The Big Reap tc-3

by Chris F. Holm

  To my right, across a narrow side street, was a shuttered convenience store, its dented stainless steel overhead doors down despite the fact it was scarcely midday. The cars that lined the street’s low curb were old and cheap and not worth stealing. The Bentley aside, of course, since it was parked along the curb as well — its driver had somehow managed to not only find a space that accommodated this beautiful behemoth of an automobile with scant inches to spare, but to parallel-park said behemoth without disturbing my beauty sleep until the deed was done. An impressive feat, to be sure, but not half as impressive as simply having the balls to leave such a stunning work of automotive art parked in a dodgy neighborhood without so much as locking its doors.

  I stretched, then, working the sleep and tension from my limbs, and turned to ask the driver, “What now?” But the words never passed my lips.

  Because that’s when I noticed the gun in his hand.

  For such a big guy, it was a dainty, slender little thing. A Ruger Mark Two, unless I was much mistaken — and believe me, I’ve been on the barrel-end of enough firearms in my time, I know most of ’em on sight. A good half the bastards who pointed ’em at me even pulled the trigger, which is how I knew the dinky little .22s that baby was packing were unlikely to put me down on the quick. But unless my buddy here’d shot off a few rounds on his way to picking me up, he had ten rounds in the mag and one in the chamber, and, dinky or not, that was plenty to put this meat-suit in the ground once and for all. So I showed the guy my palms, and sent out my best we’re-all-friends-here vibes. Of course, I spend my days killing people at hell’s behest, so I confess, the happiest vibes I’ve got at my disposal are pretty fucking far from cheery. But if it means not getting my ass shot, I’m willing to, you know, fake it.

  “C’mon, man, is that thing necessary? I came here willingly, if you recall.”

  But he just tossed me a key ring and gestured with a twitch of his gun barrel. “Unlock that and head inside. Do it.”

  The that in question was a fist-sized padlock looped through the lock-hole of a two-dollar gate latch — what it cost in Pounds Sterling, I couldn’t say — which was in turn affixed via four Phillips-head screws to the sole hinged plywood panel in the row. Why people bother putting decent locks on shitty doors and latches I’ll never know. Sure, the padlock could take a bullet — at least if the old Super Bowl commercials were to be believed — but who needs a key when a Phillips-head screwdriver could get you in just as quick?

  The door was marked as such by the laminated pressboard sign affixed to it that read:

  ANOTHER URBAN RENEWAL PROJECT

  COURTESY OF MAGNUSSON INDUSTRIES

  Magnusson: Making Life Better

  Though by the look of the project’s perimeter — a buckling plywood security wall discolored with age and papered with layer after layer of handbills — it didn’t look like much renewing had been going on for quite some time.

  I unlocked the lock. Handed it to the mook. He gestured with his barrel yet again.

  I took the hint, and pushed open the plywood door — or tried. The moment I touched it, my body was suffused with sudden, crawling dread. It slid down my arm and coiled around my heart, my lungs, my stomach. Like a litter of pythons, freshly hatched and hungry — tightening, choking, crushing my will as they contracted. And, though I’m certain now it was only in my mind, I felt as much as heard a low, raspy whisper in my ear accompanied by hot swamp breath that reeked like rotting flesh, uttering perhaps the most compelling command I’ve ever received: “Leave.”

  The driver’s Ruger jabbed into my back, a cold hard finger between my shoulder blades. I shoved the door open and staggered through. He followed close behind, careful not to touch the door along the way. The rusty spring affixed to the hinge protested as the plywood door swung closed and the city outside disappeared.

  2.

  “The fuck was that?” I asked, crossing my arms and rubbing at my borrowed shoulders in a vain attempt to dispel the dread that had settled upon me as I’d forced open the door.

  “Security,” he said. His gun was still drawn but no longer trained on me, instead hanging relaxed at his side in one gloved hand. “The whole fence is like that. Protects the would-be squatters and nosey bloody parkers.”

  “Don’t you mean protects you from the would-be squatters and nosey bloody parkers?”

  “No. Although in the Bentley’s case, that’s true enough. Its bodywork is hexed to match. Even with the gloves on, I don’t like touching it.”

  “It’s a cute trick,” I said. “You’ll have to teach me.”

  He shook his head. “Not mine to teach.”

  “The boss?” I hazarded.

  “The boss.”

  Inside the perimeter of the site the air was somehow darker, closer. It took me a moment to realize why. The sky above was a formless gray far deeper than it had been a moment before, and oddly distorted, as if seen through dirty leaded windows. And though outside the gate the rain continued unabated, I neither saw nor felt any trace of it in here, and the sidewalk beneath my feet was dry. I smelled not moisture, nor exhaust, nor simmering spice, just a still alkaline nothing, like the air inside a fallout bunker. Here, as outside, the sidewalk buckled under countless weeds’ persistence, but while outside they were thriving, the weeds inside were withered, black, and dead. And inside the plywood perimeter, it was dead silent as well. I heard no city sounds, no song, not so much as the quiet patter of the rain. Just me and this mook breathing in the silence. It set my teeth on edge.

  “Well then,” I said. “What say we two go meet him?”

  Muffled footfalls against concrete. Massive front steps looming. Now that we were inside the barrier, the building no longer resisted being seen. It was an imposing structure in the Edwardian style with hard lines and thick columns, faced in weather-beaten limestone that gathered in heavy geometric pediments above every window. As we approached the outsized arch of the entryway, I noted the lettering carved into the rectangular cartouche atop the keystone, which read, Pemberton Baths.

  “We going for a swim?” I asked.

  “Something like that,” he replied.

  We scaled the broad stone stairs. My gaze lighted on something on the topmost step that seemed incongruous with our surroundings, a brush-stroke of stark white against the gray. I crouched over it, and found to my surprise it was a good-sized bird, or what was left of one. I’d never seen one like it, or so I thought. When I said as much to my fair foreign companion, he snorted and said, “You never see a crow before?”

  With a start, I realized he was right. It was a crow. Emphasis on the was.

  The crow lay on its side, wings splayed as if felled in mid-flight, though it showed no signs of trauma from whatever felled it or from the fall itself. And every inch of it, from beak to wing to three-pronged feet, was as pale as sun-bleached bone. Save for its eyes, I realized. The one that I could see was a blackened crater with a corona of charcoal all around. It looked as if it had been burned out of the poor creature’s head.

  Suddenly, the driver’s comment about protecting would-be squatters and looky-loos made a whole lot more sense.

  I reached down to turn the bird over, to try to understand what sort of magic it had fallen victim to, but when I touched it, it crumbled to ash.

  “Your boss has quite the bag of tricks.”

  “He does, at that.”

  “And he doesn’t seem too fond of visitors.”

  He shrugged. “He’s a very private man, isn’t he?”

  “So how come you and me could pass?”

  He looked at me like I was dense. “We were invited.”

  “That didn’t seem to stop the fence. Or the mojo on the Bentley.”

  At that, the big man hesitated, a pained look on his face as if worried what came next might be perceived by his employer as speaking out of turn. “We weren’t harmed because the boss wishes us no harm. If I had to guess, I’d say he’s less concerned whether he hurts our fee
lings. And if I were you, I’d get a move on. He’s not a man who takes kindly to being kept waiting.”

  The front door was unlocked. We stepped inside. Our footfalls echoed through the broad expanse of the room. The interior of the building was dark, lit only by the faint light that trickled through the dirt-crusted panes of the skylight that stretched the length of the ceiling, and the soft glow of two gas lamps at the far end of the room. All the windows save for the skylight were boarded up.

  Situated beneath the skylight was a vast, white-tiled swimming pool. Circling it was a narrow walkway no doubt once dotted with low-slung lounge chairs, but now piled here and there with detritus — nail-studded boards; hunks of masonry run through with metal rebar; a pile of public restroom sinks. The pool itself was free of such detritus. A set of stairs in either corner nearest us — one crumbling, one intact — invited would-be swimmers into the shallow end a scant three feet below the walkway, and from there the pool’s bottom sloped gradually downward toward the far end.

  The driver gestured toward the undamaged stairs, so I took them, he trailing just behind. Together we descended toward the gas-lit glow of the deep end. Though the pool had long been drained, I couldn’t help but feel as my sightline passed below the walkway that surrounded it that I was in over my head.

  The deep end featured on its right-hand side a cluttered office. A gas lamp turned down to barely burning rested on an elegant mahogany desk, but afforded too little light to make out anything but black shapes surrounding it. The deep-end’s left-hand side was taken up by a makeshift room framed in two-by-fours and shielded from view by hanging sheets of plastic of the type I’d seen outside. Another lamp burned inside the makeshift room, this one brighter, projecting shadows of the activity therein against the walls like some nightmare paper lantern. I saw a table’s distorted shadow, its flat plane broken by a sleeping body — or a cadaver. The vague shape of a man’s head and shoulders were visible hunching over it, his hands an impossible blur of activity. He was humming, I realized — a Wagner opera. And, though the table’s supports were stick-skinny, light showing underneath, the man appeared to have no legs.

  Beside me, the Welshman stiffened for a moment as though receiving an electric shock, and then he nodded. “The boss is just finishing up,” he said, dress shoes clattering against the tile as he crossed into the office and adjusted the gas lamp. It flared white-hot a moment as the first rush of air hit the wick, and then settled into a pleasant, amber glow. “He said to make yourself at home.”

  I squinted in the sudden light, the wick’s green afterimage a dancing ghost at the center of my vision, and then forgot myself once my eyes adjusted.

  The back wall of the office was lined with waist-high wooden, glass-doored shelves of the kind one might find at an old-time pharmacy. The shelves were chock-a-block with jars containing peculiar liquids that seemed to amplify the lamplight and reflect back strange, entrancing hues of their own. As I looked at them in turn — dusky purple, vibrant green, soft pink — my mouth was filled with the taste of plum, of sage, of rose petals.

  Atop the shelving was a collection of taxidermy the likes of which the world had never seen: a three-headed owl; a piglet’s head with hooked, reddish beaks where its eyes ought to’ve been; a cheetah with the face of a baboon.

  The right-hand wall was largely given over to an array of medical equipment — a heart monitor, a respirator, an IV stand ornamented with two bags of fluids — surrounding a luxurious four-post bed done up with a half-dozen thick down pillows and sheets of gleaming silk. The pillows were fluffed up and arranged so the bed’s occupant might comfortably sit; the sheets were turned down in anticipation of said occupant.

  I strolled across the mildewed tile toward the desk at the center of the space. My driver watched idly, arms crossed, apparently unconcerned by my curiosity. The desk was piled high with books, papers, and odd artifacts: A glass bell, under which sat a sliver of blood-flecked wood; the broken corner of a stone slab, inscribed with words I could not read; a life-sized bronze bust, its face contorted in pain.

  Two high-backed leather club chairs faced the desk on one side. The side the blotter faced contained no chair. The blotter itself was leather as well but paler than the club chairs, and less burnished. I ran a finger along it, wondering idly at its strange matte finish, only to recoil when I realized the seal at its center was not a seal at all, but in fact a Royal Navy man’s tattoo.

  An anemometer sat on one corner of the desk, a device like a propeller with four hemispherical cups attached, intended to measure wind-speed. As I approached, it began to rotate slowly. But there was no wind in here, save for that which the instrument itself generated as it spun, and anyways, the cups were arranged such that it should have spun clockwise, not counterclockwise.

  It picked up speed, spinning so fast it shook. Papers flew off the desk, scattering across the floor. Something about the device pricked at a distant memory, and unnerved me in a way I could not define. Almost without volition, I raised a hand to stop it.

  “I wouldn’t,” said a thin, wizened, aristocratic voice, its vaguely continental singsong accent lending a quiet air of condescension to its words.

  “Excuse me?” I said, tearing my attention from the anemometer, and turning it instead to its owner. Who, as it happens, was the ugliest man I’d ever had the displeasure of laying eyes on.

  He was a skeletal little wisp of a thing, gliding toward me in a motorized wheelchair that hummed quietly as it cleared the plastic sheeting and rolled into the ersatz office. Twin ribbons of herringboned red trailed behind it, one from each tire, patterned like a printmaker’s stamp, ever fainter as he approached. He wore a silk smoking jacket — bold blue paisley trimmed in brown velvet — and a loose-woven brown lap blanket over his legs. One ashen, liver-spotted hand, its knuckles gnarled as tree roots, gripped the chair’s joystick. His other hand, oddly brown and muscular, rested lightly on his lap.

  His face looked like a patchwork quilt assembled by a mad cannibal — an age-creased pale white nose, narrow and aquiline; a left cheek and jaw as soft and unlined as a young woman’s; a patch of skin around his right eye blood-crusted at its borders as if it were a new addition, whose tone and epicanthic folds indicated it was Asian in origin. His right eye was pale green and rheumy. His left eye was vibrant blue, and clear as cloudless day, but it bulged inside its socket as if it didn’t quite fit. The skin on the right side of his face was as thin and brittle as old parchment; it cracked and peeled in the hollow of his cheek.

  “It detects your kind, among other things,” he said. “Consider it a warning system. You touching it will only make it spin faster. You’re liable to lose a hand.”

  “Why’s it spinning backward?” I asked.

  “Because you, Sam Thornton, are no angel.”

  He raised the hand in his lap and gestured. The anemometer’s spinning ceased.

  “And just who or what are you?” I asked.

  The patchwork man laughed, a steel brush on concrete. “Isn’t that the question,” he replied.

  “I’ll settle for a name,” I said. “After all, you apparently know who I am.”

  “Ah, but what’s in a name? Particularly for one such as myself, who’s had so many. In Sebaste, they knew me as Atomus. In Samaria, I was Simon Magus. In Cologne, Albertus. In the verdant isles of this fledgling kingdom, they sang my praises as Merlin. And this century past, I was best known for my groundbreaking if misunderstood research, conducted under the name of Doktor Men–”

  But then he broke off — mid-name, it seemed — as if deciding he’d already shared too much. “My apologies,” he said. “You care not to hear an old man’s ramblings; you simply wish to know how to address me. At present, my name is Simon Magnusson. I’m sorry to have kept you waiting, my last procedure proved more difficult than anticipated.”

  I glanced back over the Magnusson’s shoulder at the plastic-sheeted room, and wondered if I even wanted to ask.

  I a
sked. “What kind of a procedure?”

  “The unsuccessful kind, I fear. My patient lacked the fortitude necessary to survive the harvest. Now she’s just so much wasted flesh. And as you can see,” he said, tilting his crumpled parchment cheek toward the light for me to see, “I’ve little time to find another suitable donor.”

  “I hope that’s not why you brought me here.”

  “No,” said Magnusson. “We’ve other business altogether. Could I tempt you with a cup of tea? I suspect your trip to the cemetery has left you chilled.” I shook my head. “A sherry, perhaps?” Again I declined. “Well, then, I hope you don’t begrudge me some myself. Gareth,” he said, addressing the driver, “would you be a dear and fetch me some Amontillado? Then kindly clean up the surgical suite. I fear I left it quite a mess.”

  The Welshman nodded once and disappeared up the deep-end’s sole ladder, his footfalls receding into the darkness. Seconds later he returned, expertly navigating the ladder with a sherry glass in one hand. I found myself wondering how he would have managed it with two drinks.

  He set the sherry on the desk atop the blotter, and then ducked behind the plastic sheeting, three-thousand-dollar suit and all. Soon, I heard the sound of a hose running, and pink water sluiced across the tiles from beneath the sheeting, headed toward the floor drain at the center of the deep end.

  “Please,” he said, gesturing at the leather club chairs opposite the desk. “Sit down. We’ve much to talk about.”

  I did as he requested, eyeing awkwardly the desk’s contents while the patchwork man maneuvered his electric wheelchair into place. The breeze generated by the anemometer had shifted the mountain of paper atop the desk, and unearthed treasures that had heretofore been hidden to me. Two in particular caught my eye.