The Neon Graveyard

by Vicki Pettersson

  Twisting, I looked down at viewing room below us, but it stubbornly refused to live up to its name. I saw nothing. Solange had to be down there, though. Perhaps this was simply where she kept Carlos when she wasn’t “working” on him.

  Which meant she might keep Hunter up here too.

  Taking a deep breath, I swung my legs forward so they wrapped around the crossbar, then leveraged myself to the side where a support handle was welded to the cart’s rear. Carlos groaned as his makeshift bed teetered, angling so steeply it threatened to spill him from its side. I righted it with my body weight as a string of mostly unintelligible words rang down on me. “No mas . . .”

  “Shh . . .” I soothed, stilling so the cart did too, though not even I was comforted. Closing my eyes, I breathed in deep, and like a rock climber without a rope, imagined my moves—a long reach with my right arm, a swift lift of my left knee, plant my foot at the cart’s base first, while I prepped for the sway, and propel myself up into its interior on the inevitable backswing. I’d have to keep my movements compact if I were to minimize Carlos’s pain.

  The visualization worked, and I was upright with only a small bit of fumbling and that due to a necessary shift in my center of gravity. The geek-sock from the comic books shop was right. This baby was starting to make itself known.

  Just a little longer, I thought, and bent to stroke Carlos’s forehead. He startled at the touch, opened his eyes, and looked at me like he’d forgotten I was there. Maybe he had.

  “No—” The strings pulled at his mouth. I placed a finger over his lips. His skin was clammy and hot. He jerked his head, sunstone eye flashing in its socket. “No, Joanna. You must go. Go now—”

  “And you must be still and quiet, my friend,” I said, stilling him so I could cut his final restraint. Then I tucked the knife away, but kept my hand firmly on his chest. I didn’t want him sitting suddenly and toppling us both.

  “Look—”

  “No, you look.” I smiled down at him, meeting his new gaze with one of my own. “I’m not leaving without you.”

  Even the gem took on a wild look as his eyes widened. “Look . . . up.”

  I whirled, hand on the knife at my back . . . but there was no one there. The state of the once-violently beautiful planetarium, though expected, was shocking. Only a few stars remained to scatter light, the backlit gems doing their best to spark off each other, casting a spooky illumination over the rest of the room. What there was of it anyway. The gem nearest the cart was close enough to reveal the surrounding pockmarked area, a constellation raped of its soul bits.

  Though the room was round, and the wall impossibly far away, I reached out anyway. The holes where the stars used to lay looked wet, the abscesses giving the impression that they were bleeding black.

  The wall was too far, but I did touch something else. Barely discernible, as light against my fingertips as butterfly wings, a gossamer wave rose like a zip line in the frail light before unexpectedly pulsing outward. It was like a stone dropping into the middle of a black pond, though this ripple fractured into branches instead of waves. Carlos uttered a warning behind me, but it was too late. The silky quiver continued upward by the yard to reveal an arterial tangle of complicated threading. The movement crested over the room’s center and a pattern emerged, a concentric enlarging of circles, angled crookedly, lopsided if studied alone, but many patterns were like that. I drew back and took in the thing as a whole, the threaded spokes, the resultant wheel . . . and that’s when I spotted them.

  A shining strand simultaneously struck the two opposing sides of the room where bulbous masses appeared pinned, one much larger than the other. I craned my neck to keep them both in view at the same time as the ripple corkscrewed faster and faster up what looked like giant cocoons, the lines striking a tangle of others so that the bulging sacs nearly sparked. Even Carlos stilled behind me at the sight, and when the first, smaller one began to shift, I knew why.

  The rotating backside of the gossamer shell was transparent. Backlit by the remaining stars, it was also easy to make out its contents. Despite the occasional surge of light, still sparking from my inadvertent touch, a solid form lay outlined in the suspended middle, curled like a lima bean, hunched in the fetal position.

  Appropriate, I thought, swallowing hard as the thing’s head swiveled my way. It had the mismatched proportions of a baby; a giant head tottering on a too-long neck, with elongated limbs and a soft, distended belly. It could have been the lighting, or the layers of its silky shell, but the thing’s skin was mottled, nearly pearlescent in some areas, while close to black in others. Its eyes were milky globes of pure white, too small for the lidless sockets, though even unblinking I knew the creature was looking at me. There wasn’t one strand of hair on the body—no brows or lashes even—and the skin appeared poreless, like soft plastic poured over bones as thin as pencil leads.

  I lost my ability to scream as the monster banged its head against its soft cage. Carlos found it for me, an unmistakable yelp of anticipatory pain as the tangled thread above us thundered. Leaning back, I put a hand on his shoulder to hush him, but mutely shifted my gaze to the room’s other side.

  Because rolled up in the opposite corner? In the giant spiral of sticky, gleaming threads? A body I knew mainly from comics . . . and a man I’d know anywhere. Hunter’s great form was hunched as well, though in his case it was because he was overdeveloped rather than the opposite. Even beneath the gossamer layers, his hair was a tar black club, and his skin still possessed its natural dark color, though thankfully it wasn’t mottled like the other . . . being’s.

  Still, he didn’t look healthy. Though he would never be compact, his muscles had a clenched appearance, and his cheeks were hollow. Dehydrated, probably. The eyes were the same, though. Gorgeous honey globes fringed with black lashes, as beautiful to me as any gem . . . and thankfully they weren’t yet that. But they were as horror-ridden as Carlos’s as he stared down at me from thirty feet away, his mouth opened in a giant negation of what he was seeing.

  My own eyes darted back and forth from his globular shell to the other as the vibrations from my touch faded, and I finally realized where I was. Not a planetarium any longer. Not standing at the edge of the Universe. Rather, at the corner of giant, and once-again invisible web.

  So, I thought, biting my lip. Where was the spider?

  The hairless being began to screech, the sound a mixture of something from Jurassic Park and a teen girl’s sighting of Robert Pattinson. If disturbing the web hadn’t gained me unwanted attention, the upset creature’s ongoing cry surely had. I glanced back at Hunter, trapped, as the noise continued.

  Fast, then. But a hand wrapped firmly around my ankle as I reached for the web. It was a good thing I looked before I struck out because it was Carlos’s imploring gaze I nearly kicked in. His other hand found my pant leg. “No, Joanna. He can’t be reached.”

  I didn’t know what he meant. That I couldn’t reach Hunter or that even if I did he was still lost to me, but I did know it wouldn’t be for lack of trying. “Let go, Carlos, and do it quick. Unless you want your hands to go the way of your eye.”

  His face fell, disappointment and sadness etched in lines that hadn’t been there only days earlier, but he released his hold, knowing I meant it. I couldn’t have made it this far if I’d had more regard for anyone’s life—including my own—than I did for Hunter’s.

  Yet when I craned my neck again, he was shaking his head too, pounding at the cottony sac, every strike causing it to splinter with light. It looked like a lightning storm inside, but I didn’t have time to admire it, or to mind his objection. The motion was vibrating the attached threads. The web now glittered with movement. The upside was, it’d be easy to make my way up to him. The downside? I’d be as easy to see as a spotlit starlet.

  The threading was strong yet flimsy, and every movement—repositioning my hand, my feet, even reaching for another strand—threatened to flip me into the blackened abyss. I
hoped my power of creation extended to a trampoline if I fell.

  The vibrational shock was a Richter seven by now, worsened by the continuous cries of the sac creature now propelling itself back and forth in a consoling rock. I was also messing up the web. Approximately every third movement saw me grabbing a strand in the wrong spot and pulling it loose . . . and I was only halfway to Hunter. How the hell would I get back down?

  Then I became stuck. Residue, I realized, looking at my palm. A filmy layer from the silks I’d already touched, the heat from my palm warming and softening it into a gluey compound meant, I knew, to halt me altogether.

  I cursed under my breath, and tried to move faster, but a new vibration whipped me against the web, which saved me, but also caught me in its dangerous fibers. The monstrous creature ceased crying. Carlos cried out. Hunter pounded on his prison shell.

  And she dropped down in front of me, so close my eyes nearly crossed.

  She was naked, not that it mattered, because she was also gristled from head to toe. Body blackened like bacon left frying in a pan, her former beauty was impossible to imagine, even for someone who’d seen it. I’d known the smoke I’d blown in her face would attack her body. I’d been warned not to inhale from the quirley once it was lit, lest the poisonous tendrils reach into my lungs and do the same to me.

  But I’d never dreamed a weapon could so thoroughly and continually attack a person from the inside. It looked like Solange had been flash-fired and kiln-baked at the same time. Forget third-degree burns—this had rendered her skin tissue nonexistent, and my guess was the fat had been burned from her as well, because what bubbled on the surface of her face was smoke-dried strips of muscle tethered to bone. Parts of her body—her skull, left clavicle, and elbow, her entire right side from hip to knee—were blown-out chunks of bone, as if tiny explosions had erupted inside her marrow, fusing her into a new, unrecognizable shape. I found her ears only by sighting the earrings dangling from oddly angled cartilage. One was located near her charred forehead, the other down by her chin.

  Kundans, I realized with a jolt. She had armed herself with the same defensive weapons as those adorning my body, and I could have hit myself for not realizing it before. She’d never been fond of ornamentation like Diana, or affectation like Nicola, so I’d once thought beauty was her greatest weapon. But she’d worn this pair of earrings every time I’d seen her, and if this was what the quirley had done to her with the kundans’ protective powers, I didn’t want to know what would have become of her without them.

  I looked away from the earrings, lest she discern my thoughts, gaze darting over her destroyed skull like I was having trouble taking it all in. Not exactly hard to fake. This was what someone would look like walking out of a microwave set to high, left to run, and starting to smoke.

  Yet the top of her skull was the most extraordinary sight of all. The hair on her head was pristine; a shiny, healthy, deep auburn—with highlights or lowlights or both—and such a great contrast with the physical wreckage beneath it that its presence was a mockery. I looked her over from head to toe, and she let me, her sooty gaze fastened on me in unflinching defiance. I had done this to her, and she wanted me to see it.

  And then she’d want me to pay.

  “Satisfied?” she asked in a voice as charred as the rest of her. I wasn’t, but refrained from shaking my head because, were our positions reversed, she would be.

  “I thought you murdered everyone downstairs so you could fix yourself.”

  “Impossible. The quirley was of me. I fashioned it here with the intent to cause harm, and as you know, intention is everything. In any world.”

  And I’d used her own magic against her in a place where magic was everything too.

  “It doesn’t matter. I’ve no need for vanity anymore. I’ve got what I want.”

  My gaze flicked, unbidden, up to Hunter still suspended above us. He was thrashing on his silky prison, but as strong as he was, his actions made no sound and had even less effect. The sac undulated, the web shimmered, and Solange laughed.

  “Oh darling. He’s all yours. Or he would be if I had any intention of letting either of you live.”

  I ignored that last statement and shook my head. “No. You didn’t do . . . that to him just to lure me here. That’s . . .”

  I couldn’t say it. But looking at Hunter, it was clear. That was personal. If her intention had merely been to kill us both, she’d have shrunken his head long ago. But he was alive. Trapped, stored above her, but still alive.

  “Oh sure.” Solange shrugged, not denying it. “I thought for a short time that my husband and I might rekindle our old romance, maybe team up. I am Shadow, he is Light. We once created a child, the Kairos, between us. No reason we couldn’t do it again, right?”

  There’s me, I refrained from saying.

  “But he’s useless. Impotent, if you didn’t already know. Couldn’t rise with the sun in the east, if you know what I mean.”

  I felt Carlos’s one good eye roll my way in warning, and I held impossibly still, very conscious of not moving my hand to my belly, and the life Hunter had birthed inside me. Instinct told me that death was preferable over Solange discovering that.

  “Oh, don’t worry,” Solange said, tone ashy and wry. “I’ll still put him to good use. See, I’m going to fossilize him in amber. He will ever be as he is now. A pleasure to look at. My pet rock, if you will.”

  I looked back up. Hunter had stopped pounding, and his hands hung at his sides, sticky and useless, his shoulders hunched as he resigned himself, I think, to being unable to do anything but watch me die.

  “Now, let’s see,” Solange said, looming so close I smelled the ash on her shriveled organs, the smoke on her breath. I jerked back in revulsion, and the web at my back tightened its hold. Her face twisted at my reaction, causing a muscle strip to snap over her cheek. She slapped me, then loomed even closer. “What gem, my dear, do you think will best capture the hue and form of your last soul sliver?”

  Her finger, grotesque and talonlike, trailed over my breastbone. I stiffened, waiting for its inevitable plunge into my chest.

  She snarled. “I screwed up the first two times. I thought your soul power was strong enough for a mineral, and tried a diamond since you’re supposed to be so fucking special. Then a garnet, representative of your lifeblood. But now I realize your particular power is organic. Maybe a coral or ivory. Maybe jet.”

  I looked into her gaze, her own eyes lit by nothing but madness, and thought, Shit. The quirley had flash-fried her brain. There was probably a coiled up strip of jerky rattling around where her gray matter used to be. She wasn’t just everyday homicidal. She was certifiable.

  “Then again, a moonstone is the most important variety of the orthoclase, and having handled your soul twice now, I think that might fit you just fine. Orthoclase, as I’m sure you know, is derived from the Greek . . .”

  Great. More fucking Greeks.

  “Orthos means ‘right’ and kalo means ‘cleave.’ ” She bared stubs of blackened teeth. “Appropriate, don’t you think?”

  “Not so much,” I said in all seriousness. It made her laugh again, and soot billowed from the holes in her throat.

  “Yes, I think a moonstone will fit you fine. Mind, some orthoclase stones are intrusive, all right angles and flinty warm tones, but a moonstone is pristine. Sacred. So there will be no cuts in this one. I’ll polish it into a pear shape. The light will filter through it in a cloudy blue haze, and it will look like it’s floating. But it’ll be clean, yes. Something to be proud of, really. Your soul is still relatively clean. What do you think?”

  “I’m not really an expert,” I said, which made her nod. “But I do have a question.”

  She looked at me blankly.

  “Why?” I asked. “I mean, you’re no longer creating some sort of supernatural power plant with this sky of souls. You’ve taken the life energy of everyone peopling Midheaven, and while that gives you more talking heads th
an FOX News, the place can no longer run. Yet you’re not using that collective power to renew your body . . .” Never mind beauty. “So what’s so important that you’d need all the men’s energy to fuel it, all the women’s even . . . especially mine?”

  My question either surprised or pleased her because the patchy bone and blackened muscle lifted over her forehead, and she gave me a sooty chuckle. “You’re not as smart as you think.”

  She turned, and I stared at her retreating form. She really did look like a spider. As if she heard my thoughts, she flipped her gorgeous mane of hair, and looked at me from over one charred, flaky shoulder. “Don’t go anywhere.”

  Of course I started struggling free of the web as soon as she scuttled away, noting she was doing a far better job of traversing the threads than I had. The vibrations from my movements alerted her, and jarred her a little, but she didn’t turn around, or otherwise acknowledge me again, as she headed directly toward her other caged pet.

  Her lack of concern was very concerning. I yanked at the webbing even harder, but it just grew stickier. Body heat plus web glue equals trouble. I’d store that for future reference if I ever got out of here.

  Hunter resumed his pounding, sparks bursting from his soft cage in jerky undulations. I appreciated his concern, but it did nothing to aid my escape. Carlos too was yelling again, but I couldn’t stop to listen. Every time I pulled one limb loose of the gossamer silk, another seemingly shot up to secure me in place. By the time Solange reached her pet alien’s giant sac, I was covered in sticky strands from shoulders to ankles, pinned in place. Fuck.

  “Come here, darling. Come here, baby . . .” Her croon was smoky as she slit the webbing open with the nail of her index finger, top to bottom. When the surgeonlike incision was made, she parted the thick webbing like curtains, and helped the pearlescent bald thing out. It nuzzled her cracked, hardened form, white against black, soft against gristled, then almost immediately turned to me.