I watched the baby IDB, his mouth stretched open in an agonizing scream. What made it more terrible was that I couldn’t hear it. Lightning flashed inside the vessels, each strike twisting the interdimensional beings and reducing them.
The sky tore open like a sheet of paper, and there it was. The Other World. Clear as day. Even through the hail. I forgot all the colors. Bright sunlight peered through the thin veil between the two worlds. I must have been looking south, because I saw the Bronx and, beyond that, Manhattan. Giant buildings and trees. I had forgotten what green trees looked like. I didn’t look at it too long because one of the leprechauns blindsided me. I went down like a bag of dirt.
As soon as I hit the ground, an earthquake seized the mountain. Rocks tumbled down, crashing into demons and Monster Islanders alike. A demon dropped out of the sky and landed right on top of Rory the clurichaun. His stupid hat, not to mention Rory himself, was flattened like a pancake. Oh well. The other lep, Liam, looked at his fallen comrade, then at me. The sky flashed a brilliant red. The leprechaun with the jaunty-angled hat frantically searched the ground. I thought he was looking for a weapon, but he was after a cat.
The time must have come to exsanguinate the poor things.
One dashed across his path and the lep made a motion with his hand, obviously some kind of magic, and the cat slowed as if caught in molasses. Liam snatched the animal and held it up.
“You’re a dead man!” the lep shouted at me.
“The joke is on you, buddy. I’m already a dead man.”
As I’ve said, I’m not much of a sprinter. I’d never get to the lep in time. The cat was toast.
Then it hit me. I pulled off my left hand and chucked it. My hand tumbled finger over fist in the air and attached itself to Liam’s throat. The lep dropped the cat and fell to the ground wrestling with my detached hand. I went to pounce on him, but between my pounce and my landing on the fairy, the ground shook and tore itself open. I landed inside a chasm. By the time I climbed out, the lep had managed to rip my hand from his throat.
He still had no interest in me, though. He only had eyes for the kitty cats. There was one cornered against a rock wall, and the lep crept slowly toward it.
I came up behind him. I swung at his head, but he ducked and spun around with a dagger in his hand. He punched it into my shoulder blade. I fell back. The lep went after the cat. I know I promised myself, but my hunger had reached its apex and this guy really deserved it. I sprang up and went into zombie mode.
Liam screamed bloody murder as I sunk my teeth into his calf, which I knew from experience was the tastiest part of the leprechaun. He was a bit gamier than Flanagan, but I’d still give him a rating of three shamrocks out of five.
I didn’t get to finish, though. I had only just started on his guts when Zara screamed. It came from above.
I scrambled higher up the mountain, climbing on my hands and knees, until I got to the peak. There, I saw the Duke with Zara’s sledgehammer and Zara on the ground bleeding from her mouth. The Duke looked even worse. His nose had been flattened and there was a dent the size of a sledgehammer head in his skull.
The Duke looked at me like I had walked in on him taking a leak. Zara tried to stand, but fell back to the ground.
“He distracted me, the weasel,” she said, slurring her words. “Or I would have bashed in his fookin brains.”
It looked like I had missed a hell of a fight.
“Give it up, Eddie,” I said. “It’s over. Without a cat, you’re dead. Shut down the device and save yourself.”
“Once the device is started it cannot be shut off,” the Duke said. “I don’t know about you two, but I’m going home.” The Duke pulled out a cat from inside his tunic and grinned like a maniac. The cat mewled and tried desperately to get away from him.
I heard Zara mumbling to herself, but she was having a hard time getting the words out. At first, I thought she had lost her mind, but then I remembered that when the witch mumbled, some bad shit was about to happen. I just needed to keep the Duke talking.
“The cats won’t save you,” I said. “They don’t have any magical qualities. You’re fookin nuts, Eddie. You’ve always been nuts.”
“I drank from Mnemosyne! I know shit! I know all kinds of shit you couldn’t fookin imagine, corpse!”
Zara wiped dark blood from her chin. She raised her right hand and began to trace ancient figures in the air.
“I bet you’re amazing at Twenty Questions,” I said.
The Duke began to say something, but he gagged and heaved. He dropped the cat, which ran down the mountain. The gagging turned to full-on choking. Zara stood and walked toward the Duke, speaking that weird, lilting language. She took more blood from her face and described long, elegant shapes in the air. The Duke fell to his knees, his hands clawing at his throat. His eyes bulged, crazed with fear.
Zara stood over the lunatic. “This is for my father,” she said and kicked him over the edge of the mountain. I listened as a long, bloodcurdling scream faded into silence.
She grabbed her sledgehammer and returned it to her arm.
“We need to find Oswald!” I said.
We headed down the other side of the mountain, in the direction the little guy went flying. By now, most of the demons had been killed. Their bodies piled high on the mountain. We climbed over heaps of demon carcasses on our way and, a few times, had to duck as more bodies fell out of the sky.
“Oswald!” Zara shouted. “Oswald!”
The hum of the Pandemonium Device grew louder as the sky grew brighter. I could see white, puffy clouds and the sun now.
I’m so attuned to Oswald’s stupid little voice that even over the din I heard a little pip. I followed it and spotted his legs peeking out from under a pile of fallen rocks. “Zara, over here!”
I pulled on his legs, but I couldn’t move him.
Zara ran over, took a look, and smeared her fingers with the blood dripping from her head. She drew a sign on the rocks and they turned to dust. We lifted Oswald. He looked pretty beat, but he opened his eyes. “Jack, did we stop the demons?”
“Sort of.” I’d wait to tell him how royally he screwed up. But now he had a chance to make up for it.
We ducked and dived past falling demons and hail and rock slides until we made it back to the device. The IDBs were nearly gone, only their essences remained in the containers, tiny balls of intense light. Bursts of lightning bounced off the orbs. Below, the skylines of Manhattan and the Bronx flickered in and out. The mountain swayed like a drunken ghost pirate. There wasn’t much time. I thought about grabbing a cat. But just for a second.
“Okay, I have a plan,” I said.
I stood Oswald on the ground. He wobbled a bit but remained upright. “I already have a problem with that,” he said.
“This is going to work.”
“How is this going to hurt me?”
“If we don’t do this, we’re all going to be hurt real bad.”
“What’s the plan?”
“We can’t turn off the device.”
“We’re running out of time,” Zara said.
The world shook and we all fell.
After struggling back up, I said, “Oswald, seeing as though you’re indestructible, you need to cover the device, and Zara here is going to smash it with her sledgehammer.”
“And what are you going to do?”
“I’m going to applaud you for saving the world. Isn’t that what you’ve always wanted?”
“I want to be a full partner in the agency.”
“Now wait a minute! Don’t go strong-arming me!”
“He’s a fookin full partner!” Zara said. “Stop wasting time!”
The device hummed like a billion wasps in a maelstrom. The orbs inside the vessels dimmed.
I didn’t have the energy to fight Oswald or Zara. “Fine,” I said. “Whatever you want.”
“I want my name on the business cards and on the office door.”
I
was about to say something, but Zara smacked me in the ear. “Oswald, buddy, get in there and make us proud.”
“You called me your buddy.”
“I might have misspoken.”
Oswald’s grin was so wide that his head looked like it was about to split open. “I don’t believe everything they say about zombies, Jack.” Oswald winked, jumped into the circle, and spread himself out into a long, flat sheet. He then flung himself over the device. Zara uttered her magical words, touched her sledgehammer tattoo, and pulled out the weapon. She held it at the ready.
“Are you sure this will work?” she asked.
I shrugged. “Fifty-fifty chance?”
Zara grimaced and swung her hammer down on the center of Oswald. At once, two things happened: the world went silent as if all the air had been sucked out of Pandemonium, and a burst of brilliant white light exploded from underneath Oswald.
Skull Mountain jumped and rattled. Rocks showered down on us and the ground tore open.
I didn’t remember falling, but next thing I knew I was on my back, looking up at the sky as the blue bled away to red.
I grabbed onto the edge of a thin fissure and closed my eyes. I was sure we’d all get swept off the mountain, but then, as quickly as it all happened, it stopped.
The fat, black clouds returned. The hail, thankfully, did not.
I struggled to my feet.
Zara sat on a rock, shaking her head. Oswald was still stretched out like a sheet in the middle of the IDBs. I rushed over to him and got on my knees. “Oz,” I said, shaking him, “you can get up now.” He didn’t move. His body was limp and unresponsive.
I peeled him off the ground, revealing a crater that seemed to reach to the bottom of Skull Mountain. The device was gone. Most likely it had been obliterated along with the Jupiter Stone. And poor little Oswald swallowed the impact.
I draped him over a boulder, but he just lay there like a bedsheet. I knelt beside him and rubbed and kneaded him like a lump of dough.
“Stop screwing around, Oswald,” I said.
“He’s indestructible, right?” Zara asked. She stood beside me, rubbing her jaw.
“That has always been my belief.”
In the middle of the sheet that was now Oswald were two faint X’s. I remembered scratching them into his head. Living things, I had said to him at the time, need eyes. Otherwise, it’s creepy as fook.
“Your belief?” Zara said.
“He’s always come out okay before.”
“That was before he took on a Jupiter Stone.”
“Oswald, if you’re playing games, you’re out of the agency! This isn’t funny anymore.” I really needed a Lucky Dragon.
“Are you crying?”
“It’s sweat.”
“Coming out of your eyes?”
I turned toward the containers and wiped my sweaty eyes. The IDBs were all glaring at us, particularly the cherubic one.
“I think they want to be let out,” Zara said.
The interdimensional beings had returned to their humanoid forms but still looked to be in bad shape. Their ribs were visible through their now thin and gray skin.
“You’re the one with the sledgehammer,” I said.
Zara walked over to the first container and smashed it. The silver-eyed IDB breathed the air and, in a blink, disappeared. No thanks, no nothing. Zara went around the circle, smashing the containers. The last was the baby’s. I stood and we looked at each other for a moment after Zara broke him out. He looked at the crater where the device had been. He nodded at me, and then he gave me the finger and flew off. Maybe that was how they thanked people. Or maybe he was the most ungrateful creature in the universe. I kind of admired his spunk, though.
I continued to rub and knead Oswald as Camazotz swooped down from the sky and landed beside me.
“The battle has ended,” he said. “We were victorious.”
“Good going, Zotzy,” I said.
“Was that your friend?” Camazotz asked, looking down at Oswald.
I didn’t know what to say, so I said nothing. I tried squishing Oswald into a ball, hoping I could reshape him.
I was bouncing him on the ground when the sky blackened and blacker creatures appeared. They circled the mounds of fallen monsters and demons. Their long, thin wings flapped in half-time. Their beaks were like ice picks. They had no eyes.
Strands of light rose from the dead and the creatures swallowed them.
“What the hell are those things?” Zara asked.
“Soul Suckers,” Camazotz answered.
A chill flew up my spine. These things had Ratzinger’s stench all over them. He was already gathering his army.
The winged nightmares made lazy circles as they sucked up the demonic souls and inched toward us.
“We have to go,” I said.
I put Oswald in my pocket and gave him a pat.
As I was about to head down the mountain, a gang of black cats surrounded me. I had forgotten about the kitties. I didn’t count them, but I was pretty sure it was fifty-two. I took a couple of steps forward and they followed.
“See, they found me because they know I’m here to save them,” I said. “It’s logical.”
Zara walked over to me and sniffed my suit. “That’s not it, you stupid corpse. You reek of kraken and the Broken Sea. These poor cats must be starving.”
Several of them licked my shoes and pants.
The Soul Suckers squawked.
“Jump on my back, Jack,” Camazotz said, “and I’ll fly you out of here.”
“I need to get these cats back to the goblin queen or no more dust.”
Camazotz whistled and his comrades appeared. He explained the situation and each one took a cat. Zara hopped on the back of a pegasus.
“I’m not going back to the Broken Lands,” she said. “I think I’ll visit the Red Garden. Maybe Mother will be happy to see me this time.”
“If you ever need a P.I., here’s my card,” I said. I pulled out a very dirty and tattered business card and handed it to her. “I’ll give you a good discount.”
She took it, placed it against her left inner forearm, and it turned into a tattoo.
Camazotz whistled again and we all shot into the Pandemonium sky.
22. Fear and Loathing in ShadowShade
The dust was nearly all gone. Seven fookin kilos. Right up my nose. I think I had burned another hole in my nostrils. I swear I could hear pixie wings fluttering in Fairy Land and vampire fangs extending on Blood Beach and werewolf hair growing in Werewolf End. This must have been what the Duke felt like after he drank all that memory juice. Except I felt like crap. Sweat covered my body in a thick sheen. My hands shook and my throat was dry as troll skin.
I flattened myself against the office wall, carefully pulled open a tiny fraction of the blinds, and took a quick glance out the window. The creep in black was still there, standing on the corner across the street. Five hours now. He looked up at my office, and I pulled my hand back. I slid away from the window and opened my top desk drawer. There was maybe a one-week supply of dust left, if I stretched it out.
The goblin queen had been generous. When I arrived in Goblin Town with all of her cats, she was ecstatic. She couldn’t thank me enough. I don’t think she believed I’d find them. She kept throwing dust at me. When I filled my pockets, she shoved more dust in my hands. I needed a chest to carry it back to ShadowShade. I think I’m an honorary goblin now. She even hooked up Camazotz and his pals. We partied for three days in Goblin Town before we got straight enough to leave. Camazotz ditched me again. I barely remember how I got home. I think I hitched a ride with some merfolk. I sure hope it wasn’t that crazy shark woman.
Oswald still hadn’t woken up. I asked the goblin queen if she could help, but she didn’t even know what Oswald was. Camazotz had no clue either. Oswald is a damn riddle wrapped in a mystery inside a marshmallow. I wasn’t sure if he’d ever wake up.
I sat and stared at the white blob, wh
ich now sat on my desk. He had kept rolling off, so I secured him between an empty bottle of Devil Boy and my orc skull ashtray. The runt didn’t even make a decent paperweight.
When I got back to ShadowShade I locked myself up in my office and went to town with the dust. Without Oswald to stop me, I went off the rails. I felt empty inside, like I was missing something vital. It wasn’t because of Oswald! But, boy, did I feel bummed. Maybe it was because I had saved the damn world and no one knew. The newspapers didn’t want to hear from me. I was still a broke, undead bum.
I peeked out the window again. The creep in black still stood on the corner, a folded-up newspaper under his arm. He was an agent of the mad Nazi doctor, I was sure of it. The dust didn’t help with my growing paranoia surrounding Ratzinger, but it wasn’t paranoia. The fook was really out to get me.
Every night since I had returned, I dreamed of Ratzinger. His voice burning in my brain. “Jackie boy, I’m coming to get you. Jackie, I’m close to finding your soul. Jackie, you’re going to make a great general for the dead.” The dust was the only thing that silenced the voice.
I reached for a bottle of Devil Boy in the bottom drawer, but it was empty. I buzzed the intercom. “Lilith,” I said, “do we have any more formaldehyde?”
The ghost drifted through the wall. Lilith wore a flowing white gown, tiara, and pearl necklace. Her hair was made up in an impossibly tall beehive. She was ready for the ball to end all balls. She had been ready for three centuries, actually, but she never made it. She died when her carriage was besieged by highwaymen.
“Lilith, what did I say about going through the walls? Use the damn door, please. This is a professional joint.” Lilith has her quirks, but she works for free so I really can’t complain. Not that I had much choice in the matter. She had been haunting my building for decades. I gave her a job to make her useful.
“Sorry. Next time. We’re all out of formaldehyde. You’ve been drinking up a storm since Oswald died.”
Dead Jack and the Pandemonium Device Page 13