by J-F. Dubeau
To his credit, Ezekiel took her seriously, stowing his enthusiasm for the subject in order to better explain. “Destiny doesn’t undermine free will. That’s one of the weird things you learn getting your fortune told enough times. Free will is the instrument of destiny.”
“That makes zero sense. If I know that by crossing a street, I’ll get hit by a truck, I won’t cross the street. Free will beats predestination.” She shook her head. “What does this have to do with you trying to kill Mr. Peterson?”
“We’ll get to that. Ever wonder where the cliché of fortune-tellers giving either vague insights or predictions only about momentous events comes from? You can’t predict something that won’t happen once it’s predicted. So destiny, the destiny we can see, only describes those events that won’t change.”
“You can always change events,” Venus stated in defiance.
“You’re not listening. I’m talking about your own personal decision. What if crossing the road and being hit by a truck was the only way to save your best friend? You would cross that street, get hit by that truck, and you would do so of your own free will. That’s destiny. The result of a great calculation that encompasses all possible variables including—no, featuring—our personalities and individual decisions. The big book where all future events are written is the entire universe, and our actions are the words that make up the story. And a fortune-teller can read that book.”
“And Harry Peterson?”
“Harry Peterson will die in Saint-Ferdinand. I wanted to avert that, but I couldn’t go against the wishes of Abraham. I don’t have it in me to do so.”
“Destiny,” Venus said in grudging understanding.
“Destiny.”
They drove a little longer in silence. Venus sensed that she had only scratched the surface of this weird man and, at the same time, had discovered another layer to Saint-Ferdinand’s history. A tragic one. The contrast between how excited Ezekiel had been talking about magic and his sudden mourning of a friend who had yet to die made Venus thoughtful. Any talk of the supernatural, she supposed, contained these contradictions.
“How do you know about Mr. Peterson’s fortune, then?” she asked, hoping to distract Ezekiel from his own dark thoughts.
“Eh,” he said, and smiled. “A circus is a funny place. The moment you find out the owner’s girlfriend can predict the future, you start asking questions. Doesn’t take long for things to get dark. Everyone winds up knowing when and how they’re going to die. The gallows humor sets in pretty quick after that.”
“So, what? Impending death is like a joke to you?”
“Yeah. Maybe it makes us monsters, but we had fun with it. At least until it started to become real.”
The circus performer shrugged, keeping his eyes on the road but his sight clearly elsewhere. While Venus might have been put off by the morbid amusement he described, Ezekiel seemed nostalgic. There was something else, though, and she couldn’t put her finger on it.
“So, Mr. Peterson . . . ”
“We knew he’d die in Saint-Ferdinand. In the nest of a thing that eats souls. The lion’s den. I can live with one of my friends dying. I’ve buried enough of them. It’s the eternal torment part I can’t swallow.”
The words struck a nerve. Penny’s mother. Was that what had happened to her? What had happened to all of Sam Finnegan’s victims? That would explain why the old man had gone mad. Sending dozens of souls to a literal hell would be enough to unhinge anyone. Venus had been close enough to the god that she knew such a thing was possible.
“Who else?” Venus wondered aloud. “Did you know how my friend’s mother would die? Do you know how my parents die?”
“Nathan might know about the others. Katrina, she definitely knows. I only know about Harry and . . . I know about you.”
Venus stopped breathing. Why would he know about her death? Was her demise so noteworthy that it had been important for a stranger to learn it? She must have made a noise or given some sort of outward sign of her distress because Ezekiel turned his head from the road and put a hand on her shoulder.
“You okay there?”
“What . . . what do you know about my death?”
“What do I know?” he answered, putting his hand back on the wheel, his knowing smile making a comeback to his lips. “I know you don’t die.”
RANDY
RANDY MCKENZIE COULD remember the first time his father had introduced him to the stranger things of the world. It was a day filled with wonder and curiosity. A moment in time where a young Randy had first discovered that there were cracks in reality, some only big enough to look through and some that could swallow him whole. If one knew where or, more important, how to find these cracks, they could interact with the other side. They could reach in and pull things out. And if they knew the proper tricks, they could wedge themselves into those cracks and break them wide open.
Unfortunately, that day wasn’t one where father and son bonded over a coming-of-age experience. Randy’s father hadn’t walked up to him, tossed him the keys to the family car, and told him he was old enough to learn.
Instead Neil McKenzie, quiet and forbidding, had given his other son, Paul, a stack of notes and instructions and commanded him to learn. The younger brother had refused, and the discussion quickly devolved into an argument between the two. Meanwhile, Randy had leafed through the notes. A pile of mismatched papers. Most were scribbled in Neil’s handwriting, but others, older and more yellowed, were written in a script he didn’t recognize. Wherever these instructions, this mythology, had come from, they immediately took hold of young Randy’s imagination.
Since then, he’d learned so much from that stack of aging paper. In fact, he’d transcribed most of it in order to preserve the information it contained. Over the years, the medical examiner had animated dead animals, spoken with the dead, and performed a few other parlor tricks. His dabbling in the dark arts led him to study medicine in the first place, and his particular set of skills was largely responsible for his grades and academic success.
Yet, despite the power he had, Randy had never been able to leverage it to help find the Saint-Ferdinand Killer. He couldn’t interrogate the spirits of the victims, since all who died within reach of the god had had their souls consumed. It was frustrating.
Walking around Saint-Ferdinand in Penelope LaForest’s skin, however, he was able to see a much more disturbing truth. He could have found the god had he dared to simply dip his head into the realm of the dead. A dangerous prospect to be sure, but one that would have yielded all the answers. For this was a god of hate and death, and the world beyond life was its domain.
A disturbing aspect of using someone else’s body wasn’t just how ill fitting the limbs and bones were. Randy also shared Penny’s brain, borrowing neurons and synapses to think. The magic tricks he used didn’t ignore biology; they hijacked it. Penny was still attached, still tethered, to her body. There were moments when Randall couldn’t formulate thoughts because she was using what he needed.
The final and most disturbing problem, though, was with his eyes. They could not stop seeing. When Penny’s eyelids were open, he saw through her flesh. The light of the living world hit her retinas and sent signals to her brain, where Randy’s consciousness would pick them up. But whenever he closed her eyelids, even if it was just to blink, it was the other world he saw, and it was nothing like he’d expected.
Terrifying, seductive whispers beckoned him to leave his host body. He knew not to listen, that these were the temptations of the god calling to him. He also realized that the god wasn’t in his niece’s backyard shed at all. Or rather, what was locked up there amounted to the tip of a limb poking through a hole in reality. It was merely dipping a toe into the sea of the living. The real god was here, with the dead, and it was immense. Randall was like a mite crawling on the deity’s skin. The world around him bristled at his presence, aware of him but unable to swat him away, though the intention could be felt all around.
This was Randy’s experience all the way to the circus. Driving was especially difficult. Every blink reminded him how insignificant he was, how precarious his situation had become, and how little any of it mattered when faced with a power so vast and formless. Through luck, urgency, and the empty night roads, the medical examiner, clothed in the flesh of a teenage girl, made it to Cicero’s Circus.
In the dark, with only moonlight to guide him, Randy made his way between the striped tents of the circus. He was greeted by an old popcorn machine that had traveled with the circus for decades. The mountainous big top, looming overhead like a castle keep, blocked out half the night sky. In the cold indigo night, a square of warm amber invited him into a small tent.
“Hi, Nathan,” Randy said with Penny’s voice.
“Desperate times, Doctor?” An old man, sitting behind a fold-out desk at the back of the tent, lifted his head to greet his visitor. He smiled, showing off a hole where a tooth had recently been knocked out.
“Desperate measures.”
“Didn’t know you could do that particular trick. Kinda thing that would have come in handy in the past.”
“Just learned it today myself. From a ghost.”
Cicero raised an eyebrow and broadened his smile. “Full of tricks, aren’t they? The dead, I mean.”
“You sent for me, Nathan. I don’t have to tell you I went to great pains to be here.” Randy gestured at the body he wore, self-conscious of his hands, careful not to touch Penny. “I would have rather done this over the phone. What do you want?”
“We’ve failed, Dr. McKenzie. Katrina’s prophecies are all coming true, one at a time. The god is released and will be free soon enough. Harry Peterson is out of commission, and Marguerite’s boy is lurking around the village, planning God knows what. It’s all playing out as she said it would.”
A wave of despair washed through Randy. At long last they had come to the end. His heart was in free fall as the meaning of Cicero’s words calcified in his mind. A net of sympathy saved him from being overwhelmed by despair. The prophecies were true, but someone understood his pain. Penny, still clinging to the back of his mind, understood.
“So . . . Paul?”
“Is dead, Dr. McKenzie. Or close enough.” Cicero gestured in a callous, almost dismissive manner. “He knew what fate had waiting for him, and knowing your brother, he probably charged in like some noble idiot. What a waste.”
A pang of anger, shared by the original owner of the body, flared up but was immediately shut down by Randy. With disquieting efficiency, he compartmentalized his grief into a neat package that he would deal with at a later time. Cicero wasn’t detached because he didn’t care; he simply had bigger worries weighing on him. The medical examiner understood.
“What about you, then?” Randy asked.
“Me? I’ve made my peace with what the next day holds. I’m far more concerned about what’s in store for the rest of the world if we can’t stop this thing from escaping. We’ve had so much time and we’ve accomplished so little. Help me out, Doctor. Tell me there’s something we can do in the next few hours. Tell me we can save some lives.”
Randy scratched Penny’s chin, finding smooth skin instead of his unshaven stubble. He’d had a lot of time to think about this problem. Days spent in jail, avoiding conversation with a madman and reading bad books and magazines. His mind had often wandered, straining to find ways to avoid the inevitable.
“I think maybe we can contain it.”
“Again?” Cicero sounded doubtful.
“You know how ancient cultures dealt with their own gods?”
“Pyramids, mausoleums, grand tombs meant to keep their horror from escaping. That sort of thing.”
“Yes, but that’s not the common thread,” Randy explained. “I’ve always thought that the answer was vessels. Getting the creature to adopt the same limitations we have.”
“Go on . . . ,” Cicero’s eyes narrowed in partial understanding.
“This!” Randall waved at the young woman’s body he wore. “We trap it in human flesh.”
“Ambitious, but how do we keep it in there?”
Randy had no answer to that question. He knew Cicero had little interest in yet another imprisonment scheme for the god. The creature, which, through too many decades, had become his nemesis. While the god of hate and death craved revenge against Sam Finnegan, Nathan Cicero was the one who had invented the rules that had kept it bound. Randy had no doubt that it was thoughts of the circus owner’s death that fueled the god’s rage.
“That, I don’t know,” Randy admitted.
“Neil’s notes talk of a way to destroy it. He’d been very close to a solution when we last spoke. I’d hoped you’d have figured it out by now.”
“The only thing I have is what you already know: ‘god-touched metal.’ A weapon imbued by a god to kill a god. Dad spent his whole life looking for something like that, and it got him nowhere. He and Harry came close in Scotland, but that didn’t pan out.”
“A god-touched weapon. Might as well go into battle with unicorn horns and seven-league boots.”
He was right. There was no such thing. And if there ever had been, it was lost to history. Randy had long theorized that what his father and the other Craftsmen had been looking for was another god, or a being of similar power. From that they could forge their weapon and slay their god once and for all.
“I have it,” Penny’s lips said without Randy working them. In fact, the medical examiner’s very essence was being pushed aside by the teenage girl’s sense of urgency.
“I have a knife soaked in that monster’s blood,” she continued. “It cut Audrey’s ghost like she was real flesh. Will that do? Can we kill that thing with it?”
Randy felt her anger literally shoving him aside. His soul was being pulled back to his body, like elastic that had been stretched to the breaking point and was about to snap. The last thing he heard was Cicero answer with a rare hint of hope.
“Perhaps not, but it’s as fine a start as any.”
CROWLEY
“WHY DIDN’T YOU tell me about Sasha?”
When Daniel stormed into the station, it was obvious to Stephen Crowley that his son was distraught. Regardless, he was glad to see the boy.
The inspector had considered Dr. Hazelwood’s advice. Get his hand looked at, get some sleep, and figure out his priorities. Of course, seeking medical attention for his wound was out of the question. He couldn’t trust Randy or afford to drive an hour out of town to get stitches. Erica had done a good enough job bandaging him up. His maimed hand could wait another day.
Sleep had also been postponed until later. The pain in his hand made it hard to keep his eyes closed, and again, he couldn’t afford the time. He’d already wasted days sitting in his office, looking at case files and trying to get into the mind of the creature he was hunting. Staring at a map of Saint-Ferdinand and the locations of all the murders. Those of Sam Finnegan, of course, but also the more recent bodies found. It all seemed like a dead end, but something in his gut told him that he was getting close. That all he needed was one final piece of the puzzle and he’d find his god.
Or perhaps get a lucky break like he had in the Finnegan case.
All that remained was to figure out his priorities, which he was about to do until his son asked about his girlfriend.
“I didn’t think you needed to know yet,” said the inspector.
“Didn’t need to know? This is my girlfriend, Dad! Not just some girl. Three years! Three years we’ve been dating. That’s most of high school! She gets murdered and you don’t even think to tell me?”
Stephen kept his cool. The boy had the right of it: he should have told him. But how? Even after eighteen years of experience delivering bad news to the people of this village, Crowley still couldn’t get used to the idea of telling someone their loved ones were dead. He simply wasn’t wired for it. And how could he deliver that kind of news to his own son? The inspector
felt compassion for Daniel, but there was just no way to properly communicate it. As far as Crowley was concerned, the best way to deal with grief was to sit quietly with a beer, watch the sunset, and wait for it to pass. Dr. Hazelwood would have a field day with that one, but it had worked when his father had died, and it had worked when Marguerite had left. He simply couldn’t deal with the crying, the yelling, and all the hysterics.
“You’re right,” Crowley conceded. “I should have told you. I should have told you when I found out and I should have told you how it happened.”
Daniel swallowed, shaking his head. When had he ever admitted to Daniel that he was wrong about something important? “How . . . how did she die?”
“Something similar to Gabrielle LaForest. Less brutal but just as calculated. I don’t think you need too many details.”
“Was it the god?”
It was the inspector’s turn to be taken aback. How long had Daniel known about this? How much did he know? Had he been snooping around his affairs, spying on him?
“Who told you about that?”
“Was it the god, Dad?”
“Who told you?” Crowley snapped.
Daniel was unflappable. When had the boy learned to stand up to him like that?
“Dan! This is important! Who told you about a god?”
The inspector slammed his hand onto his desk, a typical gesture for him to underline his frustration. He’d often do it when chewing out an officer. The loud bang was meant to shock and intimidate. This time, however, he was met with a flare of pain up his arm, and a look of disgust and pity from his son.
“Jesus, Dad . . . your hand.”
The force of the blow had reopened the wound. As Stephen raised the extremity to his eyes, he could see red blossoms of blood seeping through the gauze.
“Well, shit,” he said, wincing at the throbbing in his fingers.
“What happened?”
Crowley considered telling the truth. Laying it all out, from the circumstances that had led to his wife leaving him all the way to how he’d gotten in a fight with an elderly circus owner and lost. Perhaps his son would even help him find the god.