The Price

by Joseph Garraty

  Of course.

  I looked at the drawing, the candles. It was like the old days back in Benedict’s lab, only this was much bigger, and I couldn’t just reach across it. The candles needed to go in specific spots along the inner rim of the broad circle at the center of the diagram. I took the candles, stepped across, then looked around the room. I couldn’t shake the feeling something was missing.

  “You ready or what?” Lazzaro asked.

  I stared. This whole setup was among the most profoundly bad ideas I’d ever encountered. Fascinating, but profoundly bad all the same. Good sense told me to get the hell out while I could, but I was pretty sure that wouldn’t go over worth a shit. And, Christ, what if it worked?

  “You ready?”

  I nodded.

  Lazzaro started the incantation while my mind whirled. I couldn’t tell exactly what the spell was, but I had some ideas. He was going to pull something through, there was little doubt about that, and he was going to use it to work some bad-fucking-juju death magic. I remembered Benedict’s warnings about this kind of thing—the price would be unimaginable, and whatever Lazzaro summoned, it would make the Devourer I’d called up look like a pet hamster. If he thought he could control something like that, he was out of his mind.

  Lazzaro nodded at me, and I lit the first candle, kneeling as I put it down on the sinuous Scythe symbol nearest me. He continued chanting, pulling another foul-sounding verse up from his wretched guts.

  Another nod, another candle, and now a terrible scent, burned iron and drowned corpse, stung my nose. The shadows danced.

  Four candles. Five, six. Seven. The torches in the room went out. The braziers, too, but a ghostly light had started to emanate from the drawing itself. I saw the names of the mayor and a couple of city council members on the edge of the circle. Old Man Chebyshev’s son. A couple of other lowlifes I knew of. Several I didn’t. Lazzaro had lost his goddamn mind. Was he trying to wipe them all out? Was this what Kelsen had been fucking with?

  What if this actually worked? Was that possible? It shouldn’t work, it was way too complex for Lazzaro—and yet, it looked right. It felt right. If it worked . . . well, Lazzaro would be the new golden boy, that was sure. If he lived, which I doubted very much.

  I thought I saw something move at the edge of the candlelight, and I twitched, half-turning.

  Nothing.

  Lazzaro started moving around the outer edge of the diagram as he chanted, taking steps in a slow, rhythmic cadence. I moved around the inner edge to the next symbol. The Slob’s name was written over here. I wonder if Lazzaro thought I wouldn’t notice, or if he thought I wouldn’t care. What the hell was he trying to accomplish? For one second, I thought about the potential here. This could be the solution I’d been searching for, an awful but complete way of obliterating my problems. If I wiped out all the Mafia higher-ups in Boston, nobody would come after me. I could get out.

  You know a forty-five can take a man’s hand off at the wrist?. . . He screamed like a little bitch.

  I shuddered. No. The price was too high, and I remembered what Benedict had said about this kind of shit. Even when it goes right, it goes wrong.

  Nine candles.

  A wind roared through the room, nearly drowning out the sound of Lazzaro’s voice. The candles didn’t so much as flicker.

  Ten candles, eleven.

  My thoughts moved away from using this magic for my own purposes, turning instead to wondering about Lazzaro’s purposes. He was making a power play the likes of which nobody had ever seen. A horrible thought occurred to me. What if he ended up in charge? Was that even possible?

  He had shown up at my parents’ house.

  Twelve.

  I finally figured out what was missing. The sacrifice. Even Kelsen had used blood, and for something this big, surely there’d need to be a sacrifice.

  Then something he’d said caught up to me. I thought you were dead when we found you.

  We.

  What if it hadn’t been Benedict checking on my calls? What if somebody else had found my stuff and given it to Benedict later, after rummaging through my call logs, among other things?

  The sacrifice wasn’t missing at all. I was right here.

  Lazzaro forced the incantation through gritted teeth as the shrieking wind in the room mounted. I saw a glimmer in his hand, just as he circled around to my right side, hiding his hand with his body.

  He was five steps away from me, one candle from completion. This was it, the scenario I’d been dreading since I got out of the hospital. Alone with somebody I’d known for ages, and this was going to be far worse than a couple of quick shots to the head.

  Thirteen candles, and Lazzaro made his move. From the corner of my eye, I saw the faint upturned crescent of an evil smile twisting his face.

  I made my decision. I reached out and, with the middle finger of my left hand, wiped away one of the lines of the binding. Just one, but it was the right one. I have a knack for these things.

  The candles went out, and the heat in the room became unbearable, stifling, like being suspended over the furnace of a dragon’s gullet. The air was crushed from my lungs. Through the darkness, the chalk lines blazed bright. I felt that familiar sense of rushing, and this time it was something vast, enormous, and utterly, utterly awful. Lazzaro looked at me, eyes wide, grin vanished. The knife in his hand clattered to the floor. “Something’s wrong!” he yelled.

  Then he saw the glowing streak of chalk on my finger.

  “Jimmy! You—”

  He never finished. There was a motion, barely visible in the dark room, something like a shadowy hand or a forked tongue or a headsman’s axe, and he fell to the floor, writhing and screaming.

  I ran.

  Chapter 25. More Bad Things

  I didn’t slow as I neared the top of the stairs, even though the noises from Lazzaro’s ritual below had stopped, or at least I couldn’t hear them anymore over my pounding heart. I didn’t care one way or the other—I was leaving, and that was that. I burst through the door, banging it loudly against the moldering plaster wall, and ran right into Big George and Patsy. More Big George than Patsy. He was a bigger target.

  “Whoa! What’s going on, Jimmy?” Big George put a hand on my chest, steadying me. In the faint light that squeezed in around the boarded-up windows, his face looked sickly pale. “It sounds like the end of the fuckin’ world down there.”

  I fought the urge to look behind me, where the door was still gaping open, and I tried to act calm. I wasn’t fooling anyone. “I don’t know,” I said. “Lazzaro—Frankie—I don’t know what the hell he’s doing, and I don’t wanna know.”

  The two men shared a glance I didn’t care for. Did they know why Lazzaro had brought me here? How much had Lazzaro told? “He still down there?” Patsy asked, squinting.

  “I don’t know,” I said, truthfully enough. Maybe he was down there. Maybe only parts of him were. Or maybe he was gone entirely. I didn’t care, but I felt an almost overwhelming compulsion to run, to get as far from that goddamn house as possible.

  “You’re losing it, Jimmy.”

  “Don’t I know it.” I tried to laugh, but I sounded like a diseased chicken.

  “I don’t like this,” Big George said. “What was all that noise? Is Frankie okay, or what?” He looked down the shaft of the stairwell, where sad pale light trickled down and faded into nothing. He put a giant hand on my shoulder. “Maybe we oughta have a look.”

  “I don’t know if that’s such a hot idea,” I said. “What’s down there—it’s Lazzaro’s idea of a sick joke, I think.” I didn’t have to fake the look of fear and revulsion that crossed my face.

  Patsy grinned and jerked his head toward the stairs. “C’mon, Georgie, let’s go check it out.”

  Big George shrugged his mammoth shoulders. “Sure.” His hand dropped away, and he lumbered around me. The two men started down the stairs.

  They don’t know. Just like that, I was in the clear, bu
t I stood there like a moron instead of running for the car. I was afraid that, if I took a step, I’d collapse. My breath shuddered in my ears.

  That’s when I heard his voice.

  “Jimmy.”

  It was Lazzaro, there could be no mistake. I turned back to the stairs, seemingly against my will, and walked to the landing. Big George and Patsy paid me no mind as they descended the wide staircase, but if I looked past them, I could see a pair of expensive leather shoes reflecting the last light that filtered down the staircase. Higher up, was that the bright, hard glitter of eyes? I thought so.

  “You fucked me over, Jimmy.”

  Something black moved in the darkness behind Lazzaro, and I smelled burning. I froze. The apparition from my nightmares, the thing that had plagued me in a thousand bad dreams, was down there, behind Lazzaro—and this was no dream. The fucking thing had invaded my waking life. How? Had I dragged it screaming into the real world somehow? Had Lazzaro? Had Lazzaro brought it back with him somehow?

  Big George and Patsy stopped halfway down the stairs. “What’s goin’ on, Frankie?” Big George asked.

  Lazzaro stepped forward, grinning, and the thing behind him shifted.

  I pulled my gun and started shooting. Lazzaro staggered, stumbled into the light and collapsed on the stairs. Big George and Patsy spun around, confusion on their faces as they reached for their own pieces.

  What could I do? I shot both of them.

  * * *

  I ran from the house like all the demons of Hell were behind me, which might not have been all that far from the truth, as far as I knew. I tripped at the top of the porch steps, somehow made it down them in a weird sort of rolling stumble, skidded on the patch of dirt at the bottom, and kept running all the way to Lazzaro’s car.

  Fuck. Lazzaro’s car. Locked, of course. I cast a hurried glance back at the house, where the yawning black mouth of the door threatened to spew forth infernal horrors at any moment. Had I left that door open, or had somebody opened it and followed me out? I spun, looking behind me. No one.

  Lazzaro’s car. Great. What the hell was I supposed to do with this thing? If anybody saw me in it, I’d be fucked. Really, Jimmy?More fucked than you are now? I laughed hysterically.

  I gave half a second’s thought to the idea of fleeing on foot and discarded it. If anything came out of the house, I didn’t want to have to outrun it. Even if nothing did come, I didn’t want to try to walk home from here, looking behind myself block after block, wondering if I was being stalked and starting at every clatter of branch or scrape of can bouncing along the sidewalk.

  “No thank you,” I said, and I kicked in the driver’s-side window. The sound of breaking glass seemed to fill the whole street. There was no one to hear, I reminded myself. No one to hear, and no one who’d care if they did. This part of town was dead as the grave itself.

  I brushed glass off the seat and got in. It was the work of seconds to hotwire the car. Lazzaro himself had taught me that skill, ironically enough. “Yeah, that’s a fuckin’ riot, Jimmy,” I muttered. “Now can we please get the hell out of here?”

  The car started on the first try, and I pulled out in a cloud of dirt, fine as bone dust. The house grinned at me in the rearview mirror, still threatening to vomit something hideous from its depths.

  I pulled the rearview mirror off the windshield, threw it out the window, and stomped the gas pedal.

  * * *

  My breathing slowed as the house receded, though even after that portal to Hell had vanished behind a run-down apartment building and a few corners, I wasn’t what you’d call calm. Every two seconds, my gaze flicked to the spot where the rearview mirror used to be, looking for cops, maybe, or maybe for the twin spots of a hate-filled yellow gaze, or Lazzaro’s grin as he readied a piece of piano wire or worse.

  I checked the side mirrors periodically to look for a tail. As for the other things, I stared forward and told myself nothing could be back there. That sounded good, but I jumped at every rattle of stone or gravel thrown against the undercarriage. The car smelled of burning, and I couldn’t tell how much of any of that was in my head or in the car. I didn’t care. The sooner I got the hell away from this part of town—to Milwaukee, say, or Buenos Aires—and ditched the ride, the happier I’d be.

  I turned the car automatically toward my apartment before I realized that was stupid. I didn’t know what Lazzaro had said to anybody before starting tonight’s insane adventure, but if nobody knew he was with me, the last thing I wanted was to give anybody the chance to see his car parked at my place. True, that would be just one more dumb thing to put on the staggeringly long list of dumb things I’d done that day, and not even the dumbest by a comfortable margin, but it could still get me dead.

  “Screw that,” I said to the car’s empty interior.

  To the harbor, then. I drove the speed limit, knowing that if I got pulled over, I was screwed. I couldn’t explain the car’s title, which was not only not in my name, but probably not in Lazzaro’s either. I’d get hauled in on general suspicion of being an asshole, and if they later found Lazzaro, the best I could hope for was to get shivved to death in prison.

  If they found Lazzaro . . .

  There shouldn’t have been a Lazzaro to find. In my mind, I could still see the shadowy, twisting shape that had come for him, could still hear the echoing screams. It should have taken him, or taken him apart and painted the room with him, but afterward he’d been down the stairs grinning at me like he knew the world’s darkest secret.

  You fucked me over, Jimmy. Yeah, I had. I’d fucked him over, and then I’d shot him. I’d killed the bastard twice, or tried to. I rummaged in the dank recesses of my brain to see if I could find my conscience and see if it had a problem with that, but either it was cool with how things had gone down, or it was in permanent hiding. A ghostly question floated by in my mind—Jimmy, what have you done?—but I had plenty of answers. Lazzaro was nuts. God alone, and maybe the devil, knew how many people he had been planning to wipe out tonight. He was a rabid dog. Aside from the self-defense issue, I’d done everybody a favor. Even the Slob, not that he’d see it that way if he ever found out.

  And Big George? And Patsy?

  I winced and buried the thought. No time to think about that now. They were in the wrong place at the wrong time, and that was it.

  It was a quarter after eleven when I got to the dock. I checked the clock twice, it seemed so improbable. The night had already lasted three-quarters of forever, and blindfolded, I would have guessed it to be more like quarter to six in the morning.

  I didn’t know who, exactly, owned this piece of waterfront property, but I guessed it was in the hands of some person, corporation, or legal entity that traced its way back to the Slob or even the boss in Providence through a route that had more twists and turns in it than a sack full of pubic hair. The property was hidden in the shadows of hulking warehouses on the neighboring lots, and there was little more on the land than an oversized shed and a pier running out into the harbor. We used it from time to time to dump things we didn’t want found—keys, guns, whatever, but not bodies. It was one thing to take the boat out and toss a rusted-out .38 that nobody’d come looking for, but even with the legal fettuccini, there were less dangerous places to get rid of bodies, if somewhat more remote.

  They’d find the car, eventually. But it would take a while, and there wouldn’t be a good reason to link it to me, or so I hoped. To be on the safe side, I worked a quick cleaning spell on the interior. There wouldn’t be so much as a skin cell or a stray hair for anybody to find, even if they did manage to haul this thing out of the harbor. Overkill maybe, but I was feeling an excess of caution just then.

  I started the engine, put the car in gear, and got out of the way. The car fell off the edge and sank with barely a splash.

  I turned, staring down the dark path between the warehouses, the sallow glimmer of light beyond illuminating the road. It would be a long walk through a rough part of
town back to somewhere a taxi would pick me up. I had a gun and a mittful of nasty spells, though, and I wasn’t worried about muggers or street gangs. Deeper worry, the nagging specter of a burned man, and other, formless fears gripped me.

  Nothing to do for it but walk.

  * * *

  “Here, stop here.” I pointed at a stretch of sidewalk ahead.

  “The address you gave me is two blocks down,” the cabbie said doubtfully, not even slowing the car.

  “I made a mistake. Just stop!”

  He heard the note of panic in my voice and gave me a look, but he stopped, threw the car in reverse, and took me back to the spot I’d pointed at.

  “This work?”

  “Yeah. Thanks.” I handed him a wad of cash and got out, making for the shadows away from the streetlights. Moments later, the cab pulled away.

  I had a bad feeling, the same kind I’d gotten back when I was a kid and the Russians were trashing my dad’s shop. I couldn’t see anything wrong, but there was this indefinable sense of catastrophe in the air, my Spidey-sense or some damn thing, and I had the very distinct impression that pulling up to my apartment in a car, headlights blazing, would be a bad idea. Maybe I was wrong, but the walk wouldn’t hurt me any.

  I walked toward the apartment building as quietly as I was able. About a block away, I felt the small hairs on my neck and back rise in a slow wave to stand straight up. It was one of the weirdest sensations I’d ever experienced, and if it hadn’t been accompanied by bone-deep fear, I would have stopped just to marvel at it.

  As it was, though, the first thing I did was turn and look down the dark street behind me. Nothing but sidewalk and brick, reflecting back the sullen glare of the streetlights.

  Forward, then. I pressed close to the buildings, hoping that anybody looking out of my apartment window couldn’t see me from this angle. And why are you so sure there’s somebody in your apartment? I had no answer for that.