The Wrong Goodbye tc-2

by Chris F. Holm

  “Why are you telling me all this? I don’t believe for a second you’ve even the slightest affection for me, and yet here you are, pulling back the curtain when you probably should’ve sent me packing. So what gives? What’s your angle?”

  Dumas sighed and ran a hand through his thinning hair. For the first time since I’d arrived, he looked concerned. “My angle? Same as it ever was, Sammy. I’m a businessman, pure and simple, and as such, I have to protect my interests. And right now, Interest Numero Uno is keeping my ass off the white-hat’s hit-list. I don’t know if you’ve been keeping score, but it’s open season on the Fallen out there. Our Chosen brothers are spoiling for a fight, and they’ll jump on any excuse to send a little wrath our way. Normally, that’s no concern a mine. I run a quiet operation here —keep my head down and my profile low. Only all the sudden here comes Danny Young with a yen to misbehave, and the more ruckus he makes, the worse things’re gonna get for me. See, whether or not he’s operating on my behalf, the fact remains he was once in my employ, and as such was privy to all manner of sensitive information —information that, left uncontained, could lead the feather-and-harp brigade right back to me. So when you wandered in from the desert asking questions about all things Danny, I figured shit —why not point Sammy in the right direction, see if maybe he can catch him? He does, and that’s two problems off my plate. Problem Two is you, in case you ain’t been keeping up.”

  “Hold up a sec. You say you wanna point me in the right direction —does that mean you know where Danny is?”

  “Would that I did, Sammy; it’d save us both a hell of a lot of trouble. But I’m pretty sure I do know what he’s planning, and more importantly, what’ll happen if he succeeds. If that happens, the stupid bastard’s gonna unleash a disaster of Biblical proportions —one that’ll make my skimmer’s slip in San Francisco and the subsequent destruction look like a goddamn kitten sneezing.”

  “OK then, spill: what the hell is Danny playing at?”

  Dumas answered my question with one of his own: “Tell me, Sammy —what do you know about the Brethren?”

  25.

  “The Brethren?” I repeated. “Not much. I mean, I’ve heard the stories. A group of Collectors who, centuries ago, banded together and found a way to break hell’s bond of servitude. Of course, they’re nothing but a fairy tale —a Collector’s pipe dream.”

  “A fairy tale,” Dumas said, smiling. “Right.”

  “I miss something funny?”

  “Funny? No, not too,” he said. “Come on —this little tour of ours ain’t done.”

  Dumas led me deeper into the cavern. The corridor, so broad at its outset, dwindled until it was more fissure than tunnel, and could no longer accommodate the intermittent torches that had marked the way thus far. Dumas snatched the last of them from the wall —a concession to my human eyes, no doubt —and took me by the elbow, dragging me reluctantly into the narrow, winding pass.

  The walls pressed close as, sideways, we squeezed through. A time or two, stone outcrops dug into my back and chest as I forced myself through a particularly narrow spot or around a tricky corner, Dumas’s light all but disappearing ahead of me as, despite his apparent girth, he pressed onward without incident. When that happened, I was left alone with my thoughts, my fears, my shallow hitching breath —all three of them threatening to spiral out of control and leave me panicked, trapped, damned to be stuck here in the darkness until the clock ran out and the bugbeast came to claim me. But that thought alone was enough to keep me moving, and eventually, the passage widened. Not much, mind you —the walls in this new, smaller chamber were maybe three feet across, and the ceiling here was low enough I had to stoop —but after the sidewalk-crack we’d slipped through to get here, it may as well have been Montana.

  As I cleared the fissure, brushing filth from my lapels, Dumas turned to me and smiled. For a moment, with the torchlight glinting off his eyes and yellowed teeth, he looked every bit the demon that he was. “Welcome to the monkey house,” he said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “The monkey house. This is where I stash the Collectors in my employ. Out of the way, so they can fling their poo or whatever it is they do without troubling my Fallen employees or bothering the clientele.”

  I looked around. By the torchlight, it looked like the cavern continued on another seven feet or so and then terminated. Three low openings, each shored up with rotted four-by-fours, extended outward from the room on either side —two left, one right. I ducked my head to see inside the one beside me. It was no larger than a coat closet, and apart from a heap of blankets in one corner, it was empty.

  “They’re rarely occupied,” called Dumas, his stentorian voice echoing off the close stone walls. “Save for Danny, none of my Collectors ever had much interest in sticking ’round once the job was done. Not all of them are as eager as Danny was to sample the product, so most of them are outta here as soon as the soul they brought’s done processing. But Danny was another matter. Danny liked to stick around. I always figured he came back here to fix, that the ramblings on the wall were nothing more than skiminduced delusion. Stuff’s awful to come off of —for your kind in particular —and it’ll fill your head with all manner of wacky shit you’d be hard-pressed to explain once you finally touch down. Truth is, I never thought much of it. But you factor in these ramblings with his interest in watching Psoglav ply his trade and his theft of the Varela soul, and a pattern emerges.” He gestured toward the doorway furthest back. “That’s the one you want. That’s where Danny staked his claim.”

  Once I crawled inside, I could see why. It was bigger by half than the other I’d seen, and set a little ways apart, providing some small measure of privacy. At first, of course, the room was black as pitch, but as Dumas shimmied in behind me, his torch’s light crawled up the walls —first illuminating the bare military cot that took up much of the chamber’s floor, and then the tattered photo of two strangers I presumed were he and Ana that rested on the framework of the door. And as the light climbed toward the ceiling, I realized the walls of Danny’s chamber were covered with writing —writing of all shapes and sizes, in a dozen alphabets and at least twice that many languages. I recognized Arabic and Hebrew, Sanskrit and Akkadian —all scratched onto the wall with charred bits of wood or pointed rock —but most of the tongues were foreign to me. They looked to be the work of a crazy person, with no rhyme or reason to their placement —some scrawled over older snippets, some halted halfway through; some flecked with blood as if the scribe’s hand had split at the effort required to mark the stone. It was hard for me to imagine Danny had done all this. It was hard to imagine anyone could have.

  “What is all this?” I muttered.

  “Folklore, mostly. Tales transcribed centuries ago from the oral tradition. Or, more accurately, fragments of tales. See, these stories were thought lost to your kind, and for good reason —the forces of heaven and hell aligned to purge them from this Earth, for fear of the damage they could cause.”

  “And these stories,” I said, “they’re about the Brethren?”

  “Yes. Most of it’s nonsense, of course —an oblique passing reference, a half-heard conversation written down a hundred years after the fact. But some of them are quite specific. Dates. Places. Descriptions of rites the likes of which I’ve never seen. And it’s the latter, of course, that our Daniel seemed most interested in —they’re the ones writ large across the wall.”

  My eyes settled on one black char inscription scrawled atop all the others, and wrapping around three quarters of the room. The script itself was crude and angular, though if that was Danny’s doing, or the appearance of the language itself, I didn’t know.

  “What is this,” I asked, “Phoenician?”

  “Close,” Dumas replied. “It’s Ancient Aramaic. Predates Biblical Aramaic by nearly five hundred years.”

  “Can you read it?”

  The look he gave me, you’d think I just insulted his mother. “It says: ‘As
the worlds drew thin, the unclean spirit was cleaved, which in turn summoned forth a Deluge that purged the Nine of sin, and cast their bonds of slavery aside.’ Or, you know, something to that effect.”

  “What the fuck is that supposed to mean?”

  Another look, this one like I’m the kid in class who eats the paste. “What does it sound like it means?”

  “It sounds like Danny aims to crack Varela’s soul and wind up a normal boy,” I replied —glib, dismissive.

  Only Dumas didn’t take it that way, which, truth be told, kind of freaked me out. “Yeah, that’s what it sounded like to me, too. Only it don’t say ‘crack,’ it says ‘cleave.’ As in fucking rend asunder.”

  “The hell’s the difference?”

  “The difference, Sam, is all the difference. That shit that went down in San Fran? That was on account of a ‘crack.’ A mean one, yeah —the worst I’ve ever seen —but the soul we cracked was only damaged, not destroyed. I think that Danny’s aiming to destroy Varela’s soul, and that’s a whole other ball of wax. We’re talking split-the-atom bad. Worse, in fact. ’Cause ‘cleave’ ain’t the scariest word up on that wall.”

  “OK, I’ll bite —what is?”

  “Deluge.”

  “Deluge.” Me, playing parrot; skeptical.

  “Yep.”

  “Like, the Deluge? As in Noah and a giant fucking boat?”

  “The very same,” he said. “Well, more or less.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “Meaning I don’t know crap about some bearded jackass collecting zebras or whatever, but there ain’t a civilization worth a damn that doesn’t have a flood myth of some kind. To this day, Hindus tell the tale of Manu, who saved Mankind from the rising waters of an apocalyptic flood. Ancient Mesopotamians had Utnapishtim, a man who survived the Deluge only to be granted eternal life. You people got that Noah deal. Point is, the particulars may not agree, but when you add up everything that does agree, it looks to be that once upon a time there was a bigass flood.”

  “And you’re telling me it was the Brethren and some weird-ass soul-cleaving mojo that caused it? What about the whole ‘God sent the flood to purge the Earth of Man’s wickedness’ thing?”

  “Hey, I ain’t sayin’ for sure that’s not how it went down. Like I said, this shit’s been buried deep by the good guys and the bad guys both, and the only folks who’ve got the juice to answer that are like a mile above my pay grade. But it seems to me if your precious God sent the flood to wash away Man’s wickedness, he did a pretty fucking lousy job. And as far as the whole soul-mojo angle, it’s not as crazy as it sounds. All magic worth a damn requires sacrifice —an infusion of life’s essence to get the gears a-turnin’. That’s why the mystics of your species always use blood to kick-start their little parlor tricks. Sometimes, sure, animal sacrifice will do, but you and I both know human blood is where it’s at if you really wanna get anything done. And a feat of the kind we’re talking about —breaking the bonds of eternal damnation, dropping off the radar of heaven and hell both —that’d require more juice than even a genocide’s worth of blood could muster. That’d require real power. Power like what’d be unleashed if you destroyed a human soul.”

  “Why Varela, though? Why’s the soul got to be unclean?”

  “Could be because it’s hell’s bond he’s trying to break. Could be it doesn’t have to be at all. Probably Danny’s just going by what he’s read —which ain’t the worst plan, since the Brethren seemed to pull it off.”

  “So you’re saying this could work? Danny does his little song and dance and busts open Varela and he’s free?”

  “Maybe. Maybe not. Seems to me it doesn’t matter —what matters is Danny thinks it will. Once he shatters that soul, it won’t matter to the millions he’ll be killing whether his hoodoo was successful.”

  “But it can’t be that easy to destroy a soul, can it? I mean, it’s not like he can just whack it with a hammer, or every time some yahoo thrill-seeker’s parachute failed to open, boom —apocalypse.”

  “True enough,” Dumas conceded. “Only a demonforged instrument would be capable of inflicting the kind of damage Danny’s after. And I’ll admit, they’re hard to come by. But the boy’s already gotten this far —you think we ought to leave it up to chance he falters now?”

  It was a fair point. Actually, from where I was sitting, it was a seriously unfair point, but given that I’m damned and all, that made me more inclined to believe it. I looked for any sign Dumas was putting me on with all of this, but if he was, it didn’t show. And truth be told, it jibed with what I’d seen these past few days; after all, the bug-monster’d said, “Were it not for the Great Truce, for the rules to which we three agreed, I would not abide the Nine at all. But now it seems that truce is crumbling, and with it my patience for your games. I assure you I will not abide a tenth.” So it sounded to me like the Nine and the Brethren were one and the same. And that Danny was gunning to be number ten. Only Captain Crawly had it in his head I was the one causing problems, which didn’t really bode well for me —particularly since I still didn’t have the faintest idea who the hell he was, or how he fitted in to all of this. And the rotten cherry on top of this shit sundae was if I didn’t stop him, not only would I wind up chillin’ in oblivion, but millions of people would die horribly. How’d that old poem go? “Fear death by water.”

  Too fucking right, I thought.

  “So the Brethren are real, and Danny’s obsessed with them, and he stole Varela’s soul to recreate an ancient mystical rite that, if he’s successful, would bring about a second Great Flood and wipe out civilization as we know it?”

  “That’s about the size of it, yeah.”

  “Shit,” I said.

  “Yeah,” Dumas replied. “Shit.”

  “So —what now?” I asked.

  “What’re you asking me for? You know what I know. You wanna stop the guy, you’re gonna hafta figure out the rest all by yourself.”

  “I thought we both wanted to stop the guy.”

  “Yeah, and I just gave you all the help I can.”

  “Says the guy who knew about Danny’s caveman ramblings from the get-go and did fuck-all to stop him going rogue.”

  “You gotta understand, Sammy, coming down off a skim, you tap into something. Something greater than yourself. Something greater than the soul you’re skimming off of. It’s like, for a little while, you’re tapped into the whole of human experience or some shit. Past, present, future —who knows what the fuck you’re gonna see or why? Call it chance, call it the hand of God —from where I’m sitting, they’re the same damn thing. But whatever you call it, I just figured that’s where Danny got all this —and hell, maybe it was. I didn’t think for a second he understood a word of it. Yeah, maybe I fucked up, but if I start poking around now and then the shit goes down, it only increases the odds it all leads back to me —which is precisely what I’m trying to avoid. So sorry, champ, but you’re on your own. But hey —there’s a chance you’ll come through and save the world. A very, very narrow chance.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Don’t mention it,” he said, and then he smiled. “Hey, I think you and me, we just had a breakthrough in our relationship. Hashing things out all civil-like —me not killing you, you not killing me. Feels good. Feels right. Feels like maybe we oughta hug it out.”

  He spread his arms. I shook my head.

  “Suit yourself. How ’bout a word of advice instead, on account of how we’re such good friends now.”

  Friends my ass, I thought, but what I said instead was: “I’m listening.”

  “If it were me tracking Danny down, I’d be trying my damndest to figure out where worlds draw thin.”

  “Yeah. That’d be more helpful if I had the tiniest idea what the fuck it even meant.”

  Dumas shrugged like what’re you gonna do? “Hey, you know as well as anyone that the whole of Mankind’s prophecies and scripture amount to nothing more than a ten-thousand-year-old
game of telephone. Half the time, they don’t mean shit at all, and the other half–”

  But before he finished his thought, there was a muffled boom from somewhere overhead, and the very cave around us shifted, raining dust upon us both and forcing me to steady myself with one hand against the wall. The movement was unthinking, reflexive, and of course it was my bum arm I reached out with; when my palm connected with the chamber wall, a jolt of queasy, white-hot pain shot up my arm, settling in my shoulder and throbbing like an impacted molar.

  Another boom, right on the heels of the first. This one loosed more than dust —the darkness above rattled as small rocks bounced off the walls on the way down, and then a not-so-small rock whizzed past my head in the darkness, parting my hair and damn near doing the same to my skull before burying its pointy self six inches into the dirt at my feet.

  “The hell?” I said. “Did Psoglav–”

  “No,” Dumas replied, his face set in a frown. “If Psoglav had cracked a soul, he’da brought the whole damn cave down. And whatever that was, it came from outside.”

  “It couldn’t have been the storm,” I said, thinking aloud, “lightning doesn’t make the fucking ground shake. Besides, it sounded like a goddamn bomb went off. It sounded like…”

  Dumas watched me talk myself out. Then he supplied the same words my brain had. “An angel’s wrath? That what you were gonna say?”

  I said nothing, my mouth moving for a second like that of a dying fish before I took notice and closed it. Dumas was glaring at me now, and the frown that graced his face deepened into something harsher, angrier, more sinister. His squat, round frame seemed to swell until he dominated the narrow room, and his eyes raged with black fire. “You did this.”