Dead Easy

by Mark William Simmons

 

  >Back when he was still a man, Grigori Yefimovich Rasputin was an acolyte of Nyarlathotep. What? You thought a simple peasant acquired the power of life and death over millions of Russians by mere happenstance?<

 

  >Pol Pot, Idi Amin . . . < she continued. >Nyarlathotep has many acolytes. And he sets them upon many thrones. But returning to the question of what we are dealing with now? I do not know the specifics. Only that Laveau is attempting to do something very bad!<

 

  >"Sanity" is not a French word.<

 

  >There's nothing you can do even if we do catch her in time. You're a passenger,< Mama Samm continued. >And I don't know how to explain the parts that I do understand. She's been preparing a summoning spell. Except what she's summoning never really departed—though its host bodies have died over the course of time. And she plans on opening a gate—although that gate is already partially open or Nyarlathotep couldn't bind Baron Samedi and manifest through his avatar as he did in your car.<

 

  >Hush now! I've got to think! Where would that bitch go to work her spell?<

  Somewhere dry and out of the rain, I thought to myself.

  >No. She called up this storm. It's more than just a barrier that shields her from the sun. It's an energy vortex that she's set up to power the next part of her spell! And to tap into it she will have to be outside when the time comes. . . . <

  Note to self: sarcasm is difficult enough without the toolbox of inflection.

  >She'll seek the highest ground possible.<

  There was no high ground in New Orleans.

  >She'll go to the roof of the tallest building she can find,< Mama Samm answered, throwing her weight against a locked exit door. It gave way with only the briefest of hesitations and we were stumbling through the rain toward the parking lot at the front of the museum.

 

  >'Fraid not, Cséjthe. My money's on One Shell Square.<

 

  >Maybe so, but the Shell's fifty-two feet taller and it's got a big, flat roof to work wit'.<

 

  >Depend on de size of whatever she's bringing trough de gate.<

  This was so not good!

  Even worse, Mama Samm's conversation was starting to devolve into the Haitian-flavored patois she affected whenever the ectoplasm was about to hit the fan. It was her linguistic equivalent to suiting up in cape and tights before battling supernatural supervillains . . .

  >What's that?<

  I looked around and, of course, saw nothing.

  >Did I just catch a flash of you imaginin' me in my underwear?<

 

  A car slid alongside throwing a sheet of water over our already soaked carcass. Irena opened the passenger door from the driver's side. "Wherever you're going," she accused, "you'll get there a lot faster by not ditching me!"

  Mama Samm wasn't done with me. >Don't you be lettin' your mind wander where it's got no bidness wanderin',< she sent as she slid onto the front seat. "One Shell Square," she told Laveau's stepdaughter. "And we're running out of time." >And none of us have time for engaging in fantasy lingerie daydreams right now!<

 

  >'Specially kinky fantasy daydreams!<

  Ow!

  Baby got backhand!

  * * *

  One Shell Square was a monolith of white Italian limestone. A gridwork pattern of bronzed glass windows were arranged in rows of eighteen per floor on the wide sides and thirteen on the narrows. Fortunately, I wasn't very superstitious.

  Very.

  Maybe Laveau sensed us coming.

  Or maybe it was just dumb luck that a freak lightning strike took all of the elevators off-line while the lights in every room on every floor continued to shine with undiminished luminosity in the storm's artificial night. There was no choice for it but to exit the lobby and take the emergency stairs up.

  Irena Pantera and Sammathea D'Arbonne debated the definition of a "flight" of stairs as we ascended the first twenty floors. Irena held the opinion that the run of stairs from one floor to the landing between levels constituted "one" flight and that the reversed run rising from the landing to the next floor was another flight—thus totaling "two flights" between each floor, adding up to a total of one hundred and two flights to reach the top. Mama Samm insisted that landings and reversals didn't change the essentials and that the complete set of stairs between one floor and the next constituted a single flight and, therefore, there were only fifty-one flights to negotiate to the top.

  It didn't make any difference in the total number of steps. And, while fifty-one seemed less daunting than one hundred and two, it was still discouraging enough to draw my attention away from the argument and contemplate my role in the approaching showdown.

  Without a body to command I was just a useless spectator. Worse, I might prove to be a fatal distraction when Mama Samm needed to keep her wits about her most. Already the mountainous juju woman was tiring and Irena surged past her to take the lead on the stairs. As her pert derrière undulated with each step taken, my attention was drawn to an assessment of her slender frame.

  Irena could be a mature sixteen or a late-blooming twenty something. Her curves were understated and her frame was slight: I doubted she weighed more than ninety pounds soaking wet. Still any body was potentially better than none and the muscles that slid and flexed in her tanned, taut arms suggested youthful vitality and toned fitness. That might offer some advantage to a bloodwalker if I borrowed her flesh in the coming melee. The problem was, such an incursion, uninvited, was tantamount to rape. It was one thing to bump brains with some inhuman foe and take possession in the name of survival and good versus evil. Quite another to commandeer an innocent bystander and chalk it up to the necessities of war.

  Your son is in danger.

  Yeah, but if I didn't start drawing lines somewhere, I would quickly become one of the things I waged war against.

  So, you've finally dropped your noncombatant status and admit to being at war.

  Shut up, I told myself. I'll do what I have to when I have to but not before.

  Still, I couldn't help assessing Pantera's compact form and thinking of ways to use it if push came to shove.

  * * *

  Push and Shove were waiting for us on the next landing.

  As vampires go, neither was particularly imposing. Skinny to the point of emaciation, they looked like meth addicts who had recently been turned, Marie Laveau improvising a rear guard on the fly.

  "Dinner has arrived," the tall black one announced to the short white one.

  Irena stopped. The hair on her arms, her head, rose up as if the handrail she gripped was charged with static electricity.

  Mama Samm never broke stride and kept climbing, mounting step after step like a clockwork automaton.

  "Dibbs on the Big Gulp!" yelled the short, white one. And leaped on us.

  Well, actually he was aiming for Mama Samm, who was too big to miss. He came sailing down over a half dozen stairs, arms and fangs extended, ready to rip and feed on contact. Mama Samm never broke stride but brought a massive left arm up and around li
ke a windshield wiper, intercepting him like a bug in flight and tossing him aside. He tumbled over the railing before I could figure out how to get a psychic hold for a bloodwalk. About five floors down he began screaming as the realization sank in that this was an express trip to the first floor without any stops in between.

  Then the lights went out.

  Mama Samm never stopped climbing stairs.

  Irena screamed.

  "You okay, baby?" Mama Samm asked without stopping.

  There was a low-pitched growling sound. And another scream. The second scream didn't sound like a girl's. But then, it didn't sound so much like a man's, either.

  The smell of blood burst in the dark but I couldn't orientate on a specific target to bloodwalk.

  Mama Samm kept climbing.

  In the near silence between our footfalls I thought I could hear a stealthy, padding sound. And a quiet chuffing, as if something were moving ahead of us in the darkness. I opened my noncorporeal mouth to ask a question and then intuitively closed it. Tried to listen, instead.

  Fourteen floors later I felt us slip a little.

  Mama Samm took a steadier grip on the railing and slowed her climb, feeling the step ahead before planting her foot. Two floors above we encountered speed bumps.

  Soft, squishy, fabric-enclosed speed bumps leaking fluids. Littered over two landings and a dozen stairs. Past those we picked up the pace, again.

  I asked.

  >Don't you worry about Miss Irena. You just worry about whether I'm too late to save the res' of the world. And don' distract me till I'm done!<

  I lost count of the steps.

  I couldn't tell if Mama Samm was counting or not: our massive mojo mama was like a machine, clumping up stairs without regard to fatigue, pain, or the myriad of obstacles placed in our way.

  She only stumbled once.

  A concussive blast—I don't know any equivalent word for the feeling that pulsed down the stairwell, shook the building, and scrambled our minds like two eggs in a frying pan—seemed to vibrate everything down to the cellular level. And maybe beyond. For a moment I saw shadow places, vast caverns and deep abysses. There were memories of ancient books and recent battles, a life divided by threes and mirrored doors between worlds. A line of Russian nesting dolls stretching off into a light . . .

  Get out of my mind!

  It was more than brute force lifting me up and tossing me out. I was momentarily mingled with memories: I was threshed, sifted, and blown back to a dark corner in the box in Sammathea D'Arbonne's head. I huddled there, dazed and disoriented from the kabalistic kaleidoscope of images and impressions that had shot through the nebula of my consciousness like a laser light show.

  I finally offered as she began to stagger up the stairs, once more.

  >It's not my privacy that's at issue here,< she answered back, >but your own safety. There are places in my mind—and places to where my mind could take you—that you would not survive!< She sent a couple of images, glimpses actually: in one I was vacant-eyed and drooling like a thirty-something newborn; in the other my flesh had burned to a crispy husk starting from the inside out. I scrunched a little deeper back into the corner of the mental box she was keeping me in.

  >Now hush up and don't distract me! Laveau has unleashed a massive amount of power up there. I may be too late but it feels like she's not finished so I'm gonna have to go with that!<

  And with that, she mounted the top of the stairs and threw herself against the access door to the roof.

  There was a blue flash and we were back outside, in the open.

  Some of the darkness from the stairwell followed us and swirled beside our legs. The fog may "come in on little cat feet" but there was nothing small or dainty about the feline paws that shadowed Mama Samm's stride.

  A black panther seemed to coalesce out of the shadows. It regarded us with wide, golden eyes before turning and slipping past into more darkness around the two-tiered base of the roof.

  No time to speculate on puss sans boots: Marie Laveau stood above us on the elevated, second level.

  At least I assumed it was the former Queen of New Orleans: who else would be up here? But all of the accounts concerning Marie pegged her as a great beauty while this creature looked like a child's stick-figure drawing of a scarecrow.

  Mama Samm seemed to recognize her, but she wasn't wasting time on long, lingering looks. She had turned her gaze upward and, of course, I could look nowhere else.

  There was an opening in the clouds above One Shell Square.

  Somewhere up there, above the upside-down purple mountain majesties of cumulonimbus incus, the sun was still shining. At least that was my assumption based on the time of day and the continuance of the laws of physics. However, the sickly green glow that leaked from the center of the collar formation over the roof looked more like leprous moonlight or a toxic waste spill from beyond the stars.

  Even as we watched, a wraith of cloud material began turning in the opposite direction of the collar's lazy rotation, forming a hollow nub of blue-gray mist shot with lightning. It was pointed, like a gigantic, snub-nosed .38, back down at the exact spot on the roof where the scarecrow woman stood over a smoldering mound of flesh and hair.

  Mama Samm took a step forward and the scarecrow whirled, brandishing an elongated, floppy object in her left hand.

 

  My hostess ignored me, reaching into her purse and producing a fistful of rosaries. With a couple of smooth, practiced motions, she pulled the loops apart and scattered the beads like a sower sowing seeds round about.

  The scarecrow made a series of complicated gestures and the wind from the storm carried snatches of fevered mutterings to our ears. Sparks erupted all around us, snapping and rolling as the beads carried kinetic energies in all directions. Mama Samm's hand was back in her giant purse and emerging with some sort of crucifix.

  There was more to it than that . . . a pair of hands, either folded in prayer or open in something like supplication . . . a ring . . . I couldn't be sure for, while I was using Mama Samm's eyes, I was focusing beyond her hands at the tableau on the elevated part of the roof.

  Where the bundle of hair and skin was standing up.

  And up!

  Grigori Yefimovich Rasputin was six foot five back when he was alive. Death had done nothing to make him look shorter. And, at the moment, he was totally naked so he wasn't wearing platforms to achieve the effect. The inches (or centimeters) he was missing were to the horizontal rather than the vertical so, still "Mr. Big" in the public sense if not the private for now.

  "What are you doing, Marie?" Mama Samm called into the wind.

  "You know what I am doing," came the reply. The voice was ancient, screechy, like a rusted antique hinge. "You have read the book!"

  "'Loathsome Cthulhu rose then from the deeps and raged with exceeding great fury against the Earth Guardians,'" Mama Samm quoted from black memory. "'And They bound his venomous claws with potent spells and sealed him up within the City of R'lyeh, wherein beneath the waves he shall sleep death's dream until the end of the Aeon.'"

  "Don't stop," Laveau taunted. "Finish the prophecy! 'Beyond the Gate dwell now the Old Ones; not in the spaces known unto men but in the angles betwixt them. Outside Earth's plane They linger and ever awaite the time of Their return; for the Earth has known Them and shall know Them in time yet to come.'"

  "The ravings of a madman!"

  Marie Laveau nodded and grinned like an idiot child. "The Mad Arab, Abdul Alhazred! By his writings, through the holy Al Azif do we know our destiny!"

  "Yeah? Well, here's my destiny . . ." Mama Samm gripped her odd relic in her right hand as she rolled up her sleeve with her left. ". . . I'm here to see you ain't be opening up any more gates and I'll just be punching the snooze alarm for any Old Ones who've gotten a little leaky of late."

 
"Old Ones?" the scarecrow echoed. "Oh, I have no intention of opening any more gates or doors or paths for any of the Star Spawn . . ."

  As fascinating as it was to witness thaumaturgic trash talk between two hoodoo mamas, I was still keeping my eye on Mr. Monk. And that almost caused me to miss the overhead show.

  Up in the clouds, the collar formation had become a vortex, spinning counterclockwise to the nub, which was elongating into a funnel of darkness. It groped toward the roof like a tentacle, the pseudopodia of a living, sentient thing. The staretz was standing, his arms raised, stretching toward the funnel as if trying to grasp a kite string . . .

  . . . or take hold of the leash of a wild animal.

  " . . . He Who Lies Dreaming," Laveau continued, "He Who Will Rise Again, already dwells on this side of the Gate. His Dreams slough away and His time draws near! The Deep Ones have returned and attend Him. They prepare the way for His return! As I prepare a new palace and throne where He will awaken and rule and summon those He deems necessary to restore the Old Ways! The Ancient Ways!"

  "Honey, you ain't preparing shit!" Mama Samm shot back. "Your mojo is gone! Used up! It's plain to see you've got nothin' left!"

  I interrupted.

  "My work is done!" Laveau cackled as Mama Samm finally looked up. "I have done all that I have been commanded! This world will pass away and He will usher in a new kingdom! A new heaven and a new earth!"

  And for a moment I caught a glimpse of a nightmare.

  A vision . . . a protomemory . . . a searing peek at the hell dimension that had been this earth—and many others—aeons before the coming of the dinosaurs. When then-ancient beings that fancied themselves gods, fell from the skies—fell upon the earth as predators fall upon their prey. Creatures of such immense scale and grotesque distortion that nothing in recorded Terran taxonomy provides perspective or adequate reference point for comprehension or understanding. Sanity is challenged, troubled, perhaps even impaired by exposure to the very imagery of these things. Their existence . . .

  And their hungers . . .

  Whatever rift was opened, whatever allowed this brief sidewise glance at the unspeakable horrors that once were and sought to be again: it blinked. And I reached out with noncorporeal hands to grasp that cosmic eyelid for another searing look.