Devil in the Wires

by Tim Lees

  Benedict walked over. He was very calm. Rose kicked and struggled, but we held him. Benedict reached out and pressed his open palm to Rose’s brow. The effect was almost instant. I felt Rose’s body stiffen, freeze. He seemed to stand to attention, and his eyes were riveted on Benedict. The shouting stopped at once. His mouth dropped open and a little puff of vapor twisted out like smoke.

  I let go. Woollard did the same. Angel, too. It was instinctive, like jerking back from an electric shock. In the half-­light, Rose’s face was cut with shadow. His eyes were wide. I could almost feel the life drain out of him. Benedict just pressed and pressed and Rose’s spine curved and his head went back. Woollard swore. But none of us moved. None of us tried to interrupt. Benedict just stood there, pushing his hand against the thin man’s head, and when I looked into his face, I could see nothing human. The features might be mine, but they were empty, as unfeeling as a mask.

  It couldn’t have gone on long. Less than a minute, probably. Benedict lifted his hand. He straightened up. Rose simply knelt as he’d been left, bent backwards, gazing at the ceiling.

  I watched Benedict—­I don’t know how to say this—­I watched him re-­composing his humanity. He twitched, he frowned. He exercised each portion of his face, bit by bit. He blinked, slowly, deliberately. He pursed his lips, pressed them together, and then pulled them back over his teeth. He wrinkled up his nose. With one finger, he touched his cheek, a gesture I’d made only minutes earlier. He was imitating me.

  He placed his fist on the palm of his other hand, folded his fingers over it, and squeezed.

  He blew out a breath.

  Rose fell back. His hands were twisted up, held to his chest like wrinkled claws. His mouth moved and his lips cracked, dry skin flaking. He was withering before my eyes. His clothes sagged. His skin shriveled and grew old.

  Benedict, stretching himself, flexing his shoulders, pulling himself up to his full height, asked Woollard, “Was he important to you?”

  Woollard said nothing.

  “A friend? An employee, perhaps?” Benedict’s tone was mocking. “Someone useful to you? Or to society? An industrialist? Entrepreneur? Person of significance?”

  “He was—­” Woollard stumbled.

  “Someone you admired?”

  “God damn—­”

  An ugly ticking sound came out of Rose’s throat.

  “What the fuck have you just done to him?”

  “Saved you the trouble.”

  Benedict moved back. None of us spoke, until Shailer, his voice high and fragile, said, “We need to leave here. Press on, or, you know. Get out.”

  “We need—­” began Woollard, but I touched his arm.

  “Not now,” I said. “Not now.”

  Chapter 72

  Mortal Remains

  Once through the doors, the smell was almost overwhelming: a sour, spoiled odor, hanging in the air, so thick it made me scared I’d swallow it, or breathe it in like a contagion, microscopic pieces rooting in my lungs like spores. I put a hand across my mouth. I fumbled for a handkerchief.

  “And that,” said Woollard, “is the smell of death.”

  He shone his flashlight. Shadows swung around the room. There was no natural light in here; the place was sealed, hidden. A steel table occupied the center, and a metal cabinet was pushed back against the wall. A metal sink unit stood at my elbow. I shone my own torch, caught the sink in the beam, looked closer, and then wished I hadn’t.

  There was water in there, one or two inches, and a clutter of tools—­not surgical tools, but kitchen and household implements: knives, scissors, a screwdriver, a pair of pliers, a fork, a hacksaw. It had an oddly domestic look to it, like the washing-­up after the day’s chores have been done.

  Off to the side, on top of this, was something else. It took a second till I realized what it was.

  A human hand.

  I looked away. I said, “In there—­” and then, not wanting to, looked back.

  The thing was pale. It rested on the pile of implements, almost wholly above water. A splintered stick of bone protruded from the wrist. The flesh looked puffy, soft. The index finger had been cut off at the knuckle. Perhaps this was why it seemed so small, almost like a child’s hand; this, and the way the other fingers curled up in what struck me as an oddly childish, clinging gesture.

  Angel pressed against me. I think without her, I’d have run. Or vomited. Or both. Only the need to look brave in front of her still kept me there, biting my lip and trying not to think.

  No one moved or spoke for what seemed like a long time.

  Then Woollard stepped forward. He held a light over the table. The metal top was blotched with stains. I’d taken them for rust at first, but they weren’t. The floor, too, was mottled, filthy. I let my gaze slide over the rest of the room without really focusing. And then I came back to the sink. Watching it with horrible, insidious fascination.

  “Some of this is new,” said Woollard. His voice was thick. “Some of it ain’t.”

  “We need to go,” said Shailer, quietly.

  Woollard fiddled with his phone. He cursed. “Anyone else try this?”

  We all took out our phones.

  “No signal.”

  “Huh. Me neither.”

  “We need,” said Shailer, trying to put some strength into his voice, “we need to go.”

  “Photos,” said Woollard. “Get some pictures. All of you.”

  “We’re done here,” Shailer said. “We’re out of here, OK? We’re gone.”

  Woollard looked at him, wrinkled his nose. “Pictures,” he said.

  Angel pulled the reader from her belt and ran it around.

  “Readings are low, Chris.”

  I, too, checked my reader. The place should have been buzzing. Instead, it was drained, empty.

  I swung the reader at Benedict. Only then the lights danced. “What’s going on?” I said. “Why do I get you, and nothing else?”

  He smiled and shrugged.

  He had his head on one side, fingers to his chin. It was a pose I’d seen myself take up, in photographs, in mirrors.

  Woollard picked his way across the room. I saw things in his flashlight beam. Meat. Debris. Human offal. Stacked in the cupboard, on the cabinets, lying on the floor . . .

  “This is a slaughterhouse.”

  The light went sliding up the walls, panned across the ceiling—­and stopped.

  The light circled a face. It was a man’s face, dark and bearded, with long strings of hair hanging about it.

  Woollard said, “Hey . . . ?”

  The eyes blinked once.

  And then the man dropped.

  Chapter 73

  One Last Job

  He moved before any of us could react. He swung his legs down, crashed onto the metal table. In a single movement he was on the floor. The lights whirled over him. He seemed confused. His eyes moved rapidly. The hair hung in his face.

  I think our first thought—­everyone’s first thought—­was that he was a victim, the last survivor, miraculously still alive.

  When Benedict stepped forward, Angel blocked him. “No,” she told him. “Not again.”

  The ceiling here was stripped, just a crisscross of metal joists and beams. The man must have been hanging from them, clinging there the whole time we’d been in the room. Yet we’d heard nothing. Not a sound, not a breath . . .

  Now he watched us, warily, keeping the table as a barrier between us.

  Shailer asked him, “Can you talk?”

  The man pushed hair out of his face.

  “Who did this to you?”

  The man looked right, left.

  Shailer said, “I can help you. I can get you to a hospital, get you treatment. The company will pay for it.”

  The man looked straight at Shailer. Whe
n he spoke, his voice was very soft, very slow.

  “This,” he told him, “is a hospital.”

  “A real hospital. With, uh, with doctors . . .”

  I pulled Shailer back. Something was bothering me. Something in the way the man looked, the way he faced us. He wasn’t scared. He was looking for an opportunity, that was all.

  “Shailer. He isn’t what you think—­”

  The man moved. Sideways, suddenly, out of the torchbeams. Lights flashed. He barreled into me, knocking me aside. He passed Benedict, who merely stepped back and let him go. Then, in the outer room, he turned. Something glistened in his hand. A blade, a knife. He leapt into the air. For a moment he just seemed to hang there, to fold in on himself, and then—­

  Then he was gone.

  “What? What the fuck?” Woollard ran into the center of the room, looking around.

  To me, he said, “What happened? Where’d he go?”

  Benedict said, “Forwards. Backwards. A few minutes. An hour. Whatever the Old One advises.”

  I said, “Shailer’s right. We need to go.”

  Shailer said, “Well, thank you, thank you. The voice of fucking reason—­”

  Woollard touched my sleeve. “What’s happening here?”

  “It’s . . .” and suddenly, God help me, I wanted to laugh. Perhaps it was the tension, or perhaps I’d lost it, finally. The laughter just came bubbling out of me, like a nervous tic. “It’s a nest of time-­traveling serial killers,” I said, “and we’re right in the middle of it. OK? Anything else you want to know?”

  We passed by Rose’s body. The face was gray, the skin powdery-­looking, like old plaster. I think we all took a glance at it. All except Benedict. He walked straight by without looking as if the corpse weren’t even there.

  There were no more incidents. We took the back stairs, hurrying, not speaking. But by the time we hit the lobby, I’d realized there was one more job to do. A job that wouldn’t wait.

  “You’re not staying,” she said. It wasn’t a question, but I acted like it was.

  “I’ll be in the lobby,” I said. “That’s all. I’ll be fine. You go with the others, get the power sorted. I’ll be ready.”

  “I’m staying with you.”

  “No. I said before, that worries me. I need to concentrate. I don’t want to be bothering with—­”

  “Chris. I can do this. You trained me, right?”

  “Not well enough. And years ago.” I put my hands into my pockets. I fidgeted. “We’ll talk about it later, OK?”

  “If there is a later.”

  She turned away from me. Christ, I thought. That’s all I need. If being in the house of horrors wasn’t bad enough, I was about to break up with my girlfriend, too. Jesus.

  They took the power cable on its big, plastic spindle. Woollard went, ready to badge his way in anywhere that would get us what we wanted. Shailer and Benedict I was glad to be rid of. Angel, too, I wanted gone, only for different reasons.

  I watched her walking out the glass doors, hoping she’d look back, one final, reassuring time.

  She didn’t.

  So I tried to calm myself. The hall was big and gloomy. The light was failing now.

  I took some long, deep breaths, and walked over to the pile of bags we’d left on the lobby floor. I took a flask and a ­couple of bags of cables. I also found the control box, set it down near the doors, and plugged the first cable into the socket.

  I couldn’t get a reading on Assur. There was something there, but never quite enough. Not like in Iraq; there, I’d been dealing with a largely dormant force, spread out through the land. Now . . . was he displaced in time, as Benedict suggested? Here spatially, but not quite in the present?

  There was something here, or had been. That echo, once again, that shadow of a sound . . .

  I couldn’t wire up the whole hospital. But I could take a bet. I could guess. The lobby was the biggest open space we’d seen, the temple, the church. A thousand years of worship leaves an impact on you, I suppose; it forms a habit. So it was this place. This, or else the slaughterhouse upstairs. And there was no way I was going back up there.

  I moved the cables, trying to judge the distances, the patterns. Remembering what I’d done back in Iraq. That dumbbell shape, but more spread out, more open. Everything was hypothetical. Everything was guesswork. This was not the god of Sumer or Assyria; not the god I’d woken and so quickly trapped. He’d had time to grow now, flex his muscles. He had gained disciples, and the link between a god and his disciples was a two-­way thing, changing them both in ways I couldn’t even guess.

  I was on my hands and knees. Work swallowed me. I didn’t know how much time had elapsed. I was at the back of the hall, still linking cables, still trying to work out what went where.

  A voice said, “Hey there. Field Op.”

  I looked up, and sat back on my heels.

  “I was wondering when you’d get here,” I said. Then, just to be nasty, “Anytime’s too soon for me, though. For anybody else, too, I’d imagine.”

  He didn’t like that. But he laughed, good-­naturedly, to show me he could take a joke.

  Chapter 74

  Disciple

  He was seated on the pile of bags. One leg stuck out, thin in tight jeans. The other had been folded under him. He wore the Blackhawks sweater with the hood up and his eyes in shadow; but I could see the scrubby blond beard, the lips pressed tight together and then, as by some vast effort of will, twisting up into a grin.

  He said, “Hey. Field Op.”

  “Hey.”

  “So tell me. How’s my girl, huh? How’s my Angel? Missing me?”

  “No.”

  He watched me link another set of cables. “You’re lying to me, man.”

  I went on with my work.

  He said, “You’re wasting your time, by the way.”

  I kept working.

  “This here, see, it’s his place of power. Where he is, was, and will be. You can’t drain him here, can’t take his power away. You know why? Do you?”

  I was distracted. It was hard to think. I had no sense of where the god would be, or how to snare him. I moved the wire, studied it, then moved it back.

  “You’re off the grid, man! No fucking power! Hey, I know the way this thing works. I dated your girlfriend, remember? She told me all kinds of things.” He dropped his voice, stage-­whispered, “Pillow-­talk, you know?”

  He slid to his feet. He kicked one of the bags towards me.

  “Hey there. Carry on, man. Carry on.”

  Deliberately, he turned away, as if ignoring me. He rolled his left sleeve up. His arm was thin, gnarled-­looking, like an old tree branch.

  Then he looked back at me.

  “See, here’s the thing now. Here’s what it’s about.”

  With his other hand, he took a small, red switchblade, and flicked it open. I saw his mouth tense. The breath hissed through his teeth. Then he dug the knife down hard into his forearm, and wrenched it sideways. He seemed to fold in on himself, grunting horribly. I stared at him, the cable hanging from my hands. He looked back at me, just for a second, and caught my eye; his lips curled in a smile.

  He straightened slowly, raising his bare arm. With the knife-­point, he teased the wound. He made the blood flow. It came dark and slow, like oil, falling in drops upon the bags and on the floor. He was breathing heavily. His lips began to move, a rapid fluttering: a prayer, an incantation . . .

  I took a step towards him, but my balance failed. It was as if the floor suddenly tilted, and then tilted again. I lurched, I stumbled. I felt like I was pushing through a barrier, an unseen wall. Even the smallest movement now a struggle. The air began to shake. Gotowski put his head back, his mouth twisting, nonsense sounds just pouring from his throat.

  Small, white flecks came flu
ttering around me. Some landed on my shirt, dissolving into damp, dark spots.

  Snowflakes.

  A cold wind blew across the lobby.

  Gotowski shook himself.

  There was snow under my feet. Snow and hard, rough earth.

  He seemed to wake, to come back to awareness of himself. He raised his bare arm, smeared with blood.

  “This whole city. It’s his now. He’s touched it, he’s part of it. He’s touched it, but it can’t touch him. Not anymore. It’s all a one-­way street, from here on in. One way. From you—­to me.”

  He paced, rolling his shoulders, swaggering like some great, hulking bully. Only that wasn’t what he was; he was gawky, angular—­a weakling play-­acting a monster.

  Except it wasn’t play-­acting. I’d seen the slaughterhouse upstairs. This man was dangerous.

  Blood fell sluggishly onto the floor: one drop, two drops, a trail of it, back and forth, back and forth.

  “Hurt, Chris. You know hurt.”

  He brandished his forearm at me like a weapon.

  “A little bit of hurt. Hurt you, hurt me. ’Cause he’s the God of Hurt, Chris. Ain’t that right? Tell your friends, huh? Tell ’em what you brought here. Tell ’em what it’s really all about. The God of Hurt. Why not? Why the fuck not?”

  “He’s . . .” I could see the doors behind him, glass doors with the hospital name stenciled on them. A dark wall rose above, and up there, high over his head, it seemed that I saw treetops swaying, snow spinning down . . . I could see the lobby, only more and more, it felt like I was out of doors, somewhere cold and far from shelter. “He’s a god of lots of things. Whatever’s in you. However you react to him.” I gave a short, dismissive shrug, feigned nonchalance. “Course,” I said, “if you’re some psycho bastard who likes hurting ­people, that’s what he’ll do for you. Whatever’s on your mind—­”

  “Uh-­uh.” He wagged a finger at me. “You don’t get to say that to me. I’m in charge here. You say what I want, understand? Got that?”