‘Looks like you haven’t been cured of making stupid decisions.’
‘You can’t be cured of that,’ Ronin says. ‘You can only go into remission.’
‘Don’t do this …’ I say.
‘Listen, there’s no getting out of it now.’ He puts a hand on my shoulder. ‘Watching humans die is a favourite goblin pastime.’
‘Why’s it always like this with you?’ I ask.
‘Like I’ve said before, I’m just a fun, dance-like-nobody-is-watching kinda guy,’ he says with a grin.
‘Try not to fucking die,’ I tell him.
The Halzig’s huge left arm is chained to the pole and it suddenly gains a sense of clarity and purpose, looking around for its victim with a murderous snarl.
Ronin, in a black vest and camo fatigues, rolls his shoulders and stretches his neck, then ties his long red hair back into a ponytail. He takes a packet of cigarettes from his pocket as the goblins chain his left arm to the pole.
‘Smoke?’ he offers, holding the packet out to the Halzig.
It gives a short howl and lunges at him. Ronin spins out of the way and entangles it in the chain long enough to light his smoke.
‘I know, I know, lung cancer,’ he says, pulling on the chain and trying to drag the Halzig’s arm into a nest of razor wire.
But the Halzig hasn’t even begun yet. Its animal rage transforms into a cold, lethal cunning. It methodically frees itself from the chain and begins to stalk Ronin around the pole.
Ronin keeps up his usual dumb banter, but I can see the sweat beginning to drip down his face as his attempts to avoid the giant goblin become more and more desperate. He stumbles and it catches him with a long arm and effortlessly slams him into the ground, wrapping the chain around his foot and reeling him in like a fish on a line. With a last brutal yank it drags him into reach and begins to pound on him with its sledgehammer fists.
‘Ground and pound’ doesn’t even begin to describe the Halzig’s fighting technique. Ronin covers up valiantly and manages to squirm out of the way like a cockroach from beneath a slipper. He’s gasping for air and bleeding from a gash on his cheek. He looks across at me and spits a mouthful of blood on to the floor. I give him an optimistic thumbs-up.
He picks up his cigarette, puts it between his bloody lips and drags himself to his feet.
‘Bravo,’ Norrd says, with a sarcastic little clap. ‘You’re giving it one hundred and ten per cent, which is the most important thing.’
Ronin grabs the chain, wraps part of it around his fist and forearm and runs straight at the ice goblin. He hits it with a series of percussive punches to the ribs and then vaults up on to it, using its knees as stepladders. It roars as he punches it viciously in the face with his chain-wrapped fist but grabs him around the neck and holds him suspended in the air. He struggles against the clawed hand at his throat and his face turns from white to red to purple in a matter of seconds.
‘Disappointing,’ Norrd says, looking at his nails.
I start preparing myself to make a run for it but then notice Ronin’s right arm. He’s surreptitiously wrapping the chain around the Halzig’s lower limbs. His body is slumping but he manages to swing his feet up and put his whole weight on to the chain.
He slips from the Halzig’s grasp and pulls the chain as he falls, dragging the Halzig down with him. They hit the ground and Ronin scrambles across the goblin’s chest, wrenches its head backwards and slams his boot into it with a satisfying crunch. Without pausing, he drags the Halzig towards the pole, positions its head against a spike, reconsiders and adjusts the angle, then boots the head into the spike. There’s a wet crunch as it punches through, coming out just beneath the left eye.
Ronin drags the body across to Norrd like a dog proudly displaying a pigeon carcass. ‘Leave Ed alone,’ he says, jabbing towards Norrd with a finger.
The goblins in the tracksuits are suddenly wielding AK-47s.
‘Do you know how much that Halzig cost me?’ Norrd screeches.
‘Surely can’t be more than your weekly anal bleaching,’ Ronin says, wiping blood out of his eyes.
‘The Bone Kraal is coming for you, human. It’s coming for all of you,’ Norrd screams.
‘Really? Brilliant. Then please sign me up for your human genocide newsletter. My email address is Ronin-at-go-fuck-yourself-dot-com.’
He staggers towards me and puts an arm around my shoulders. He’s bleeding from the gash in his head and dragging one of his legs.
‘Let’s get the hell out of here, sparky.’
The goblins watch us with narrow, menacing eyes as we make the painfully slow shuffle up the walkway to the elevator and out of the goblin lair.
‘You drive,’ Ronin says, fumbling for the keys as we reach the Cortina. I start the car just as he passes out in the passenger seat.
‘Ask for Dr Munro,’ Ronin says, his eyes popping open the moment we stop outside the emergency room. I help him through the entrance and we collapse on the uncomfortable plastic chairs next to a guy holding part of his face on with a cloth, and a woman missing a finger. I give her an empathetic nod.
An old doctor with wild brown hair, a series of deep ugly facial scars, and a T-shirt with a cat on a trampoline beneath his white coat turns the corner, takes one look at Ronin and rolls his eyes.
‘Schoolgirls beat you up again?’
‘That was once!’ Ronin says, wincing. ‘And they were possessed by demonic forces.’
‘Right, “possessed”.’ Munro smiles. ‘Come on, let’s sew the worst of that up.’
‘You’re a gent, Doc,’ Ronin says.
While I wait, I get a Coke from the vending machine and slouch against the wall watching the various casualties hobble by and trying to guess their origins. It’s while I’m trying to figure out how a guy managed to jam a corkscrew into that part of his body that I casually look through a window and see Anwar staring sullenly at an episode of Days of Our Lives on a flickering TV.
Seeing my arch-nemesis is, like, emotionally challenging and I need to take a moment to process it:
CrowBax: Could probably still take him out with an overdose. It’ll look like an accident.
SienerBax: You’re ridiculous. We saved him. Besides, we’re being good from now on, remember. Remember?
CrowBax: I don’t remember having an equal say in that.
SienerBax: Be good. For Esmé.
CrowBax: OK, fine. But we don’t have to go see him, right?
I walk in through the ward door trying to look nonchalant. Anwar is lying on a bed looking bored, but when his eyes land on me they narrow into daggers of pure malice.
‘Zevcenko,’ he spits.
‘So nice to see you,’ I say through gritted teeth.
‘Yeah, I bet.’
‘I thought you were OK?’ I say.
He lifts his pyjama top and shows me the nasty scar on his abdomen.
‘The stabbing caused complications. I have to have a colostomy bag.’
‘I bet chicks dig it,’ I say before I can stop myself.
‘Fuck you,’ he hisses.
‘Yeah, well, just don’t forget who saved your life. I could have left you there to marinate in your own bodily fluids.’
‘Knowing that hurts more than any of the tubes they’ve shoved into my orifices.’
‘Well I’m not particularly fond of the decision either,’ I say.
We stare at each other in hostile silence.
‘What are you into, Zevcenko?’ Anwar says eventually.
‘What do you mean?’
‘I’m trying to figure it out, man,’ he says as he jabs the button next to him to lever his bed into a more upright position. ‘You give up your porn for a bunch of guns. I thought you were going to use them to secure some kind of new territory, but I don’t hear anything further about it. It’s like they’ve just disappeared.’
‘They have,’ I say. ‘I no longer have them.’
‘You sold them? I could have found you a buyer i
f that’s what you were after.’
‘Traded them,’ I say. ‘And what I wanted you couldn’t get.’
‘Hmmm. I always knew you were into some dark shit, Zevcenko. Let me in on it and I’ll leave your little flunkies alone.’
‘The Spider has disbanded. Kyle, Zikhona and the Kid are all NPCs now. They don’t figure in the game any more.’
He laughs. ‘I think I’ll decide that.’
‘Listen,’ I say. ‘It’s over. We’re finished. High school isn’t like the Mafia.’
‘You’re really going to stand here and say something like that to me? Did we even go to the same school? It’s almost like you’re a different person.’
‘Just leave them alone,’ I say.
‘Or what?’
I could jam my thumb into his wound. Twist until he agrees. I could drop an anonymous note to the cops about Central and the guns that Anwar had there.
‘Or nothing. I’m just asking you.’
‘This whole “nice” thing is wearing really fucking thin, Zevcenko. What’s your scheme, what’s your angle?’
‘No angle,’ I say.
He laughs. ‘Then you’re a fucking idiot.’
For the first time in my life, I think I might actually agree with him.
‘He has no internal injuries,’ Dr Munro says to me when I find them.
‘Forty-seven stitches,’ Ronin groans as he stands up, touching the seam that holds his cheek together. ‘Not even close to my top score.’
Munro sighs. ‘When I first agreed to help you, I was under the impression that my involvement would be of the now-and-again variety.’
‘You agreed to help me because you were being hunted by a Kholomodumo. I still have its skull somewhere if you need reminding.’
Munro touches the deep tracks that have been gouged into his face. ‘No,’ he says. ‘I don’t need any reminding.’
‘Painkillers, then,’ Ronin says with a satisfied smile. ‘And no skimping. I want the good stuff. I know what cheapskates you doctors are.’
Munro sighs and scrawls him a prescription.
‘See you soon, Doc.’ Ronin pats Munro on the back and stuffs the prescription into his trench coat.
‘One day it’s going to catch up with you,’ says Munro, shaking his head.
‘Not if I keep running fast enough, Doc,’ Ronin replies with a grin.
We pick up Ronin’s medication at the dispensary and then I help him to stumble through the parking lot to the Cortina. By the time we’re on the highway, he’s crushed some of his pain pills into a joint and is on a slurry, happy buzz that’s immune to pain.
‘This quitting alcohol is such a cinch, sparky,’ he says. ‘All you have to do is just stop. BAM! You don’t need any of this twelve-step bullshit.’
‘It’s been half a day, and you’re high.’
‘You’re undermining my self-esteem,’ Ronin says, lying back in the passenger seat and closing his eyes. ‘Now put on some Moondog.’
I rummage through his cassettes, keeping one hand on the wheel. Moondog is Ronin’s favourite when he’s high, but it annoys the hell out of me. I slam a cassette into the tape player and then try to grab the joint out of Ronin’s hand. Without opening his eyes, he pulls it out of reach. I sigh and let the music’s orchestral madness envelop me.
3
PLATFORM AGNOSTIC
I GET HOME to find my brother Rafe sitting on the stairs reading another South African history book. At this point I think there’s probably more South African history in Rafe’s brain than in any library. They should make my red-haired weirdo brother a national monument.
Rafe is possibly the biggest surprise this whole mess has produced. Far from being the intellectually challenged older brother I thought I had, he exists on a whole other level of Siener mystic power. Where I see visions, he lives in an inner world of wisdom and insight. And what he lacks in conversational ability he makes up for in know-it-allness.
Still, it’s good knowing there is someone else whose genetic make-up is as screwed up as mine. I still wish I could talk to Grandpa Zev, though. Just to tell him he was right about giant Crows and to chat some of this stuff through. Rafe isn’t exactly the biggest talker.
‘Hey,’ I say.
He looks up and hits me with the knowing eye. I used to think he looked at me with the knowing eye to annoy me. Now I know he does it to annoy me AND because he also has Siener abilities.
‘Whoa, whoa, give me a chance,’ I say, holding up my hands. ‘Let me get a word in here, buddy.’
He just stares. Then he puts the book down on the stairs and gets up and opens the door that leads into the garage. He turns to look at me and I sigh. ‘OK, Lassie. Where are we going this time?’
My folks are out on a date night, which means an art movie, dinner at the same restaurant they always go to and lots of red wine, so we grab our bikes and head out. In the past I would have mocked Rafe and possibly tried to lock him in a closet. But now I just follow. However much it absolutely grates to admit it, on a certain unknown metaphysical level he’s much smarter than I am.
I follow his bike light through the winding back roads of our neighbourhood. The night is cool and dark and there’s an eerie mist hanging low over the houses, but I’ve long since stopped worrying about eerie ambience. The real shit that’s out there can kill you just as easily in broad daylight.
I know where we’re going before we get there; I can feel the tug of the canal way before I see it. I’ve tried to avoid it as much as possible lately. There’s a strange power in it that pulls at the eye in my forehead, the only part of suburbia that does that, and I’d rather not have anything further exacerbating my mental issues. I can teeter unsteadily on the brink of reality quite fine by myself, thank you very much.
We reach the damp grass surrounding the canal and Rafe throws his bike down. I do the same and follow him into a little hollow of warped and twisted trees. A bed of cardboard boxes has been made up next to a rock and an old rusting chain-link fence.
‘You bring me to the nicest places,’ I murmur as Rafe sits down in the dank hollow.
I grab a seat next to him and wait for a couple of moments in silence.
‘I’m really surprised this didn’t make it on to the “Twenty Things You Have to Do in Cape Town”,’ I say as I catch a whiff of urine from somewhere downriver.
Shut up.
The voice rings clearly in my head like I’m wearing invisible DJ-level, noise-cancelling headphones. I’m so startled that I sort of half stand up, get my foot caught underneath me and topple over into some reeds.
Now who’s the retard?
‘Rafe?’ I say, pushing myself quickly on to my haunches. ‘Who the fuck was that?’
He looks at me with a tiny flicker of amusement twitching at his lips.
Who do you think it was, dum-dum?
OK. I know crazy stuff is possible, but I’d sorta drawn a line under it. Creatures? Fine. Ritual magic? OK, I can manage that. Far sight? Not cool, but I guess I’m just going to have to find a way to deal with it. But this far and no further. Telepathy? Come on!
I thought you’d be a little more adult about this.
‘Fuck,’ I say, running my hands through my hair and then readjusting my glasses and breathing deeply. ‘OK, OK. You’re telepathic. Please explain this little quirk.’
It’s just something I’ve learnt to do. You can probably do it too.
‘I doubt it.’
Try.
He stares at me like he’s asking me to tie my shoelaces.
‘OK,’ I say.
I concentrate really hard on saying something to his mind with mine. Nothing.
This is a Crow thing, not a Siener thing. So you have to open up that part of yourself. It helps if you use your fingers, too.
He twines his fingers together in a weird configuration and I copy him. My mind begins to throb and twist. Shapes swirl in front of my eyes. I gape as a tiny glowing bridge unfolds from my third eye. I
t stretches across the gap between us and locks on to Rafe’s forehead.
My mind explodes with a rush of foreign memories and sensations. I recognise a lot of them because I have a corresponding set. They’re Rafe’s memories. I watch a rapid-fire tour of what a dick I’ve been to him since we were kids. There’s me blaming him for stealing from my dad’s booze cabinet. There’s me almost drowning him in the pool. Yep, there’s me taking credit for a picture he drew when he was five.
You really are an asshole.
‘Thanks,’ I say.
He shakes his head. Try to speak to me with your mind.
I concentrate really hard. I picture the words marching across that little bridge like toy soldiers.
Ummmerggaaaa.
‘How was that?’ I ask.
You sound like that time when you fell and landed with your groin on the crossbar of your bike.
‘Thanks.’
You’ll get there. Keep your chin up, kiddo.
‘Screw you,’ I say with a laugh.
There are different parts of all of us.
‘Oh, I know all about that.’
He snorts.
You’ve only just scratched the surface. There’s a whole geography in your head that you’ll have to explore.
‘I can’t wait,’ I say, and wonder yet again how I could have underestimated my brother for all these years.
The next day Kyle comes round to help me pack for Hexpoort. Kyle is having a tough time of it all. The end of the Spider has resulted in a kind of crisis for him. He really doesn’t know what to do with himself and I’m at a loss as to how to help him. He’s been researching supernatural stuff non-stop since he found out it was real. It has become really annoying.
‘It just seems strange that the Hidden STAY hidden,’ he says, sitting in front of my laptop. ‘I mean, it’s a fairly major thing. Other creatures live among us. Magic exists. Keeping it secret is undemocratic.’
‘All those conspiracy websites and fringe magazines are actually creating a layer of noise,’ I tell him. ‘The Hidden stay hidden because they’re hidden in plain view. That’s what Ronin says, at least.’
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