” I say as I sense rather than actually perceive the shuddering god-mountain thing re-orienting itself towards us. “You more than earned your stripes during our little Dreamtime adventure. I’ve got your back on this. Right?”
“You’ve got my back?” Negator laughs begrudgingly. “It’s you who called me for back-up, you piece of shit.” And he laughs again. “So let’s get this fucking show on the road.”
And so we do.
*
IT IS A Sisyphean task, but we take to it with a gusto that might make a less Christian person think we are a pair of foolhardy fucking retarded fuck-monkeys.
The trick to bringing down world-class monstrosities is a bit the same as thwarting any top grade villain’s nefarious plans: taking the most dangerous, most stupid, most downright retarded and risky option that is the only one left in an otherwise desperate situation.
Negator and I spend long minutes buzzing the beast like biplanes around King Kong, aerating the thing on about the same scale as flea bites. Case in point, the only option to really hurt this monstrosity is to get it where its defenses are down, which in this case means me letting the gargantuan thing wrap one of its big, disgustingly syrupy inner appendages about me so it can swallow me whole.
“Are you fucking sure about that man?” is what I think Negator yells at me from inside the Cyclopean whirlwind, but the tops are shaved off his words by the disturbing organic grinding noise that carries through everything, including my quivering bowels.
“No, I’m not sure, but what else are we gonna do?” I bawl back, but Negator pulls a face at me, unable to understand a word, and I grunt in frustration as we’re forced to fly apart as one of its feeder arms snakes down and bisects the space between us.
“Shit,” I snarl to myself as I twist and weave away from the various appendages trying to gut and slaughter us, flying instead right into the trajectory of one of the bigger pseudopods grasping for me with curling, nettle-covered pads the size of mattresses.
The limb explodes in pieces, green fire clinging to it, and Twilight hovers into view as the amputated limb drops.
He yells – something – and points meaningfully up at the monster’s peak, then back down instructively to the formation of lights within which it still operates, but I can only shrug my shoulders and reply with a mystified look, the words of my reply themselves inaudible.
We flit apart on the defensive once more. I catch a glimpse of Negator doing his thing with heroic abandon, but then I can’t see the forest for the veritable trees wavering around me with deadly intent, huge grey-blue-black tentacles with the strength you’d expect from a skyscraper come to life. I shatter the air immediately before me with a high voltage charge, swoop through smoking debris and see Twilight faring much the same, but after a moment more cluing in to the futility of ongoing commands, he holds up his cell phone and waggles it, ignoring my look of disbelief.
Zephyr 17.13 “The Occult Obscene”
I’M FIGHTING FOR my life and text messaging at the same time. Tessa would be so proud, multitasking be damned. I rebound inadvertently off one of the pillar-like tentacles, shooting backwards with my powers as I juggle the phone and trying not to get killed.
I got a plan, Twilight’s text says.
“This is fucking ridiculous,” I mutter to myself as I cavort endlessly around the thing, finally buzzing away, momentarily out of reach so I can clumsily tap out a reply.
Be quick T. Going hail Mary in 5.
No probs Z, the message comes back almost immediately. U trust me rite?
I grunt at the spelling, resisting the temptation to close my eyes in regret which might just get me killed right now. I tap confirmation and nearly genuflect, but somehow with this evidence of the occult obscene before us, that doesn’t seem apropos.
And Twilight hurtles past me with a look of determination and a cheesy grin.
Keep it bizy.
Easier said than done. Or spelled.
And Twilight disappears into the middle distance.
*
WE – MEANING NEGATOR and I – continue to flirt with imminent death, getting into concentric flight paths around the wavering horror as it flails its dismay at the countryside, with trees and wreckage from the observatory lifting up like they’re caught in a Wizard of Oz-style hurricane to b
ecome just an added danger as they hurtle airborne around us.
Negator whirs by shooting me a “what the fuck?” look. I can only shrug it off, modelling my best look of steely determination despite my faith in Twilight already starting to go off like a tray of day-old meat. I can’t help thinking we’re here with our nuts on the chopping block and for all I know, he’s hurtling his way to the Bahamas.
“Just keep it busy!” I yell, knowing at the same time Negator can’t even fucking hear me, irked beyond all measure to learn my pal Twilight is one of those annoying people who’re either functionally illiterate or think social media’s somehow an excuse to ignore the basics of centuries of human communication.
I guess it serves me right getting pissed off about spelling and grammar in the middle of a shit-fight as I get snatched out of the air by one of the aforementioned sticky feelers, wrapping about me with the familiarity of the grave as I’m nearly drowned in its highly suspicious nectar and lifted heavenwards to its twitching summit.
I know what happens next.
I also know this was part of my original desperate plan. And I also know if I follow through right now I’m more likely to end up as compost than hero of the hour.
Inspired by the very real prospect of my own imminent obliteration, I power up like a star in my own right and explode the fucking thing from within.
Huge chunks of alien matter rain down like a bad stop-motion Japanese cartoon and I fly free. Negator takes out his frustrated sidekick anger on several of the bigger chunks that still look like a danger before we notice a strange sensation.
“What the fuck is that?” I bark.
We hover midair, noting a new, more shrill pitch enter the living cacophony around us – and a decidedly downward motion to the inherent physics of the moment.
“We’re getting sucked down!” I barely hear Negator yell.
And indeed we are.
Zephyr Box Set 2 Page 41