by John Hook
“So what do we know so far?” I threw the question out for anyone, including myself. I was thinking out loud.
“We have a pretty large city where everyone seems to either live in fear or hopelessness,” Izzy commented.
“Except for a small privileged class, though it is not clear what their privilege buys them,” Blaise added.
“What do you mean?”
Blaise rubbed his head. “They’re spooked.”
“Like collaborators.”
Blaise shot me with his thumb and forefinger.
“We also haven’t actually seen the cause of their fear,” Rox mused.
“However, we do have a couple of candidates.”
“I assume these dark men?”
“Right, Izzy. And this Demon King, whatever that is. Rox, ever heard of a Demon King?”
Rox shrugged. “I keep telling you, small-town girl. Our demons are pretty tribal. There’s usually a chief of some sort, but they largely work for more powerful beings.”
“Maybe a demon with delusions of grandeur. However, the Demon King is connected to the rumor of this thing called Haven.”
“If Philip was looking for something better, something called Haven might have attracted his attention,” Izzy mused.
“And if it was a trick of this Demon King, then maybe this last time was when Philip was tricked.”
“So what do we do now?” Rox asked.
“We’re going to have to try to find this Haven. Which means we have to figure out where this Demon King is.”
“Behind the wall,” Blaise said quietly.
“That would be my guess.”
“How do we get over there?” Izzy asked.
“We could try knocking.”
“They might know how annoying you are.”
“There’s that.”
“We could try going out of the city and around and see if there is any other way into the walled sector.”
“I’m betting not.”
“And scaling the wall when we don’t know what’s over there is probably not a great plan.”
“I’ve had worse plans.”
“So what’s left?”
“Let’s save the Demon King for now and see if we can find these dark men. I think if we go back to that bar, they’ll show up.”
“And then what?”
“I don’t know. I’ll figure that out when we find them.”
“Maybe you win them over with your cheery personality.”
When we returned to the Dirty Glass, the place was much busier. People sat together at tables with mostly illusory food and drink, but there was no pleasure. While they were different from those I had first found in Rockvale, they were “the mass” nonetheless. They were going through motions, but there was no life or passion in them. They didn’t talk or even acknowledge each other even when they sat at the next table. It was as if they were doing it just because it was what one did. They showed fear when we walked in, but apparently we were easier to take when they were gathered in numbers. Or maybe word had gotten around and we were no longer something new and therefore there was not as much reason to fear us.
We made our way to the bar. The couple of people sitting there moved away to an empty table. We sat down on the stools. The bartender glared at us. I did my best to look friendly and interested.
“Why did you come back?”
“Your charm and hospitality are irresistible.”
“Get out of here. You don’t know what you are involved with.”
“Of course I don’t. That’s why I keep asking questions.”
“And I told you before…”
“…you don’t know anything.”
“You corrected his grammar.” Izzy grinned.
“Seems the least I could do.”
The bartender stormed to the other end of the bar, filled a couple of clay mugs and took them to a nearby table and came back.
“Is that stuff real?”
“Yeah. Sweet water.”
“We’ll have a round of that, if you please.”
“I don’t please. You won’t be here long enough.”
I ignored the bartender and looked around. My eyes settled on two men sitting at a table in the corner near the door. They were different. They had swarthy complexion, but no obvious tip-offs to ethnicity. In fact, all of their features seemed just average. Average height, good build but not bulging muscles, brown hair. They wore slacks, turtleneck sweaters and jackets, all of coarse brown or black material.
“Ah ha,” I said to myself but out loud.
The bartender yanked me around to facing front on my stool. His face was red with anger.
“You idiot! Don’t look at them! Do you want them to see you?”
“Probably.”
The bartender suddenly stepped back. His eyes went wide. I sensed two presences behind me.
“Is there a problem here?” It was a very deep, gravelly voice.
I turned on my stool and studied the two men.
“The dark men,” Izzy noted.
“Appears that way.”
They had piercing brown eyes and well-drawn cheekbones but the only thing that seemed unique about them is that they were not cowed and fearful. At their sides they held finely tooled long wood clubs that looked like well-lathed baseball bats. I wasn’t sure what we would do if they decided to wield them in such close quarters, but like most things I couldn’t do anything about, I didn’t think about it.
The bartender’s voice behind me sounded whiney. “Nothing, sir. Just having a, well, spirited conversation.”
“We were discussing the Yankees’ chances this season. He was a little upset because he’s a Boston fan.” I grinned.
The two men looked down at me. I couldn’t tell what their expression was but it probably wasn’t amusement. I didn’t like their looking down at me so I stood up, easily, like it was nothing, no sudden movement. It put me on the same level, eye to eye with them. It also made it harder for them to swing their bats without stepping back. They didn’t step back.
“You’re not from here.”
“And here I thought I blended right in.”
“You might want to reconsider being here.”
“Don’t sell yourselves so short. You do need to clean up your streets a little bit, though.”
They didn’t say anything for a few moments and the stare down continued.
“I don’t know about you guys, but I start giggling uncontrollably when I stare at people too long.”
Another pause.
“What do you want?” The man who appeared to be in charge asked.
“I want some questions answered.”
They paused again. They were big on menacing pauses. One looked at the other. The other nodded and they turned and left for the door. I was hurt they didn’t back their way to the door. I was hoping I was more intimidating than that.
At the door, one of them turned back.
“Get out. No one will answer your questions.”
“Sure they will. I’ll just keep prying and eventually you’ll give in.”
That earned me another baleful stare and then they went out into the streets. I heard an exhale of breath behind me. I turned back to the bartender. Before, his face had been red with anger. Now he was white as a sheet.
“For your own sake, get out now. They will come back for you.”
“And when they do, I’ll learn something. And I’ll keep probing and someone else will come at me and I’ll learn something more. If you want to get rid of me, answer my questions and maybe I won’t have to get your bosses mad at you.”
The bartender turned red again.
“I don’t work for them.”
“At the very least you work at their pleasure.”
“Get out!”
I shrugged and we left. I turned at the door and looked back one last time. He was still red in the face and had his club out. I noticed none of the “patrons” were paying any attention and in f
act were trying very hard not to look up. I blew the bartender a kiss as I exited. Yeah, it was childish.
We figured we would wander around the city and see what else we could learn. We couldn’t find the two dark men who had left the Dirty Glass, but I was hoping that we had stirred things up enough that they might go get reinforcements. My thinking was that, like many other of the entities I had encountered here, they were essentially bullies and would feel better having larger numbers before finding out what we could do. That wasn’t necessarily good news for us, but talking to them was the next logical step. I probably couldn’t get anything out of them unless we could stand up to them, but we’d worry about that when the time came. So we walked around, hoping we had drawn targets on our backs. Demons are so much easier than people in Hell.
We decided to look for an empty apartment. There were so many buildings, I couldn’t believe all were full. There were no rental offices in Hell. If you wanted to live somewhere you squatted it. I figured if nothing turned up by nightfall we could get some rest and try again tomorrow. While we didn’t need sleep, these glamour bodies could benefit from some down time.
We were headed down another alley when we heard screams coming from the far end. We couldn’t see anything so whatever was happening was probably just around the corner. Blaise was much further down the alley than we were. We had been looking at a couple of buildings to explore for apartments and he had wandered ahead. He took off at a run. I shouted after him, but he either didn’t hear or didn’t care. He was a fast runner and quite lithe. We took off after him, but we had a ways to go. It reminded me of when I ran into the alley the first time demons dragged humans in to torture them. I hadn’t known enough about how this world works and I was afraid he didn’t either.
When we turned the corner we skidded to a stop. A terrified woman, in a torn dress, lay on the ground. A man, also terrified, was kneeling beside her, obviously concerned. Between them and us, Blaise was surrounded by six dark men wielding their baseball bats. They circled him menacingly. He stood in the center, outwardly calm. He did not move, but I sensed his eyes moving. He seemed almost like someone in a trance.
Izzy took his collapsed bow off his back. He carried it that way because it was easier to move about, but it meant it took time to restring it and get an arrow ready. Rox had her small slingshot, which she tied at her waist, but its range was too short to hit anything from where we were.
“Izzy, hold on. We don’t have a good shot that will keep them from hurting Blaise. And we might hit him by mistake.”
The dark men didn’t seem to have taken notice of us, concentrating intently on Blaise. He stood there quietly and started turning himself. He didn’t raise his walking stick defensively but rather used it as a pivot as he circled in place. The dark men raised their bats and as they circled they drifted in, making the radius of the circle smaller and smaller. I was about to shout something to distract them. It was the only ploy I could think of that might buy Blaise a moment, but I never got the chance.
I was pretty sure Blaise didn’t have the ability to teleport, but that’s exactly what it looked like. One moment he was pivoting in the middle of the collapsing circle of bat-wielding dark men. The next moment he was between them and the man and woman, behind them. It was as if he found the one gap they had in their circle and stepped through it so fast they hadn’t even noticed yet. In the next moment he swung the head of his walking stick, caving in the skulls of two of them. He snapped the walking stick back, driving the narrow foot of the stick into another’s throat. Izzy dropped another with an arrow. Startled, the two remaining dark men panicked and ran. One raced up another alley and got away, but the other ended up making the mistake of running in our direction. I stepped into him and upended him with an arm to the face. Rox landed on him with one knee on his chest and thrust her slingshot into his face. She smiled.
“Blaise! Get back!”
He looked at me, momentarily unsure why I was warning him.
“Get back! Pull that man and woman back.”
He decided to not worry about why. He did as I suggested. I was hoping he would. He had just finished moving the man and woman back when the bodies of the three slain dark men suddenly seemed to rip open, almost turning inside out. Flesh and organs puffed out like someone had set off airbags and then settled back into humanoid shapes, but pink and fleshy and naked. No clothes. The skin was smooth and bloody. Their faces were featureless and unformed. The eyes appeared and finally mouths, which started screaming.
They jumped up and thrashed wildly. They were strong and would have torn apart anyone who tried to stop them. They ran off down different alleys screaming.
Blaise looked at me. His only reaction was a raised eyebrow.
“Protos?” he asked.
I nodded.
He looked up one of the alleys where they had run and looked back at me.
“Thanks.” He smiled.
We approached the man and the woman. They were wary of us, but also seemed grateful for what just happened.
I turned to Blaise.
He shrugged. “I didn’t know what was going on, but I didn’t like it. Those dark guys were tearing the woman out of his hands. She didn’t like it. He didn’t like it. And I thought it looked unfair.”
“So, what, you said ‘Hey, stop that?’”
“I might have said ‘The jig is up.’”
“I bet they were impressed.”
“They did stop.”
“So they could give you an ass whooping.”
“Yeah, that wasn’t what I was hoping would happen.”
“What did you hope would happen?”
“That they would surrender and promise never to do it again.”
I looked at the couple.
“What happened here?”
The man was square jawed and might have once been ruggedly handsome, but now just looked beaten down. The woman had brown hair that she wore in curls. Her eyes were dark, her skin pale. She also looked worn down. However, unlike the man, it showed mostly in her eyes which were filled with fear and pain. Her dress was badly torn and she had some blood on her. The dress, of course, was part of her glamour and would repair itself, along with her wounds, but it hadn’t happened yet.
Rox came up to her and put a hand on her shoulder. Initially the woman was startled, but then she began to relax. Then she put her head against Rox’s breast and began to whimper.
I looked at the man.
“The dark men came for her. I knew you can’t fight them, but I couldn’t let her go. Not what they would do with her.”
“What would they do with her?”
“I don’t want to say.” He pressed his lips together hard. “I’ve kept some of it from her. Was hoping maybe this wouldn’t happen to us.”
“The dark men take what they want?”
“Always.”
“Why?”
“They run this place.”
“This is Hell. Humans don’t run anything. Who lets them run this place?”
“I don’t know. They just always have.”
Since I had someone who, for the moment, was talkative, I shifted the subject.
“Did you recently meet an outsider more like us? Maybe called himself Philip?”
“No, no one like that. And honestly, normally, I’d get far away from people like that.”
“Why?”
“The dark men don’t want us talking to outsiders.”
I walked over to the dark man sprawled on the ground. He glared, still pinned by Rox’s knee.
“Where can we find the dark men?”
“You won’t need to. They are going to find you.”
6.
I had wanted to talk to the couple more but they had run off while we were making sure we had no more attackers.
“What was that?” I asked Blaise as he walked over. As was usual, his face had the look of someone quietly observing everything but not particularly disturbed by anything.
“What was what?”
“You know.”
He smiled. Then he shrugged.
“Lucky.”
“Like Hell.”
Blaise smiled again.
Izzy joined us around the single remaining dark man. He was sitting up. Rox was on one side with her small slingshot pistol. Izzy had picked up the dark man’s club, deciding it made a better close-range weapon than a bow and arrow. His bow was once more unstrung and hung on his back. The dark man was brooding, but passive. Apparently, without the group, they lose some of their bravado.
“You have a name?”
“Tyndel.”
“Tell us about the dark men.”
He glared at us, but it was the glare of the defeated.
“We run Zaccora.”
“Zaccora?”
“This city. We run it.”
“That’s what the couple you were terrorizing said, but humans don’t run anything without someone saying it’s okay. You work for the demons?”
“We have a deal with the Demon King.”
“And where is the Demon King?”
“Behind the wall.”
“What do you do for the demons?”
“We have a deal. We decide what we do.”
“Why is everyone afraid of you folks?”
“Because we have power over them.”
I slapped him. Just like the demon in the woods, humiliation worked better here than physical intimidation.
“Wrong. You have power over them because they fear you. What do you do that makes them afraid?”
“We tell them what to do and if they don’t we beat them.”
“What about the merchants?”
“They pacify people. Make things more normal. If they do a good job, we leave them alone.”
“And the others? Why were you grabbing that woman?”
“The demons want humans to torture and serve them sexually.”
“Nice to know there’s someone in Hell you can rely on.”