I don’t remember ever being so heartsick, so ill with someone else’s sin. I’m exhausted, I realize. Whittled down to an ache. And every time I shut my eyes, there are bodies laid out like plates on a table, dead because someone thought it was amusing—or worse, because no one noticed they were there. Used, abused, ground down into food, or raw material. An entire charnel house steeped in pointless casualties. At least the ghouls—
No. Fuck.
The lie unlaces itself from my thoughts, presents itself as what it is: a crude excuse for my complicity, just another way to get through the day. I run the coin over my knuckles, metal glimmering in sinuous waves, hoping to find absolution in repetition. A muscle in my cheek twangs. I don’t like how guilt feels.
The coin tumbles through another circuit.
Silence, but for the sound of the patient in the other bed, wheezing through an uneasy sleep, an orchestra of acute pneumonia. No answers there.
“Like you’re even real gold.” I bite down on the coin.
It isn’t. Or, at least, it no longer is, the material altered by the metaphysical. Memories, until now an indistinct aftertaste, burst across my tongue. The alloy foams and fizzes, dissolving; a stink of lye whirlpooling into my lungs, chemical burn that swells the throat, pricks at my eyes until they water. I spit phlegm over the side of my bed, globs of green-yellow infection; scrape the roof of my mouth with my tongue, again and again, but the flavor sticks.
Briefly, the amygdala coquets with the idea of panic. Genetic memory is clear: that taste is poison. But common sense counters with a quick rebuttal, gleefully highlighting the fact I’m too well and truly fucked to do anything except stay horizontal and accept the inevitable. And besides, why did I bite something covered in someone else’s blood?
The bitterness continues to funnel down my throat, a metallic warmth invading capillaries and digestive tract. Fuck it. At least I had a last meal. People have died under worse circumstances. I’ve died under worse circumstances. As far as these things go, everything’s coming up slightly-better-than-everyday-Rupert.
Feeling dramatically better, I flick my attention up to the ceiling and map animal shapes to water stains.
But the end never comes. Instead, its antipode swaggers up, a truly phenomenal itch, one that spiders across my sinews and rappels down my spine and sides, worming into fractures and misaligned muscles: cellular repair sped-up into an exquisite torture. I buck as my ribs slot together. It hurts like a bad marriage, a slow death exacerbated by the faith that the end goal is axiomatically better than any alternative.
I miss morphine.
Still, what goes up must come down, and even eternity has an expiry date. My torment ends, somewhere between the past and I’m-going-to-pee-myself-screaming. I inhale shuddering gouts of air, soaked to the molecule with sweat; trembling bone and skin so raw that the fibers of my hospital gown grate like razorwire. The fact that I’m whole again, fresh-fleshed and fully functional, feels like a participation trophy, rather than any miracle of royal mercy.
I swing my legs from the bed, picking the IV drip from my arm. Air-conditioning billows noisily, a death rattle not dissimilar from the respiration of my bedmate, glacial against my bare calves.
“I guess it’s something,” I tell the indifferent quiet as I waddle stiff-legged between cupboards and drawers, rummaging for my passport, wallet. I find both. I also find someone else’s clothes, a stash of fresh twenties, and car keys.
Everything gets requisitioned, of course. You can’t save a universe without stealing a few cars.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
“SORRY, FRIEND.”
I stroke a hand along the lithe lines of the car, moonlight flashing silver across the gunmetal chassis, feeling like I’m saying goodbye to the woman of my dreams all over again. I’m not generally a vehicle guy, but there are exceptions to everything. The RX-7 I’ve commandeered is exquisite, better than new, almond-pale leather and voice controls, a stereo system with an operatic bass, an engine that croons.
Unfortunately, where I intend to go, it’s just a useless chunk of gorgeous metal. I keep at the ruse for a while nonetheless, driving in aimless patterns around Waterloo station until the fuel light winks a warning. Only then do I park and step out into the time-honored existential dilemma: to keep the car or to not keep the car? That is the fucking question.
I keep the keys, just in case. I pat the hood one last time, forlorn, and slink out of the alley. Central London is beautiful at four thirty in the morning: buildings glazed silver by the omnipresent drizzle; street lamps pooling golden on the glistening cobblestones; the dark waters of the Thames, jewelled, strange; no drunken milieu to mar the composition of glass and old Georgian architecture.
Just me and the overly affectionate chill.
I pull my hood over my head, zip up the coat and shake a frisson from my spine. My new clothes are too big around the shoulders, too tight around the waist: business-casual with a touch of consensus-developed street, a middle-class fantasy of criminal cool. Poor funerary clothes, but thieves aren’t allowed to whine, are they?
Brain churning with worst-case hypotheses, I lumber into the station, palming exhaustion from the crevices of my eyes. To say that I have a plan of action would be like saying that the human species is born with foreknowledge of its trajectory through this strange, savage existence, every shining accomplishment and humiliating failure prenatally selected from a cosmic brochure. That said, I do have the barest framework of a plan; which is, depressingly, more than I ordinarily have.
I trot into the mouth of the station. It’s eerie at this time of the morning. Waterloo was obviously constructed to house the masses, and their absence rings like a scream. There is too much space and not enough personality, a hostile sterility that brings to the imagination old horror movies, hospital corridors with nowhere to hide.
What I should be doing right now is putting together a ward, a failsafe, some measure of protection against the shoals of dead dithering through the underground. If London’s spectral demographic follows the same conventions as the rest of the world, they’ll likely be feeling quite rambunctious (adjective: feisty, ferocious, ravenous, man-murdering, inclined towards inflicting eternal torture) right now. But instead, I go on a hunt for a coffee.
“Hello! Welcome to”—yawn—“Costa. What can”—yawn again—“I get you?”
“Flat white for me, and could I buy you a coffee?” I count out coins from a stylish wallet, pausing to flip through a rainbow of cards. Anthony Sebastian Lions, you had a good life.
“Haha! Good one.” My barista, a local named Tom Pritchard, is bearded and squishy, infectiously cheery, with a tuft of aqua-green hair combed into a flaccid fauxhawk. His eyes keep hidden behind massive aviator glasses. “It’s the whole ‘opening the store’”—jazz hands are executed—“‘at four-bloody–a.m. in the morning.’ I’ll be fine. Honest.”
“Sure?” I slide over an inexact amount of money and slot a cautious smile into place, not entirely sure what to do with his exuberance.
“I mean, I probably shouldn’t have stayed up for that premiere, but it was so good. My mates and I were, we were like, whoaaaaah. Marvel movies are fucking awesome. You a comic fan?”
“Sometimes?” I scan the empty café, disoriented. No one is allowed to be this ebullient at this time of day. It’s unnatural.
“Don’t tell me...” He palms his forehead, extends the other hand forward in perfect imitation of your dollar-store psychic. “You’re a Dark Horse guy.”
I guffaw. Probably harder than expected or even should have, body folding, arm over my waist. An espresso machine hisses steam in the background, and the ambient soundtrack changes, switching from elevator music to a syrupy pop song about someone vapid. By the time I recover, Tom’s laving hot milk over a styrofoam cup, grooving in place, head gyrating in rhythm with the command to shake it off, shake it off.
“Here you go, mate. Sure I can’t get you a stroopwafel to—”
“Stroopwafel.”
“Excuse you?”
“Str-ooo-p waffle,” He repeats, teasing out the syllables like ropes of taffy. “It’s Dutch for ‘small, delicious waffle.’”
I square an incredulous look and Tom chortles merrily, perfectly on beat, so impeccably good-natured that he probably bleeds confetti. I twirl my fingers in three quick circles, a smile crooked at his beaming countenance. “Fine. You win. I’ll take your waffles.”
And then the light flickers, the tiniest aberration, as though every source of illumination breathed in together and held the air caged while something flitted unseen into the room.
“Shit.”
“You okay, mate?”
I unscrunch my eyes, open them to find Tom’s soft face riveted in concern, a bag of miniature waffles held out. My mouth seizes into a rictus before it rearranges into a wincing smile. Just my imagination. Surely. I reach out a palm.
A seam opens in the center of Tom’s forehead, a fine line of claret. It divides his mouth, throat; runs along his tan-colored shirt, past the white apron. I watch, silent, tongue swollen to silence. Gingerly, I pluck the stroopwafels from his grip and take a step back.
The two halves of the late Tom Pritchard shudder once and his eyes roll up as he sighs, long and gustily, somehow serene. The release complicates into a moist, slorping cacophony, like viscera in operation. Something arches beneath his skin, bulging against the side of his neck, the dermis turning rubbery. Briefly, I see the contours of knuckles, a flattened palm.
I chew my fist as he finally wriggles loose, shedding Tom Pritchard like a bad habit, skin puddling onto the ground. The man from the train is exactly as I remember: black leather, brown curls, knife-jawed smile.
“I’m sorry. Did you still want your coffee?”
“I think today might actually be a good day to quit coffee. And coffee shops.” I glance at the stroopwafels and let them fall to the tiles. “Also sugar. And maybe even today.”
The man shrugs. Despite his recent ecdysis, his attire is pristine, artisanally rumpled, not a drop of gore in sight. Tom’s face, slack without its bones, teardrops from the bend of the man’s wrist. Skin tears. The sack of tissue falls, ignored.”Your loss.”
He plucks my flat white from the counter and sips at the surface, painting his upper lip with a foam mustache. I almost laugh at the banality, hysteria bubbling close to the surface, but I bite down on a knuckle again, harder this time, skin pinned between my teeth, and gnaw. “You know? You could have just waited,” I manage not to wail.
“I get impatient.”
“I completely understand that.” T-Swift is effervescing softly about something else now, voice wound slow: cherry lips, a door opening in a beast, breath distilled into a silvery drink. “But I was looking for you. I was literally in the process of going to find you. Did we really have to kill an innocent bystander?”
The man takes another drink of my coffee. “Probably not.”
“Then why do it?”
He doesn’t answer, only props a slim elbow alongside a case lush with confections, condensation dewing in the glass. As I watch, the moisture crystallises into patterns. He grins, his teeth white, a cigarette abruptly smoldering between them. “What did you want from me, Rupert?”
I slip a hand into a pocket, close a grip over Sisyphus’ orphaned coin, the metal scalding in palm. “I want to make a deal.”
A WARM, HUMID smell of urine rises from the underground. Animated billboards fritz like malfunctioning televisions as we go past, and I feel the hairs on my neck rise, the borders of my vision flooding with horrors: wide, white bodies, maggot-soft; a noose of eyeless faces; fingers, spiralling like ferns.
I keep my gaze forward.
“She’s gone, you know?” His voice comes sympathetic, paternal.
I don’t answer. But anyone with eyes could see it’s a gut punch, anyway, the thought smashing my ribs to kindling. When I breathe, all I get is a lungful of shrapnel.
“Your ghoul.” Smoke tendrils indolently from his joint, a blend of marijuana and something sweeter, a suggestion of citrus.
“Minah was a langsuir, thank—”
“They lied to you. We are the shape that we inhabit, an actualization of an idea of self-awareness. The moment we give that up, we disappear.”
“I hate to be that guy, but I should probably point out that we’re currently swimming in ghosts.” Nails trace the back of my arms, the slope of my shoulders.
“But they haven’t given up their identity, have they? Ghosts are concentrated passion. Their very existences pivot on desire. As the madman Descartes might have said, ‘They hunger, therefore they are.’ In contrast, those content enough to surrender to the idea of an idyllic afterlife—”
“They vanish?”
He says nothing. Skeins of cannabis-fueled vapors trek through the air, writing secrets in an alphabet of forgetting. In between the warping curlicues, apparitions convulse and squirm, defying active scrutiny.
“So, basically, you’re telling me that Hell exists and Heaven actually represents a complete dissolution of self, and we’re all lying to each other?”
The silence textures with smugness.
“You know what? I really didn’t need the exposition. Pass the fucking joint. Please.”
He does. I swallow a toke, clutch the heat as long as I’m able, hoping it’d burn through the grief rising in my ventricles, before I let the smoke leech away. To my vast disappointment, the weed reveals no precocious properties, no ability to instantly elevate my mind, send me soaring into a state of higher numbness. It simply is.
“Well, fuck.”
The man retrieves his blunt and begins to take deep, ruminative puffs. “Sorry.”
“I don’t know if I believe you.”
“That’s entirely fair.”
“I’m pretty certain that I don’t, at any rate.”
“You do you, man.”
I flinch at the colloquial terminology, the ease with which he uses it, the wrongness of the juxtaposition. Entities like him, whatever he actually is, have no right engaging in popular culture, although I suppose it could be argued that, by that logic, they have no right to any form of communication native to sapient life. But then again, does mortal philosophy matter at all in the face of world-shattering consciousnesses?
Minah. Her name repeats beneath my pulse, a knot of sounds like a noose around my throat. It’s hard to breathe.
“So what are you?”
He exhales a single pearlescent word. A locus of glittering syllables, both terrible and haunting, inaccessible by the human larynx, sound and shape and undiluted sensation. The utterance expands into visions: a writhing nebula of tentacles in the center of the universe, suspended among galaxies, singing dumbly to a court of protean dancers; a man at a gate, his shadow crawling with nightmare forms; a worship that will not die; a name, a name, a—
I tear myself from the frenzying hallucinations, images of unnatural architecture seeping from my neurons like sand between my fingers. “That absolutely isn’t an answer.”
He sighs. “Nyarlathotep.”
“Who?”
“Me.” He passes me the joint. “That’s who I am. I am the Crawling Chaos, the God of a Thousand Forms, the Stalker among the Stars, the Faceless God. I am the son of Azathoth, the Blind Idiot God. I am the voice of the Outer Gods, the destruction of humanity, and a happy fabrication of H. P. Lovecraft.”
“You’re a figment of someone else’s imagination?”
“More like an analogy for an irrational fear of the foreign.” His mouth rises in passable mimicry of a smile. Trails of lacy smoke ribbon around his face.
“I guess that makes some amount of sense.” I pause. “Does this mean you’re actually an octopus, then?”
“I—what are you talking about?”
“Lovecraft made Cthulhu, didn’t he? And Cthulhu, if I recall, was a gargantuan beast with a squid for a head. And
you can’t deny that he had a marine theme to his works, what with Innsmouth and—” I smack my lips thoughtfully. Maybe the weed was more potent than I thought.
“Exactly how much Lovecraft have you read?”
“About two animes, six movies, and several graphic novels.”
We hit the bottom of the escalator. Taking another drag, I risk a gander behind us, discover a flight of steps practically short enough to jump. About what I’d expected, I suppose. That conversation had far too much time to percolate. I flick the joint against a wall and trot after Nyarlathotep, who is already halfway to the gates, the barrier swinging open before him.
“How does that work, anyway?” I ask after he leads us onto the lip of a darkened platform. The dead keep their distance, eeling restlessly just outside of view. “Being a literary construct and—and whatever you are?”
“Priorities, Rupert.” In the penumbra, his face is garish, a chiaroscuro of flat lines and shadow, a drawing that occasionally stirs to three-dimensionality. His cigarette flickers blue. “You were here to make a deal.”
“Right. Right, I—”
The Necropolis Railway saves me from gibbering my way into an untenable contract with what is either a metaphor for the existential terrors that plague men of relative leisure, or possibly an actual divinity of unthinkable hideousness. The Body Train roars into position, excreting steam, moisture beading on its shuddering flanks. A noxious musk washes over the platform, exhaust and sweat and steel and assorted glandular secretions.
Polyps in its dermis flower into eyes, pupils rolling in my direction. Strangely, the train’s attention doesn’t come across malevolent, only distantly curious, an arthropod’s insouciant interest in the world outside its lifespan.
“Step into my office.” Nyarlathotep gestures at a door, his smile cranked up to used car salesman, all teeth and no authenticity.
“Classy.” I make a face and step through.
“DIU—”
The epithet slips before I can stop myself. There’s someone else in the train. Many someone elses, in fact, if they’re all ostensibly piloted by a single consciousness. Men and women in three-piece suits litter the carriage, some propped up against the walls, others strewn loose-limbed over the seats, marionettes abandoned after a disastrous comedy act.
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