by H T G Hedges
"Hello?"
It was so sudden that she almost dropped the phone in surprise. The voice was hesitant, slightly distorted and she had a sudden intuition that the speaker had been staring at his ringing telephone for a long time, weighing up whether or not to answer. God, she thought, I’m turning into Mr. Happen.
"Carver Whimsy?"
"Oh shit," Whimsy muttered, "I’m getting a really bad sense of déjà vu."
"Um." Suddenly Loess’s mind had hit a blank as she realised that she hadn’t for a second considered what she was going to say if she ever made it far enough to make contact with the elusive Whimsy, a prospect which at ground level had seemed pretty unlikely. "I’m a friend of Jon Hesker’s," she tried.
"Ah. Yes," came the reply from the handset. "The dead Mr. Hesker."
"I guess?" she said, trying to find a deeper meaning in the words. They’d told her some of what had happened to Hesker on the ride over, between making their plans, but she wasn’t sure she was ready to buy into his resurrection wholly just yet.
"Only he isn’t dead is he?" Whimsy continued. "Which I find a peculiarity given that I saw him take a bullet over at Central and he looked pretty near to dead to me."
Loess had no idea how to respond to this but she knew she was probably running out of time. She could feel it ticking away with every tiny pop and crackle on the line.
"He’d like to talk to you," she said, supposing simple honesty might be as good a bet as any, deciding to simply ignore anything she couldn’t nail down. Whimsy was quiet for a long time, so long in fact that she thought that maybe the connection had been cut.
"Hello?" she said at last, "You still there?"
"Yes," he said at length in a voice that spoke of resignation to a life that looked likely to be full of complications from here on in.
"OK I’ll bite." But whatever else he might have been about to say was put on hold as the boards creaked in the hallway outside the apartment and a very definite shadow fell over the gap at the base of the door.
"Hold that thought," Loess whispered into the mouthpiece, as she padded delicately and soundlessly over to the door and pressed herself flat against the wall as the jarring sound of a key scraping in the lock filled the small room. Then the door was opening, a shadow crossing the threshold like a vampire in some Victorian penny dreadful horror story.
Without hesitation, Loess lashed out with the phone, smashing the handset into the face of the interloper. He grunted and she brought the full force of her knee straight into his stomach, coshing the phone into his face a second time as he doubled over, flipping his lights out for a little while.
"Hello?" she breathed into the receiver.
"What the fuck was that?" demanded Whimsy, still hanging on the other end.
"Company," she replied. "And there’ll be more where it came from so I have to go."
"Alright," he said. "Alright. OK, listen. You heard of the Old Town Motel? If not, look it up. Go there. Wait for me. I’m burning this number now so no more callbacks." With that he hung up and she was left listening to the empty flat-line of the dial tone.
Loess looked around the small apartment one last time as the atonal buzz sounded like a bell in her ear then, with a small shake of her head and a smile, she tossed the phone onto the couch.
It was a pipe dream, she thought, making her way out of the fire escape, the cold outside air hitting her like a slug of whiskey that tasted like rain and city streets.
We were really gunning it now, the hearse’s engine screaming like an animal in pain. The SUV was still tailing us but I had the sense that our lead was increasing with each frenetically passing second. Corg must have been doing some serious tinkering under the hearse’s hood.
"I think-" I started to say but at that moment a second car, a sleek black hybrid, recklessly piloted by the same crazy-eyed killer who had started all of this for me, screeched mercilessly out of nowhere and smashed into our left hand side. Metal screamed and buckled as we left the road, crunching into the curb. Wheels spinning helplessly, we pirouetted into the air, skidded, flipped.
The windshield popped then shattered, spraying us with tiny bullets of rounded glass and we were still moving, spinning, another crunch, pain, constriction and the smell of burning as we bounced and slid and imploded. The noise was incredible. For a brief moment I saw the SUV, which must have ploughed straight into the other car, was also rolling, end over end, wheels spinning helplessly. It looked like a turtle marooned on its back. And then all I could see was the mist and the cold sky and then again the road as it rushed round to welcome us once more.
At last we stopped moving, stranded with our wheels pointing to heaven, though the hearse continued to make noise, moaning eerily to itself. There was blood in my mouth from somewhere and for the second time that day my ears were ringing and my head felt like it had been pressed in a vice.
With an effort I managed to un-clinch my seatbelt to fall heavily onto the compacted roof. Broken glass tinkled ominously beneath me as I hauled myself out, groggy and confused, onto the road.
The air was thick with smoke and soupy fog that seemed to be rushing in to fill the atmosphere, cold and clinging. As I looked at my hands pressed against the grey tarmac, for a moment it seemed like the ground beneath me had slipped away, replaced by a yawning chasm of inky nothing. Curls of mist burned and charred away from the pit, a string of bloody spit trailing from my open mouth sizzled before dropping into nothing. I screwed up my eyes, head pounding, and when I opened them again there was road beneath me once more, rough and grey and beaded with dewy droplets of mist.
A figure slumped down next to me.
"Corg?" I croaked. He patted my shoulder in recognition as other figures appeared out of the haze: men in black carrying automatic rifles and training them on our position. Wearily, I pushed myself to my feet.
"Stay on the ground," a voice commanded, hoarse with smoke and muffled behind a protective mask. Squinting through the swirling mist I could see that our pursuers were somewhat the worse for wear as well, torn and scuffed, much as we were, by the crash.
"On the ground," he said again, though neither of us made any move to comply. I didn’t like the way the guns were moving around – a nervous jerkiness permeated the group, as obvious to me as the tangy taste of copper in my mouth.
The nearest figure, the speaker, ripped off his mask revealing sandy blond hair and handsome features. "Quinn," one of the others began to say but Quinn waved him into silence. His eyes had a haunted, open look to them and his finger remained locked to the trigger even as the barrel of his rifle wavered.
And then another figure emerged from the mist which, though it parted for Quinn and his team, seemed to cling to the newcomer much as it did to me, lending him an ethereal sinister aspect.
"Wychelo?" Quinn croaked as the strange eyed killer advanced on us. Somehow, despite his actions in the crash, Wychelo still looked immaculate and unruffled, as if he’d stepped from a salon rather than the burning wreck of his car. I felt a pressure building in my skull and the mist closed in even more. I was almost ready for the feeling this time as the shadow moved.
"Control wants these two alive," Quinn said, turning towards Wychelo so that the business end of his rifle now pointed at him. A flicker of annoyance played over the killer’s previously impassive features.
"Lower your weapon," he said evenly but, although the barrel wavered, Quinn kept his rifle raised, barrel levelled at Wychelo’s chest.
"What’s going on out here?" Quinn growled. The mist seemed to be circling him, growing thicker around him, clinging at his mouth. It was almost like he was breathing it in, being infected by its insidious tendrils.
"Lower your weapon," Wychelo repeated as the mist rolled around him, drawing a tight circle around us all. He had, I noticed, a suppressed pistol in his hand hanging loosely, almost casually, at his side.
The blood was pounding in my ears, sweat beading on my brow and prickling down my neck. A white
wall now penned our small drama in, like players on a stage. The closer Wychelo came, the stronger the tension became; it was like there was a cord running between us, stretched almost to breaking point. The sense of another world overlaying this one surfaced nauseatingly once more. For a split second I had the distinct feeling that there were figures waiting in the impenetrable mist, indistinct and intangible. I could see them when I closed my eyes, grey shapes cast against the blackness of my eyelids. Eyes opened, I could still feel their still presence.
The moment passed, but my sense of them still remained, like reality was stretching, being strained and extended like an overfilled balloon, ready to rip under the strain at any moment. Something shifted in the murk, a wet whisper of noise. By now the others could sense it too, I was sure.
"What was that?" one of the ops shouted, squinting off into the mist. Others followed, his lead, their attention suddenly no longer locked on Corg and me.
"There’s someone in the mist," Quinn hissed urgently, still sighting on Wychelo. He was losing it fast from the look in his wide eyes. "Someone who makes my skin crawl same as you do. How do you explain that you creepy motherfucker?" he growled, voicing the strange creeping parity between the cold eyed assassin and the encroaching white wall.
Quin was unravelling quickly now, every breath of misted air leaving him more strung out than before, spooling his poise out like so much unwound cotton. The whispering was increasing too, a steady creeping susurration that seemed to come from all sides.
Around us, the mist was moving as if alive, coalescing and resolving itself into half-seen shapes, darker patches that flittered and moved in the corner of the eye and disappeared when you tried to look for them. Dark patches that looked almost like the shapes of people. My mouth felt full of electric and there was so much tension buzzing off Quinn and his men I expected them to sizzle and crack with each jerking movement. Quinn was breathing in heavy gulps, taking in great lungfulls of the coiling air.
I caught Corg’s eye and tried my best to convey "When this goes off, get ready to run," without moving my face in any way. I think he got it.
Wychelo’s lips slid back revealing even, white teeth. "Put it down," he said with deadly finality. I looked from his cold, impassive face, still with poise, to Quinn’s bunched up features, a vein pumping madly at his temple, teeth bared. There’s only one way this ends, I thought.
"What’s happening?" Quinn whispered again, desperation edging into his voice, his final plea. What followed was a complete cessation of all movement, the whispering stopped: whatever - if anything - was waiting in the mist held its breath.
"Fuck it," Quinn breathed and I could read his intent. His fist tightened on the grip of his rifle, knuckles white and bloodless on the trigger. With a speed that seemed impossible, inhuman, Wychelo whipped up his hand and we all heard the zip as he fired, once, at close range.
There was blood in the air. Something howled.
I grabbed Corg and pulled him into the wall of mist before Quinn even started falling. It closed around us immediately, muffling all noise so the boom of automatic weapons fire came to us as a muted staccato, the answering zips as chilling as the hiss of a knife through velvet.
Whether they were firing at each other or us or something else entirely I didn’t know or care, we just ran, not stopping until our legs were pained and stiff with lactic acid and our lungs burned with each laboured mouthful of chilling fog that felt like fingers stroking at our faces.
We ran and ran and didn’t stop until, at last, we were free of the mist that grabbed at us like dead men’s hands.
"What the fuck was that?" Corg breathed but I could only shake my head. I could tell him what I’d felt: that the world was stretching and melting to join with another that lay just behind it, but how could I put that into words that didn’t sound crazy? There was no way. He pulled out his phone and dialled, putting it to his ear and stumbling off a few steps in something of a daze.
Small snakelike knots of mist still hung limply in stray bundles close to the ground, moving with a repulsive undulation, whispering apart with oily reluctance as I kicked out at them. Corg was on the phone, speaking animatedly, but I couldn’t hear the words. My mind was still full of the sounds of another place, of the strange sibilant voices I’d heard as we tumbled madly through the fog, of unknown animal calls and howls from a place that wasn’t there and yet, I felt sure, was real or as close to it as made no odds. I shuddered at the thought as Corg limped back over to me.
"She’s on her way," he said, waving the phone, then added regretfully, "Poor Genie."
It took me a moment to catch up. Oh god, I thought, he named the hearse. Of course he did. Despite the events of the day a smile was trying very hard to spread itself across my features.
"Genie?" I said tightly.
"Fuck off." It was good to see him getting back to normal and we lapsed back into tense silence, waiting, trying not to listen and watch for sounds and shapes that weren’t there on the far side of the lingering curtain.
When at last the familiar beat-up shape of Loess’ ride came into view it was a blessed relief. We piled in, shivering and desperate.
"Shit," she said, taking in our further ravaged appearances. "What happened?"
"You think we look bad you should see Genie," I said, though it came out as little more than a croak. "Listen, let’s get the hell out of here." Obligingly she put the pedal to the floor. It was only some time later that my brain caught up enough to wonder where we were going.
"We’re heading out of town," Loess said, throwing a wink. "You’ve got an appointment to keep."
***
As she drove, Loess gave us a brief history lesson. The Old Town Motel, she told us, had first come to fame, or should that be infamy, some thirty years ago at a time when pretty much all organised crime in the city was orchestrated by three rival families. Three families at war, but a war that was costing each of them dear and holding them back in their main preoccupation: making money. Or at least, making even more money.
"So," she said, as the grey city whipped by though the windows, "One of the families reached out to the other two and proposed they hold a council of war. But the big question was where could they meet to discuss their business? They couldn’t agree to anywhere in the city else two of them would be in the third’s territory and none of them trusted the others as far as they could spit. No one would agree to be held at a disadvantage.
"The solution? The heads of all three headed out of town, to the nearest motel outside of the city limits – neutral territory – and they sat down, with the cops of course, and carved the city into big pieces of pie and, for a while I guess, peace reigned."
"Until?" I asked. There’s always an until, after all.
"Well," she said, flipping on the wipers as the first inevitable fat drops of rain spattered the windshield once more, heralding the beginning of yet another deluge. Despite knowing better, I had sort of hoped we were done with the rain for a while.
"For a time everything ran smoothly and more meetings were held at the Old Town, and there grew out of them a sort of code. All three families had to be represented at every meeting and all baggage was left at the door. It was like a church or something, holy ground. There was an understanding that this was equal territory and they all accepted that its value as such couldn’t be overestimated."
Our headlights cut a swath through the deepening afternoon, lighting the road markings like neon veins.
"But then, naturally, someone got greedy," she continued. "Someone started to wonder why they were only taking one third of the pie when there was so much more tasty tasty pie for the taking."
"I’ve just realised how hungry I am," Corg chimed in. Loess pointedly ignored him.
"So this one family, they thought about it and they planned and wondered how to hit their enemies – who were, after all, paranoid and never easy targets. I heard that none of the heads ever went anywhere without their own private retinue
of tough guys, drove bullet proof cars, the lot. It was only at this one place you saw them relax a little, and so they realized that they had the perfect opportunity for an ambush just waiting for them outside the city."
"At the motel?"
"Surely. So they paid off the cops and they came armed to the next sit down. And it was a bloodbath." We drove for a while in silence, listening to the steady swipe of the wipers. "Of course," she said at length, "It’s never that neat is it? Decapitate the head of the snake and two new heads grow back. In the end it spelled death for all three families and their turf war shifted, their influence diminished and they were gradually banished to my side of the Links and, I guess, everything that’s going on there grew out of it."
"But the Motel’s still there?" Corg asked.
"I guess it must be, though I imagine it must have seen better days. Here endeth the lesson," she added with a smile.
We rolled on still further, the city shrinking behind, the buildings becoming fewer until we were passing the kind of grubby industrial size shopping complexes and manufacturing zones that seem the make up the fringes of all major cities, lit by the kind of bright white lights that made your eyes ache.
"That was a fun story," Corg said at last, as I watched the city fade in the rearview. "I do kind of hope that it wasn’t portentous to our own situation, however."
Loess arched an eyebrow at him in the mirror.
"I mean," he said slowly, "I hope that we, too, aren’t happily rolling into a trap."
"Whimsy?" she asked, uncertainly. "Do you trust him?"
"We’ve never even met him," Corg replied.
"I trust him," I said simply. In truth I hadn’t even considered it until that moment but I knew the words to be true as I spoke them. "I saw his face when he saw me bleeding on the ground, it’s enough for me."
"Ah well," Loess said with a bright shrug. "Too late now anyway, I guess."
We had just passed the city limits.