He ventured farther into the damp, dark space, footsteps quiet and slow. The roots got thicker and denser as he progressed, until the rock walls almost completely disappeared. Unlike the stairs, this place was warm. Like the stairs, it smelled of cave—that dark, earthy sort of smell—but there was something else, too. An edge of something unpleasant, something rotten.
Sigmund moved deeper into the cavern, into what must have been a truly enormous space. The light from his phone was effective, but it illuminated only one wall, the rest being lost in darkness. It would have been sort of cool, almost—exploring some unseen world like a supernatural David Attenborough—if it weren’t for the fact that Sigmund knew he wasn’t alone.
The murmuring and shuffling sounds he’d heard in the courtyard hadn’t gone away. They’d grown clearer, in fact. Clear enough that Sigmund could tell the words weren’t being said in English. They didn’t sound like happy words, and down here they were accompanied by what sounded an awful lot like the clinking of chains.
The smell got worse as the sounds got louder. A deep body stench: sweat and piss and shit and vomit and blood and death. By the time the stairs had vanished beyond the reach of Sigmund’s light, the smell was a tangible thing, pressing itself against Sigmund’s throat, sending him retching and choking on his own bile.
Still, he kept walking. It wasn’t that he was afraid, exactly. Sure, he was shaking and his grip was damp enough to make holding on to his phone difficult, but the terror lived somewhere deeper than physical fear. He knew where he was. Or, rather, a part of him did. The part that had been here before.
The edge of something caught on the light, and Sigmund veered toward it. Away from the wall, into the blackness, stumbling over slippery roots.
The new shape was large, rectangular, pale, and awfully familiar. It should’ve been. Sigmund had been walking past it nearly every day of his adult life and many times before. Three huge stone slabs, a hole piercing the center of each and a strange depression in the top. In front of the LB headquarters it was an eccentric and slightly ugly piece of modern art. Here it was…
Here, it was.
The stone blocks were taller than Sigmund, but a large, arching root rose up beside them. Sigmund crawled up it, fingers digging between whorls in the bark, trying not to slip on the surface and wishing he didn’t feel like he’d done this all before.
The noises were coming from the top of the slabs. Incoherent whimpering, punctuated by the clinking of metal and, this close, a hissing sound.
Slowly, Sigmund stood up, already knowing what he’d see when he peered over the stone. And there, chained in place by heavy irons wrapped around his chest and his hips and his ankles, was a man.
An apt description, really. The thing certainly had been a man at some point, though now only the barest of evidence survived. A gaunt, bloodstained outline of something that had once lived, and now only waited.
Sigmund could see the thing’s scarred lips moving in time with its cracked voice, milky green eyes staring sightlessly into the void, not responding to Sigmund’s light or his presence. The clinking sound came regularly, every few seconds, caused by the violent jerks that ran through the thing’s limbs. Jerks caused by a poison drip, falling in its face from somewhere in the darkness up above. Each drop burning into flesh with tiny, hissing bubbles, turning lips and sockets a rotten, necrotic black.
Sigmund wondered how long the thing had been here, alone, that it didn’t even scream.
Next to the figure’s head, sitting on the slab, was a stone bowl. Sigmund had seen that before, too, though only more recently and that version had been cracked. This one wasn’t.
Which made it a small thing, really, to pick the bowl up—it was surprisingly light, though Sigmund doubted that would last—and hold it out, over the man’s face, and catch the drops.
NINETEEN
Even knowing they were going to hit, the impact was still shocking.
“Hold on!” Wayne yelled. She floored the accelerator, pointing the Beetle straight at the thing standing outside Sigmund’s house. She didn’t know what it was, but it hadn’t noticed them and she wasn’t about to take the risk that it might.
“Wayne what are—?” was all Em managed before they hit the monster. Wayne got a flash of milky green eyes, wide in shock, set in a face that almost looked familiar. Then, in the next instant, the car shuddered and the windshield shattered as the thing’s huge, charcoal dark body rolled up the hood.
Wayne lost control of the car for one heart-stopping moment after that. Careening across the street in a squeal of tires, before managing to pull to a halt about three houses down. They’d spun completely around in the chaos, and in the fluttering glow from the headlights, Wayne could just make out the shape of the thing they’d hit. It was lying on the ground, unmoving.
“What the fucking fuck was that!” Em, unsurprisingly, didn’t sound amused. Wayne wasn’t sure if she was inquiring about the thing on the ground or the fact that Wayne had just run it over.
“It was looking at Sig’s house, man!”
“It’s a public street!”
Wayne turned to look at Em, who returned her incredulous stare with interest paid in sheer, unadulterated terror.
Still, Wayne wasn’t going to be made to feel guilty. “ ‘Public street’? That thing wasn’t human!”
“That doesn’t mean you can just run it down!”
Wayne opened her mouth to argue, then closed it again. Em might have had a point. Maybe. But if the thing was hostile, then what? They were trapped in some crazy hell dimension. Wayne hardly thought that stopping to ask for directions was going to be a good opening gambit.
“Fuck! Oh fuck it’s moving!” Em had flicked her eyes back to the street. “Wayne! Fuck! It’s moving, Wayne, you’ve pissed it off oh fuck oh fuck!” Her hand shot out, wrapping itself in a painful, white-knuckled grip around Wayne’s bicep. Em wasn’t cut out for this sort of thing, not really. She liked video games as much as the next girl, but in her heart of hearts she was an office worker. Strictly white collar. Wayne was sympathetic, even if it was a sentiment she didn’t share.
She’d left her makeshift spear lying in the back of the car, and she unbuckled her belt and jumped out in order to retrieve it. Em’s fingernails scratched when Wayne’s arm pulled out of reach, and Wayne’s back twanged a bit from the accident, but she ignored both sensations. Instead, she threw open the Beetle’s rear door, retrieving the spear with only a minimum of awkwardness.
Em was right, and the thing they’d hit was moving. Groaning, too, from the sound of it. Wayne didn’t care. Blood and adrenaline, fight or flight. She was armed and she was coming, crossing the distance between the car and the monster, spear raised and ready.
And then, when she was almost within striking distance, the thing looked up. Its face—monstrous and ruined and suspiciously familiar—flicking between all-too-human expressions of rage and shock as it said, “Murphy?”
When Wayne’s foot next fell, the jolt from the disrupted momentum rattled up her entire leg. Wayne ignored it, spear tip clattering to the road in one horrific moment of realization, of recognition. Because that voice, that face. They were wrong somehow, grotesque and distorted but still recognizable as—
“Lain?”
The Lain-thing’s shoulders sagged in relief as the expected blow was diverted. It opened its mouth as if to answer, but something about the way leather stitches pulled against its black, too-wide lips snapped Wayne out of her confusion.
“What the bloody hell are you?” she demanded, bringing the spear back up again, the tip a fraction of an inch from the thing’s neck. It was still mostly prone on the ground, and Wayne was determined to keep it that way. “Where’s Sigmund?”
It was at about this point that Em arrived, jogging up beside Wayne, calling her name in terror. Em was brandishing her rolling pin, but she didn’t look convincing. Breathing hard, her face contorted into a double take when she caught sight of not-Lain.
“Wh-what the fu—?”
“I asked you a question! Where is Sigmund?” Wayne pushed the tip of the spear into not-Lain’s throat, hard enough to draw a line of dark blood. It sizzled against the surface of Em’s best chef’s knife. Wayne decided she’d apologize later.
Not-Lain’s eyes were a weird, uniform milky green that almost seemed to glow in the darkness, but Wayne could still tell when it flicked them between her and Em. It pulled its head back to extract its throat from the tip of Wayne’s spear and said, “I don’t know. We got separated. I hope he’s taken my car back to LB like I told him to.” Its voice was cracked and rough, the register jumping all over the place, but still identifiably Lain’s.
Em noticed it, too. “Wayne! Wayne, Jesus fuck that’s—”
“No,” Wayne could hear the threat in her voice as she said it, low and quiet. “It’s not Lain. Lain doesn’t exist, does he?”
The thing on the ground returned her stare. “I wasn’t aware we were here for semantics,” it said finally. Then, “You already know what I am, Ms. Murphy.”
It had a point. “Yeah,” she said, lowering the spear. “Yeah. I just didn’t expect…” Sigmund had said something about horns, though, hadn’t he? He’d apparently neglected to mention the tail and the talons and the almost-glowing tattoos and, gods, the scars. So many scars.
“Well, this is all fantastic,” Em said. “Would someone like to explain what the fuck is going on?”
“Em, meet Loki. The god. Loki, you already know Em.”
Grinning a grin that was all fangs and stitches, Loki stood up. And up. Lain was tall but Loki was huge, easily seven feet. Huge and broad and charcoal skinned and topped off with a swept-back pair of horns and a shaggy mane of flame-colored feathers that seemed to flicker in the dim light.
Em’s mouth snapped shut with a click when the god held out his claw. She shook it, dazed, eyes still glued to the thing in front of her.
“You’re a…god?” Em’s voice cracked when she spoke.
“Yes.” Loki’s expression was patient and, for the moment, faintly amused.
“You’re dating Sigmund!” Then, as if to emphasize the point, “Sigmund!”
“Yes,” Loki said.
“And you’re a god. Like, actually, literally a god?” Em’s voice had turned skeptical, which Wayne took to be a good sign.
“Yes.”
“Prove it!”
Loki laughed. It sounded like a wildfire, like an earthquake, and Wayne winced. He was amused. She wouldn’t like to hear his laugh when he wasn’t. “Maybe later,” he said. “I think there are more important things right now.”
“Like what is going on around here,” Wayne prompted.
The god nodded, then started walking toward where Wayne’s smashed VW had skidded to a halt a few meters down the street. When no explanation was forthcoming, Wayne shot Em a look. Or tried to. Em was still staring sort of blankly into the middle distance, lips muttering something inaudible. She looked like someone who’d just watched her entire worldview tilt ninety degrees and was still struggling with the vertigo. Wayne decided to leave her to it, taking her arm and leading her over to where Loki was peering into the driver’s side of the car. As they approached, the engine gunned to life. Wayne didn’t remember turning it off.
“Success!” the god declared, turning toward them with a grin like an open wound.
Wayne indicated the shattered windshield. “Visibility might be a problem.”
Loki inspected the damage, elbow in one hand and claw picking at the stitches in his lip. It was more than just a little uncomfortable to watch, so Wayne didn’t.
The car’s windscreen was screwed. The impact of the god’s body had turned the entire surface into a mass of opaque crazing. It glittered sort of prettily, but didn’t do much for visibility.
The laminating had held the glass together in a single sheet, but one of the corners was lifted slightly out of its frame. Wayne watched as Loki pushed his fingers into the gap and pulled. The glass screamed as he tore it free, but when he was done, Wayne’s car was minus one visibility problem.
“I hope you’re gonna pay for that.”
“Sure,” Loki said, a bit too cheerfully. “As soon as you apologize for running me over.”
“Uh…”
Wayne got an elbow in the ribs at the words, and when she looked down, Em was giving her best I-told-you-so glare.
“It hurt, you know,” Loki was saying, voice still laced with faux cheer and teeth. “Shattered my collarbone, hip, broke three ribs, spinal fracture…not to mention what the road did to my skin. I heal fast but th—”
“Okay, I get it,” Wayne blurted, popping between the squeeze of Loki’s narrative and Em’s glare. “I’m sorry. I just— I thought you were—”
“A monster?” Loki gave her a look, the ridge of one brow cocked. When he put it like that, it did sound sort of…not like the greatest excuse in the world.
“I told her it was a public street,” Em said, the urge to be right temporarily overriding her existential horror. “You can’t just go running people down because they look different.”
Wayne was certain her face was fast approaching the color of her dreads. Loki studied her for a while longer, and she found herself fidgeting under the unfocused, milk green gaze. When he turned away, it felt like something physical. The release of a pressure that Wayne hadn’t noticed until it was gone. Her breath started again in a gasp, heart racing.
(he’s a god, he acts like he’s just some guy but he isn’t he’s deeper and older and dangerous and be careful, be very careful)
Apparently done with Wayne, Loki returned his attention to the car. “Someone’s going to have to drive,” he said finally. “This thing isn’t made for my feet.”
That was probably an understatement. Loki’s “feet” looked like something out of a museum. Wayne loved dinosaurs, real-life dragons that they were. She’d put Loki as coming from somewhere in the late Jurassic.
A thought occurred. “Um, hey. You realize you’re, like, naked, right?” It was true, more or less. It wasn’t like she could see anything—Loki had ash gray feathers running down from his navel and across the backs of his thighs and down his lower legs—but Wayne felt it was the principle of the thing.
Loki apparently didn’t agree and gave her another raised-brow look. He was good at those, she thought, trying to ignore her cheeks heating up yet again.
“Dude, he’s totally not.” That was Em. “He’s wearing a wrist cuff.” She was smirking when Wayne glanced down at her.
Loki gave a dark bark of laughter in return, holding up his left arm: He did, indeed, have a black leather wrist cuff. Wayne remembered seeing it on Lain.
“If we’re done, we need to go.” The tip of the god’s tail flicked like a cat’s, huge fringe exaggerating the otherwise subtle gesture.
“I’ll drive,” Wayne said. She didn’t ask why Loki didn’t just assume Lain’s form again. Maybe he couldn’t, not here. It seemed as good a reason as any.
“Shotgun backseat,” Em said. Then, when they both looked at her, “Front’s fucking dangerous, man. No windscreen.”
She had a point. “I’ll go slow,” Wayne said as they climbed into the battered-but-still-functioning vehicle. She half expected Loki to contradict her, but the god kept quiet.
“You said you think Sig headed to LB?” Wayne asked as she started to pull down the Sussmans’ street. With no glass protecting them, the wind picked up quickly. She really was going to have to take it slow.
Loki nodded. He definitely wasn’t designed for the car. He’d pushed the seat all the way back and was still an awkward-looking curl of limbs and tail, too big, too tall, and too inhuman.
“Take a right down the bottom here,” he said.
“But that—” Would take them in totally the opposite direction to town.
“I know. There’s somewhere else we have to go first.”
TWENTY
Drip. Drip. Drip.
> One drop, one second. Almost like clockwork.
Drip. Drip.
Sixty seconds in a minute, three thousand six hundred in an hour. Eighty-six thousand four hundred in a day.
Drip.
Impossible to be sure without measuring, but assuming one drop equaled a minim, that meant five milliliters a minute or three hundred in an hour. A thousand in a liter: three and a half hours, give or take.
Drip. Drip. Drip.
Six hours: one point eight liters. Twelve hours: three point six.
Seven point two liters per day.
Drip. Drip.
About two thousand six hundred and twenty eight liters per year. For one thousand years. So two point six megaliters, give or take.
Or, to put it another way, about one Olympic-sized swimming pool.
Drip.
The bowl was maybe fifteen centimeters wide inside the rim and slightly less than half a sphere. So maybe it could hold two liters. Meaning it would have to be emptied about four times a day.
Or, six hundred and fifty thousand times in total. Plus change.
Drip. Drip.
The bowl was stone, thick rimmed and heavy. Say about one kilo. Plus about another two when full. So a varying weight of one to three kilograms, held up at right angles from the body, all day every day.
For one thousand years.
Drip. Drip.
There was no way of measuring time, other than by the filling of the bowl. Sigmund’s phone was in his pocket, but he didn’t trust his shaking arms enough to reach for it. He should have thought about that earlier.
But he hadn’t.
His arms were trembling and his feet ached, legs and lower back threatening to go next. Even a chair would’ve been an improvement. Or some kind of really huge retort stand.
Anything.
He’d been working out the volume of the drips when the…thing had noticed his presence. Thin, bony claws reaching out and snatching at the hem of Sigmund’s hoodie, fast enough to make him shriek and jerk backward.
Liesmith Page 21