by Bryan Camp
Regal peeked around the corner, and when she ducked her head back inside, her expression wasn’t hopeful. “So tell me, Sparkles,” she said, digging through her duffel bag, “how exactly is the world’s shittiest Transformer out there ‘not real’?”
“It’s not only one thing, is what I meant. Not something you can kill, or even hurt. It’s like . . .” Renai waved her hand, as if she could scoop up the words she was struggling to find. “You know those birds? The ones that make a big flock and swoop around and fill up whole trees?”
“Starlings,” Leon said, “and the word ain’t ‘flock.’ When they in a group, they called a murmuration.” Regal pulled away from her search to look at him, her head turning slow and deliberate, her brow creased with incredulity. Leon grinned at her, a quick flash and it was gone. “What? I like big words, too.”
“Sure,” Renai said, “it’s like starlings. Only instead of birds, you got a tree full of spirits. Or shades, or devils, or whatever you wanna call them. All the little wisps of magic and soul that don’t have anywhere else to go? They like abandoned places. Ruins. This whole theme park is like their tree and their swirling, murmur-whatever all balled up together. That thing out there is just a puppet. You could burn chunks off that ruin all day long, and the spirits would just gather up the pieces and start over.”
“So we burn down the tree,” Regal said. There was no humor in her voice, no question, either. Just will.
“Bad idea,” Renai said. “Be like fire ants in a flood. You know, how they—”
“They cling to each other in a ball and float to dry land, I get it,” Regal said. “Christ on a crutch, between the two of you it’s like watching the goddamn Discovery channel. I should make a recording for when I can’t fall asleep.” Outside, the ruin shrieked like a dozen schoolchildren hurtling through the air, cackled like a hundred wheels hurtling down a pair of tracks. Regal let out a disgusted huff. “Can’t you do something? Seems to me spirit problems fall under the psychopomp’s jurisdiction.”
Renai thought about what she’d done to the fugitive spirits, the destructive wind that had ripped them apart and forced them to take new forms. She tried to picture doing that same thing here, but all she saw was failure. The dead she’d turned into playing cards had been haunting spirits, true, but they’d also been afraid of her role as a psychopomp and softened by centuries of ennui. They’d been waiting for change. The spirits animating the ruin outside, on the other hand, were ravenous, desperate beings made of fire and shadow and dust. Whatever they’d been once, they’d already changed, already chosen this new identity, or had it chosen for them. They were too violent, too feral, too many for Renai to try to control.
She never got a chance to say any of this, though, because Leon—carrying only his trumpet and an expression of grim determination—walked past her and out into the sunlight. He was already playing when she and Regal caught up to him, his cheeks ballooning out so elastically that it would have been funny if not for the giant mass of metal and machinery and trash lumbering toward them.
At first he played only a single note, bright and loud and clear, but the piercing scream of his trumpet soon shifted into a throaty, brassy growl, a gently cascading melody of drawn-out melancholy sounds. There was magic in the song he played, not merely in his skill or his artistry—though he demonstrated an abundance of both—but a literal, potent charm that radiated through the air and resonated through the earth from where he stood. Unlike Regal’s sorcery, this magic came from deep within him, drew on the fire of his own soul to fuel it.
The ruin slowed and then stopped, or at least it stopped coming closer, but it swayed where it stood, like a tall, tall tree rocked back and forth by the wind. The eerie, laughing shrieking chorus of its voice fell silent. Leon played his soothing, muffled tune, and the world listened and went still. He leaned into it with his whole body, straining for every note, to produce a sound that hung in the air, delicate and achingly sweet.
The psychopomp part of Renai could feel the shadowy, haunting spirits that animated the mound of trash and metal being lulled into calm, their rage soothed by Leon’s music. And then, piece by piece, the ruin slumped to the ground. First the great trunk of it, the whirligig with its gaudy gilt frame and its dozens and dozens of burnt-out or shattered lightbulbs, and then the appendages—which had only ever been connected by force of will anyway—came undone and succumbed to gravity. He played until Renai felt the last of the spirits dissipate into a kind of sleep, and she put a hand on his arm and said he’d done enough.
When his last note faded away, Renai felt like something pure—glimpsed only for a moment—had flown away.
And then Regal bunched up a fist and punched him in the bicep. He grunted in pain, and she flinched at him like she was going to do it again. “The hell got into you, woman?” he asked, moving away from her and back toward the bathroom, rubbing his arm.
Renai followed and Regal chased him, shaking her fist at him. “You did, you shit-heap, plague-dicked, stupid son of a—” Leon whirled around, making a sound in the back of his throat, the one you made when a child reached for something you’d just told them not to touch, and pointing one long, slender finger right at Regal. She stopped mid-word, grimaced, and then turned that baring of teeth into an insincere smile. “Son of a very nice lady,” she finished. “Where do you get off risking yourself like that?”
Leon continued walking back to where he’d left his instrument case, his long strides carrying him quickly around back into the darkness of the former bathroom. “You reminded me that these spirits were sleepin’ when we got here,” Leon said. “Y’all the ones woke ’em up with all that yellin’ and callin’ up magic.” He shrugged. “Figured least we could do was leave ’em how we found ’em.”
“Leaving is a very good idea,” Renai said, hurrying to interrupt whatever Regal was about to say next. “Let’s just get what we came here for and go, okay?” Regal grunted her approval, snatching up her duffel bag like it had offended her. Renai dug the seeing stone out of her pocket and held it up to her eye, only to look straight through the hole without any image appearing: no Ramses, no glimpse of the past, not even a shroud of darkness. Just the other side of the stone.
“What you see?” Leon asked.
“Nothing. Nothing at all.” She handed the stone to Leon, who looked through it and handed it to Regal.
“I don’t understand,” Regal said.
“Neither do I. Maybe whatever demon Jack put in there got put to sleep when Leon played his song. Maybe whatever power helping Ramses elude his moment of death was stronger than the magic in this stone. Maybe Ramses died here in this theme park, and we missed it.” She chuckled, even though she didn’t find any of this very funny, but it was either laugh or start crying. “I really, really just don’t have any idea what I’m doing. All I know is I’m probably not ever going to find Ramses, so I might as well give up and enjoy my last couple of days before I tear myself apart again.”
For a moment, everything was quiet. And then, from the darkness at the back of the bathroom, came the sound of a weight being dragged along the floor. It was a brief sound, maybe a roach or a rat, but it made the hairs on the back of Renai’s hair stand up. When it came again, louder, the black glass knife was in her hand before she thought to reach for it. Leon and Regal moved to either side of her, but that was something she felt more than saw. Every sense strained toward that impenetrable absence of light, where some new threat shifted and slouched its way forward.
“Wamtheeth?” a soft, creaky voice said, lisping the word. “You want Wamtheeth?” Renai hadn’t sensed it back there at all, which meant it wasn’t human, wasn’t alive. And then the shuffling, timid creature reached the edge of the light, just enough for Renai to see that it had a human shape, though it only had the height and scrawny shoulders of an adolescent. For a moment, they looked at it and it watched them. And then a sudden, heartbreaking possibility occurred to Renai.
She reached out t
o the skinny creature in the darkness and said, “Ramses?”
Chapter Twenty-seven
There are ways to see that which the spirits would keep hidden. Sip of the tea brewed of the ayahuasca vine, or the wine of Dionysus, or the water from Mimir’s well, or Indra’s soma. Chew the peyote button, the dried psilocybin mushroom, the petals of the lotus flower, the bark of the iboga tree. Lick the bufotoxin from the back of a frightened toad, or the paper that has been soaked with lysergic acid diethylamide. Breathe in the smoke of the cannabis leaf, the tobacco leaf, the volcanic fumes of the oracle at Delphi.
Dosage determines whether they are medicine or poison; culture determines whether they are sacred or profane. Whether they reveal a deeper truth or inspire a dreamlike madness, however, is entirely a matter of perspective.
The shape in the darkness made a wet, rasping chuckle. “Īe. Aka knowth Wamtheeth, but Aka no Wamtheeth. What you want for him?”
It took Renai a half second to comprehend what the voice was saying, to understand that it—Aka, it called itself Aka—wasn’t Ramses, made a joke about it, and then asked why they were searching for him. She’d thought at first that Aka had offered to buy him. Leon held his arm out across her waist, like a dad reaching out for his kid when he slammed on the brakes. Misguided patriarchal bullshit aside, Renai didn’t understand why he and Regal still seemed afraid of Aka. There was something infantile in the voice, a childlike quality that went beyond just the lisp and the simplicity of language. Renai adjusted her own diction to match it.
“Ramses stole something,” she said. “Something important from someone dangerous. We want to get it back before something bad happens.” Not entirely true, of course, but close enough to the truth that she didn’t feel bad about saying it.
“Hai,” Aka said, “Yeth. Aka knowth. Aka thaw.”
“You saw him take it?” Only Leon’s arm stretched out in front of her kept Renai from stepping forward. If Aka saw what Ramses took, maybe they could find out where he’d gone, if he’d managed to get out of the park at all.
“You understand that Parseltongue shit?” Regal asked. Her abrasive tone made Aka retreat a step back into the darkness.
Renai spun around to confront her. “What?”
Regal aimed her bat into the gloom where Aka had vanished. “You know what that thing is saying?” She leaned around Renai to look Leon in the face. “It’s not just me, right? You hear somebody gargling a throat full of spooge, too?” When Renai turned to him, Leon shrugged and nodded.
“Ain’t the words I’d have used,” he said, “but yeah, it don’t make a lick of sense to me, neither. And I don’t like the way it don’t come into the light.”
Renai breathed out through her nose and moved Leon’s hand out of her way. To come this close, to have finally found someone who could point them in Ramses’ direction, only to have it slip through their fingers? She couldn’t just walk away. “Aka,” she said, “my friends can’t understand you. And it makes us nervous when we can’t see you. Can you come into the light, please?”
“Nathty mouth dropth down her thick firtht.”
“Regal, put the bat away.”
“Is that what it said? You know, I think I’m starting to pick up on the language. Here, translate this.” And then she hocked up a wad of phlegm and spat it on the tile floor at her feet. “How was that? Did I get the pronunciation right?”
Suddenly, the tempest was back, quick as the flush of anger that raced across Renai’s skin. She and the presence living inside her might not have a lot in common, but neither one of them liked bullies. A spark arced back and forth between Renai’s palms, snapping the air with a loud crack with every leap. In the camera’s flashes of brightness that flared through the bathroom, Renai caught a few fleeting glimpses of the demon named Aka, before it went shrieking into one of the stalls.
Aka had bright red skin and long grease-slick black hair. She—Renai, to her own embarrassment, had looked—was naked and filthy and so emaciated that Renai had seen the slats of her ribs, the knobs of bone at her hips. Her fingers were twice as long as they ought to be, curling and multi-jointed as spider legs, and her feet each tapered to a point, one squat toe with one wicked-looking nail. Mostly, though, it was Aka’s tongue that Renai noticed—thick and muscular as a tentacle, hanging down all the way to Aka’s navel, slavering and questing—because it was the tongue that Renai recognized from the first time she’d seen Aka.
Sitting at the table in Jude Dubuisson’s card game full of destruction gods.
It took a number of apologies and more than a little pleading—and Regal being forced to leave the bathroom entirely—before Aka crept out of her hiding place. While she made her way back to where Leon and Renai stood, wary as a feral cat, nails clicking with every step on the tile, Renai tried to think of what best to ask this creature, whether the status of the card game was more immediately significant than whatever information she might have about Ramses.
“Okay,” Renai said, once Aka had settled into a crouch a few feet away from them, “nasty mouth is outside. It’s just us. Can you tell us what you saw Ramses steal?”
“Prith firtht,” Aka said, stretching one hand out flat and then stamping it with the thumb of her other hand. “Aka no thay unlethh rai den girl gifth Aka rei.” She seemed intensely serious for a moment, but then she broke off into her raspy, choking laughter. “Aka wordth make muthick.”
Leon leaned over to Renai without taking his eyes off of Aka. “What’s it sayin’?” he asked, his arms folded across his chest, his trumpet held at the ready. He’d told Renai—when she tried to get him to wait outside with Regal—that while he trusted that Renai trusted Aka, that didn’t mean he trusted her, which was the kind of nonsense bullshit only a man could say and actually mean it.
“She,” Renai said, tilting her head as she said the word to emphasize it, “she said that if I want to hear what she knows, I gotta pay for it. At least, I think that’s what she said.” Renai glanced back at Aka and saw her licking Regal’s spit and snot from the tile floor. Delicately, as if she were savoring it. Renai choked back a gag, suddenly understanding why this bathroom was as clean as it was.
“You think? I thought you understood . . . her.”
“I do. Mostly. But I don’t really know what she wants.”
“Thtone,” Aka said, saying it slow and enunciating as best she could with her massive tongue blocking her mouth. She stretched out one index finger, and then pressed her thumb and index fingertips to it to form a triangle, which she held up to her eye. “Theeing thtone,” she said, one beady eye glaring through the gap of her own fingers.
“Oh,” Renai said, “okay.” Part of her recoiled from the idea, since less than an hour ago it had been her best chance of finding Ramses. But it didn’t show her anything now, much less Ramses. Before she could get caught up in some internal debate about it, Renai pulled the seeing stone out of her jacket pocket and dropped it into Aka’s slick red palm.
Leon sucked in a breath between his teeth. “You sure ’bout that?” he asked.
“Sure,” Renai said. “Damn thing’s broke, anyway.” The demon sniffed it, smiled up at Renai, and snapped it in two like a dry twig.
Leon grunted out a chuckle. “Damn sure broke, now.”
Smoke rose from the broken edges of the stone, oily and thick and sluggish. The psychopomp in Renai reached out for the smoke, the same part of her that ached at the sight of the shades in the Underworld. Whatever demon or spirit Jack Elderflower had trapped in the stone, Aka had just set it free. Before Renai could ask what she intended to do with it, though, Aka’s tongue lashed forward, coiling around the spirit and scooping it up and dragging it to her lips. There was something grotesque in the sight, her tongue bulging and quivering as if it moved of its own volition.
Leon coughed into his hand in an attempt to disguise the low moan of disgust in the back of his throat. “What is she?” he asked, having the decency, at least, to whisper it. Renai hoped Aka
couldn’t hear them over the slurping noises she was making, and then felt her own belly squirm with nausea.
“I think she’s a destruction goddess, more or less. The whole world is in balance, right? Everything dies, everything gets eaten. Well, what happens when a spirit gets too weak to continue its task? Or when scraps of memory and emotion get left behind when a soul crosses over? Or when a god dies? That’s where Aka comes in. She’s a scavenger for the spirit world; a bottom feeder, like crabs or catfish.”
“Yeah? Well, I like my catfish fried and my crabs boiled, me. Not suckin’ up dead spirits like the marrow out a bone.”
“Just be glad she didn’t offer to share,” Renai said, and grinned when Leon coughed again, hacking like he nearly lost it. To Aka, she said, “I gave you what you wanted. Now tell us what you saw Ramses take.”
The red-skinned demon beckoned her closer. She reached out and let the two halves of the seeing stone spill into Renai’s hand, closing her fingers with her own. “What I thaw,” Aka said, “ith ethier to thow.” Before Renai really even understood what Aka said, much less had a chance to ask what it meant, Aka’s tongue stabbed forward and slithered into Renai’s mouth, cold and wriggling and foul.
Renai gagged, unable to stop herself from imagining that impossibly long appendage snaking down all the way inside her, but Aka’s tongue withdrew as quickly as it had intruded, leaving nothing behind but a burning taste, like bile, and a pungent, mildewy slime that Renai spat and retched onto the floor, on her hands and knees with no memory of falling. She felt more than saw Leon lunge for Aka, but the demon went skipping into the darkness and vanished.