The other item that caught my eye, mounted as it was on two narrow arms such that it ran parallel to the far edge of the desk, was an ornate, filigreed skim blade, its beveled cutting edge gleaming in the lamplight. The base on which it was displayed read:
To my beloved brother, Simon.
Until the stars burn out,
Grigori
A skim blade is demon-forged, and as hard and sharp as the fury of the Adversary himself, but it is no weapon. It’s used in the manufacture of skim, a demon drug of sorts made by shaving fragments of life experience from souls recently collected.
But skim blades have another function, too. They can be used to cleave a human soul entirely, a sacrifice so great and terrible it’s only used to fuel the most violent and desperate of magical rituals. A skim blade is what Ana used when she destroyed Danny’s soul as part of her rite to escape hell’s bonds. A rite she learned of through decades of painstaking research into what I’d thought to be an old wives’ tale – of a group of Collectors some three thousand years ago who called themselves the Brethren, and who, through a ritual in which they tore a soul asunder and brought forth the Great Flood, broke free of hell’s orbit forever.
I was pretty sure I was now in the presence of one of them.
“Quite the collection you’ve got here,” I said, plucking up the Maneki Neko all casual-like, as if I were inspecting it, rather than weighing the odds of bashing it into this dude’s skull if our little tête-à-tête went sideways.
He smiled. “I understand you’re something of a Collector yourself.”
“Cute.”
“It won’t do you any good, you know.”
“What’s that?”
“The lucky cat. I assume that’s why you’re holding it, no? In case this meeting comes to blows. And I’m telling you, it’s no use against the likes of me.”
“You sure about that?” I asked, remembering the havoc the last one wreaked on beings doubtless more powerful than this poor wretch.
“Of course I’m sure,” he snapped. “I made it. Originally, I enchanted a case of twelve, dimestore trinkets bought wholesale from a manufacturer in Taiwan. Stashed them wherever I thought they might prove useful. But objects of such power have a way of walking off. Much as my brazen head once did, when that bastard Pope Sylvester decided he had to have it, and stole it from me.”
I eyed the bust he indicated – bronze, tarnished, and unremarkable. “The fuck’s it do?” I asked.
“It’s an oracle of sorts. It’s said that it can answer any question truthfully, provided that question is phrased such that it may answer yes or no.”
“Does it work?” I asked.
“Yes,” replied the head, damn near causing me to jump out of my chair.
“No,” replied Magnusson.
“B-but it just said–”
“Oh, I didn’t say it couldn’t speak. Just that it no more knows the secrets of the universe than you or I. Well, more you than I. I assure you, the human mind that I encased inside it was quite infirm to begin with, and has only grown madder as the centuries have passed. The only thing keeping it from gibbering like an idiot all day long is it’s mystically forbidden from saying anything but ‘yes’ or ‘no’.”
The old man gave me the stare-down for a moment, and then, more serious now, continued. “Tell me,” he said, “do you know why you are here?”
“I’m starting to get an inkling,” I replied. “You’re Brethren, aren’t you?”
“Aren’t you the clever one,” he said. “For over three thousand years we Nine lived unmolested, protected by the same Great Truce that stemmed the tide of war between the heavens and the realms below. And then you and your idiot friends ginned up delusions of grandeur, and decided to recreate our ritual to free yourselves from servitude as we once did.”
“That ain’t exactly how it all went down,” I said, but Magnusson raised his good hand to silence me.
“Spare me your frayed yarns and tired excuses,” he said. “I assure you, I’m interested in neither. Do you know why we Nine were successful in our endeavor?”
“I have a feeling you’re about to enlighten me.”
“Oh, I doubt very much your capacity for enlightenment, though I shall try. We succeeded because we had vision. Creativity. We escaped the bonds of slavery because not a being in the universe but us believed that it could work. You and your friends had no such advantage, which is why you were doomed to fail, and fools to even attempt it.”
“And here I figured you got by on your rakish good looks.”
His face twisted momentarily into a gruesome mask of fury, quickly mastered. “You mock what you cannot understand. When you look upon me, you see something to be reviled, yes? Pitied, perhaps?”
“I wouldn’t expect much of a line at your kissing booth, if that’s what you mean,” I replied.
“Again with the juvenile humor. A pointless act of childish rebellion. But your words hurt me not a bit. You see, when I look upon my own reflection, I see not a monstrous visage worthy of your scorn. I see the culmination of fifty lifetimes spent in the service of science and magic both; the great triumph of human ingenuity – my ingenuity – in besting death. For you see, the eternal life my siblings and I fought so hard for is not without its drawbacks. Unlike you, we cannot simply flit from vessel to vessel. Our flesh and soul are fused. We can scarcely stretch our consciousness enough to control those most dimwitted of humans who happen through our sphere of influence,” he said, eyes swiveling toward the plastic-sheeted surgical suite, where Gareth – still hosing down the effluvia left behind by Magnusson’s procedure – suddenly began to whistle the selfsame Wagner opera Magnusson was whistling upon our entry. A few notes in, he fell silent once more.
“And even then,” Magnusson continued, looking drained, “only temporarily. Since we are condemned to our fleshly prisons for all eternity, we require constant replenishment to push back against the ravages of time. In our early days, we bathed in the blood of innocents – stoking the flames of war and of distrust, even drumming up an Inquisition or two if need be – to ensure our cups ever runneth over. A few of my kind still do, in fact, so entrenched are they in the old ways they refuse to acknowledge the world has moved on without them. Others found the unpleasant necessities of our lifestyle so distasteful, they broke from the pack to form another, taking refuge on a wooded continent as far from civilization as they could manage, so as to not be tempted to feast on the life-sustaining flesh and blood of the living. Their efforts proved shortsighted, as that vast, sparsely populated continent they chose to make their home was discovered not long after by our standards. Turns out the poor, misled bastards starved themselves just long enough, subsisting for centuries on the scant life-force of wild game, to drive themselves quite mad. Now they’re nothing more than feral beasts, feasting on the very species they sought to spare. Through rigorous application of the scientific method to the so-called arcane art of magic, I alone have happened upon our true path, our true future; one to which I hope my dear siblings will one day come around. Thanks to the great strides I’ve made in my own nascent field of molecumancy, muscles, bones, and organs – and yes, even skin – may be replaced as they each in turn fail. Vitality may be replenished through regular transfusions. Immune responses can be managed mystically to avoid rejection, and ensure a perfect join between old and new, regardless of the source. Which means our bodies can even be augmented, transformed into something greater than human; what Nietzsche called the Übermensch. A true self-made man.”
“Christ,” I said. “You give that speech to every mother whose baby starts wailing when it catches a glimpse of you? You’re no fucking superman, you’re a decrepit mess with delusions of grandeur, and you look like the goddamned Crypt Keeper. I fail to see how that makes you better than the people you prey upon.”
Magnusson waved a hand dismissively in my direction. “Your choice of words, though no doubt borne of carelessness, is apt. You do, indeed, fail
to see. My outward appearance I manage by employing a simple glamour – one which projects an image of a kindly old man to anyone who looks my way. I can even, for short stretches in controlled environments, force that glamour to imprint itself onto film – a discovery that proved a revelation to one so long relegated to the shadows. Now I’m known the world over as a great pillar of the international business community, one whose holdings in the fields of technology and biosciences have improved humankind’s understanding of themselves and quality of life in ways none but me had the vision to imagine. My false face graces billboards, and speaks to thousands of Magnusson Industries employees every year via my very own dedicated satellite network. But I refuse to wear it here. Here, I am my truest self.”
“Here, where you slaughter innocents, you mean. Your methods may differ from those of your fellow Brethren, but it seems to me you pillage the living just the same.”
“For now, yes, but only by necessity. I derive no pleasure from it. One day soon, I shall possess the means to cultivate my own replacement parts, at which point I’ll no longer have any need to pester the living. And I assure you, those from whom I borrow are hardly innocent. I own a number of institutions both penal and mental from which I draw as needed – once the potential donor has met my rigorous screening requirements, of course. Borrow portions of an undiagnosed schizophrenic’s frontal lobe just once, and you too will become a stickler for prescreening, although the dreams, I confess, were quite engaging. I removed it a week later to stop the voices, opening my skull with hammer and chisel by my reflection in the washroom mirror and scooping it out with a soup spoon in my desperation. But sometimes, they taunt me still.”
“Least you’re never lonely,” I replied. “Speaking of, maybe you and they could finish this conversation without me. I mean, thanks for having me and all, and really,” I said, looking around the dank, echoey space of the abandoned public bath, “it’s a lovely home you’ve got here, but I’ve had about as much hospitality as I can stand for one day. So, if you don’t mind…”
The old man laughed once more. “My home? You think this is my home? Oh, no, dear boy. I’ve a penthouse not far from here on Piccadilly, a country estate some hours north, a small island in the Caribbean, the top five floors of a high-rise in Hong Kong that bears my name. This place is merely a refuge of sorts, where I can carry out my more… esoteric experiments away from the prying eyes of those who might wish to put a stop to them.”
I pictured a bleached white crow, its eyes burned out of its head. And a man made of crows three stories high; an old god named Charon, whose dominion was the vast nothing separating life and death known as the In-Between, and the Collectors who routinely passed through it as they traveled from vessel to vessel. It was he who absorbed the energy released by Danny’s riven soul during Ana’s recreation of the Brethren escape-ritual, thereby sparing the living world a horrid fate. I had it on good authority he was none too fond of the Brethren. He didn’t cotton much to folks who took advantage of his beneficence.
“You’re hiding from Charon,” I said.
“Amongst others,” said the old man. “Unaffiliated deities such as he can prove as volatile as they are unpredictable, and he’s no great fan of me or mine. But there’s value in staying off heaven and hell’s respective radars as well, particularly as they descend once more toward all-out war. Ours are dangerous times, Mr. Thornton – for the living and the dead both. For the first time in three thousand years, I wonder just how long any of us on this spinning rock have left. And speaking of hell’s radar, where does your handler think you are right now?”
“Lilith found me at the cemetery, same as you, so she knows that I’m in Jolly Old, but I didn’t exactly have time to file a flight plan with her before your goon – excuse me, driver – absconded with me.”
At the mention of Lilith’s name Magnusson started, but whatever emotion just passed through him, his hodgepodge features were inscrutable. “That is reassuring to hear,” he said. “For it would not do to have her waiting at the gates, once I take my leave of you this night. It’s shame enough I had to sacrifice my sanctuary just to neutralize the threat you pose, the last thing I need is to tussle with the likes of her.”
At the implied threat behind his words, I tensed. Fear, cold and slithering, coiled itself around my stomach. “You must know I can’t be killed,” I told him. “If I were, I’d be reseeded somewhere else.”
“Fear not, Collector, I’ve no intention of killing you. I simply chose to remove you from the field of play.”
That’s when it occurred to me. “The bed…” I said.
“…is yours, of course. And I do hope you find it to your liking. You’ll be sleeping in it for centuries to come.”
“The hell I will.”
“Oh, I fear you haven’t any choice. And Samuel?”
“Yeah?”
“You really should have accepted my offer of tea.”
And that is when the patchwork man attacked.
3.
Look, I’m no idiot. This gig of mine, as awful as it is, comes with its share of downtime, much of it passed surfing cable in fleabag motels, or thumbing through whatever tacky airport thriller happens to grace my meat-suit’s nightstand. So sure, I’m well aware when a creepy-ass mad scientist transports you to his secret lair unblindfolded and then lays in on the mustache-twirling monologue, you oughta figure your day’s about to take a turn for the shark-mounted death-ray. But what I didn’t expect from this decrepit sack of patchwork skin and bone was that he’d try to take me on himself. Nor did I have the faintest inkling the freaky son of a bitch would be more than equal to the task.
When Magnusson first began to rise from his wheelchair, my brain couldn’t make a lick of sense of it. Then his lap-blanket fell away, and my confusion and mounting fear were replaced by revulsion. What I’d taken for spindly old-man legs beneath the woven blanket were in fact the front-most two of four ropy, mismatched arms, which angled elbows-up away from his withered trunk in such a way the knot of mottled scar tissue at their join where his junk should’ve been was visible as his robe slipped open. The two rear arms, which had been hidden under his robe, folded beneath him, and then pressed palm-down on the wheelchair’s seat, lifting him upward. As I watched, they first one and then the other moved from the leather seat to the wheelchair’s armrests like a gymnast gripping pommels. I had just long enough to think that suddenly the flurry of activity I’d half-glimpsed through the plastic sheeting on my way in made a lot more sense, when this monster rendered in stolen flesh and bone launched himself at me.
The wheelchair shot backward, slammed into a set of shelves, glass shattering and noxious smells. Magnusson vaulted over the desk, his two proper arms extended toward me as if to throttle me, the palms of his two front leg-hands slapping the mahogany to maintain his momentum, and spilling the desk’s contents across the pool tiles. His silk smoking jacket trailed behind him like a paisley cape, its belt tie flailing open on either side. The gas lantern hit the tiles with a wind-chime crash, its fuel igniting as it splashed across the floor and scattered papers and casting long, flickering shadows through the vast, empty space – a storybook hell made real.
I had no time to react. The club chair tipped over backward as he slammed into me – his one dark, beefy proper hand on my throat, pinning me in place; the two hands on his forelegs gripping white-knuckled the leather of the chair wings; his two hind-leg hands digging into my knees. The naked join of his four lower limbs was scant inches above me, scarred and filthy and reeking like an open sewer. With his one withered hand, he reached into an interior pocket of the smoking jacket and withdrew an old, glass syringe filled with a sickly amber liquid, cloudy and flocculent. Attached to the syringe was a heavy-gauge needle three inches long.
I clawed and scratched at the old man’s face. Skin sloughed off in patches beneath my fingers, revealing yellow adipose tissue like fresh-plucked chicken and glistening cords of blood-red muscle streaked with p
urple. Its scent hit my nostrils, earthy and animal and tinged faintly with rot, and the loosed scraps fluttered black and withered to the ground, aging decades in the seconds after they were set free from this monster’s horrid form. But the bastard just laughed, and removed the protective sheath from the needle with his crooked, gray-black teeth. Vision growing spotty, I couldn’t help but note how long and sharp those teeth were, now that his cracked, parchment-colored lips were pulled back to display them in all their glory. Like an animal’s I realized – or maybe several animals’.
A mouth full of stolen canines.
“Do you see now how little chance you stand against me? You who cling to your petty human worldview, your myopic human sense of what is possible?”
But I didn’t see. My eyes were clenched tight in concentration. My consciousness probing. Seeking. Reaching for another meat-suit.
I brushed against Magnusson’s own consciousness, but recoiled as soon as I made contact. It was too foreign, too alien, too goddamn corrupted for me to work with. I’d barely grazed him, and I hope to God he didn’t notice, but God ain’t one to listen to me, I guess, because Magnusson roared in sudden rage and backhanded me twice in rapid succession.
Made sense. He had backhands to spare.
I reached my mind toward Gareth’s next. When I touched him, I realized the Welshman was frightened. I found him huddled, shaking in the far corner of the plastic-sheeted room, a toppled tray of bloodied surgical equipment scattered all around. The stainless steel mortuary slab was thankfully above his eye level, and harsh white light from the surgical light above cast a corona all around it, so my hazy, impressionistic remote-view afforded me blissfully little detail of its viscera-draped surface. But I saw one bare leg, female, dangling off the nearest edge. The dead woman’s toes were painted a glossy coral pink, and her calf was tanned and shapely. Well, the bit of it that was still whole. There was a scalpel-slice below her knee the circumference of her leg, and a perpendicular cut proceeding halfway down her shin. The skin below her knee was folded down over itself like an unzipped leather boot. Fluids dripped from the corners created by the vertical slice onto the floor, the tap-tap-tap echoing dully in the emptiness.
The Big Reap Page 4