I knew we were horribly outnumbered, and the faces of the men I’d killed swam in front of me. A lot of men—criminals, almost to a man, the scum of the earth, but this wasn’t how I’d envisioned spending my life, wading through blood for a few thousand bucks a week. So many dead.
I hadn’t seen Chebyshev, though, and, now that I thought of it, I didn’t think I’d seen any of the goons that had been with me on that day.
I ran my hands over the scars on my chest, down to my belly. I flexed my left hand. It was stiff from the burns, from where the Devourer summoning spell went up in flames.
I heard a clamor, a small army pounding up the stairs to the second floor. Not much time, now.
The Devourer. I suddenly understood. Old Man Chebyshev was dead as yesterday’s lunch, but his reanimated corpse—or whatever—wasn’t following me around. And why was that?
Why wasn’t he following me? For the same reason my body was covered with protective charms. Because when the Devourer takes something, he keeps it.
We lifted the desk.
It was a thin hope, but I’d take it. I hated to use this kind of magic, imperil my already hideously damaged soul even further, but I was going to be dead real soon if I didn’t do something, and I had a pretty clear idea of what to expect after that. Oh, Hell no.
“Here they come,” Kit said. Her eyes were wide, but her voice was steady. She was ready to go down fighting.
Another slam against the door, and the desks jumped harder. We had minutes, not more. I thought I could guess at the summoning diagram, maybe. It was the only straw I had to grasp.
And then I remembered something else. Benedict’s words:
Usually they need a sacrifice. You shouldn’t have been able to call it. . . . You, uh, sort of acted as your own sacrifice.
I remembered the agony of the last time, months spent in bed bleeding and weeping, and Haverty’s terrible solution to the problem. I didn’t think I could survive another round of that, and then I’d be just as dead.
Kit moved into a shooter’s stance.
I needed a sacrifice. The solution was obvious.
I didn’t stop to think—I moved, swinging hard and batting Kit’s gun from her hand.
“Jimmy, what the—” she started, but then she saw the look on my face, which I’m sure was pure murder.
I advanced on her, scalpel held tightly in my right hand. “Kit, I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”
Something slammed into the door again.
Kit froze where she stood, caught in my eyes like a mouse before the serpent. She didn’t understand, she couldn’t understand, and I didn’t have time to explain.
This will work. I know it will. I have a knack for these things.
I took another step toward her.
She didn’t even move to defend herself—and that’s what stopped me. I thought of Lazzaro whacking Tink with his oversized .45. I thought of the whole bloody fucking lifestyle, always waiting for the next dollar, for the next fuckup, for the inevitable shot in the back of the head.
I thought of Benedict, dead at the top of the stairs, and I looked at Kit. Two people who were ready to stand with me whether I deserved it or not, when they could have gotten away clean.
I was going to die here, now, if I didn’t do something.
But I was done hurting other people to get what I needed.
I took the scalpel, and I slashed open my left wrist.
“Kit, listen to me. We have no time.”
“What?” She wasn’t keeping up, and who could blame her? Things had gotten exceedingly weird in the last thirty seconds.
“Get your gun, and listen to me very carefully.”
* * *
The scene was faintly ridiculous. I stood there, shirtless, scarred, and dirty, with my left arm held close to my body. Kit’s blouse was wrapped tightly around my left wrist, keeping what was left of my blood in. She stood a few feet away in her bra, gun pointed at the door, an NRA member’s wet dream made flesh. Blood slicked my arm, spattered on the floor.
I mumbled, dark words spilling out of my face as fast as I could utter them.
Another slam against the door, and this time the desks moved back an inch. Then two inches. Kit didn’t so much as look at me. The gap widened, and Patsy stuck his head in.
Kit squeezed the trigger, and Patsy was no longer a problem.
I continued the incantation.
Something else slammed into the door, and it opened wider. This time, the gap was wide enough for somebody to slip through, and they did, coming in low and rolling. Kit pivoted, machinelike, and drilled the guy. He slid to a limp halt.
I chanted, and the tension in the room built. It seemed my own words echoed around the room, being whispered in my ear by some unknowable thing, building toward a climax that would tear me apart from the inside. I built it to a frenzied pitch—and then stopped, holding it there, willing it not to dissipate.
The next guy to try the door was a little smarter. He waved something in front of the opening. Kit fired, but there was just motion, nothing really to hit. Laughter came from the other side of the door.
Motion again. Kit squeezed the trigger one more time. The click of the hammer hitting nothing was clear and sharp.
“I’m out,” she said quietly, a note of panic in her voice.
“Lazzaro!” I shouted, still trying to hold the spell in my mind. It wanted to slip away, but it yearned for completion as well, and so far I’d been able to keep it balanced. That couldn’t last long. “Frankie! Come on, you cheap piece of shit!”
“What you workin’ on in there, Jimmy?” he shouted back. “Feels nasty.” A chuckle. “You know you can’t hurt me, Jimmy.”
“Then why don’t you come on in here and get this over with?”
There was a moment of silence, and then he stepped through the door. I knew he would. The kind of guy who can’t simply complete a job and shoot somebody in the back of the head but has to gloat and torture the poor bastard is the kind of guy who wants to finish you off himself, watch you suffer and die.
I shook from the effort of holding the spell in my mind without completing it, as well as from blood loss.
Lazzaro took a look at me and Kit and smirked. “Am I interrupting something?”
I ran at him with the scalpel. He dodged, turned, and clubbed me in the ear with a fist moving at approximately the speed of sound. Half the world filled with bees.
Before he could hit me again, Kit was on him, whipping out some judo shit the likes of which I’ve never actually seen in person. She twisted, took a step, and hauled him over her back, slamming him right into the center of the floor. Kit and I stood between him and the door.
He started to get up, and I let go of Kit’s blouse and lifted my hand. Blood poured down my wrist, hitting the diagram I’d traced on my forearm.
Then I said the last couple of words. The drawing on my arm flared with heat, but I barely noticed.
The look of hatred on Lazzaro’s face changed to terror as he felt the immensity of the thing approaching. He screamed as something monstrous swirled into existence in front of me, a hunched shadow evoking everyone’s worst nightmares.
There was no way out.
I heard more than saw Lazzaro go down, and that was plenty.
I grabbed Kit, leaped away from the door, and huddled in the nearest corner, eyes closed and trembling. Behind us, Lazzaro’s guys rushed the place.
The slaughter went on for a long time. After the last screams, there was only the sound of blood dripping off walls and furniture. And slow, inhuman footsteps.
Something horrible and ancient knelt next to me. I shook uncontrollably, and Kit sobbed beneath me.
Awful whispers in my ear, and this time I could understand them. “We’re waiting for you, Jimmy.”
Then it was gone.
Little beads of blood popped up on my shoulders.
Kit and I huddled in the corner for a long time.
Epilogue
&n
bsp; The congregation stood and voices rose in chorus, following the little black dots in the hymnal, but it all flowed around me, water around a stone. Maybe it changed the stone in some way, but right then, right there, you couldn’t tell by looking. I watched from the back, sheltered by the columns at the rear of the church. This was risky, and stupid, and I figured Kit would slap the holy blue fuck out of me if she caught me here, but I needed to come one more time.
Ma and the old man were in the same pew as ever, and from what I could tell from my lousy angle, the old man sang with everything he had, offering up his beating heart to the god that had roasted his flesh and, as far as he knew, had taken his only son. There was probably a lesson in that, but I never got Job, either.
Of course I was dead, or so said the official report. One of the perks of having an ally—friend?—in the police department, I suppose. There hadn’t been another solution that we could see. The Slob would have kept coming for me, and, failing that, he’d have hurt my parents. So, after huddling together for seemingly hours in the aftermath of the slaughter, we’d gone downstairs. Haverty had actually been up and around, untouched, unaware that anything had happened there. She’d carved another set of runes into my body to get the bleeding to stop. She got the job done, but the damage to my body was considerable, and I didn’t even want to think about the state of my soul.
Afterward, she’d packed a few things, and we’d burned the old factory to the ground and got out. Haverty disappeared—she wouldn’t say where she was going—and I followed suit. Kit called it in. The police found fourteen bodies in the wreckage, only a handful identifiable. Kit testified that I’d gone in and hadn’t come out, and that was about all it took.
She was in the third row from the front now. If her faith had ever faltered, which I doubted, the experience in the factory had been all she needed to bolster it back to full strength. I guessed she’d be here every Sunday until she got to be a hundred years old.
I looked past Ma and Dad, past Kit to the figure crucified on the far wall. It was a replacement for the one I’d wrecked, but only the most particular of particulars had changed. His head was cocked at a slightly different angle, the wound in his side a slightly different shape. It was the same guy, doing his same eternal penance on the wall of the cathedral. Had he known when he got up there that he wouldn’t simply die, but that he’d be crucified forever, his ongoing suffering an inscrutable, inexplicable symbol of hope for one lost and confused congregation after another? Would he have signed on for the job if he had? Might he have pushed the cup from his lips a little harder if he had?
I’d seen a lot of things in his face over the years, but that day I saw only that he was exhausted.
The hymn worked its way around to the end, and everybody knelt.
I didn’t know what was next for me. I was a half-assed, half-burned-out mob wizard—or whatever—and my soul, for all I knew, had already been cored out, sliced up, and stuck on little toothpicks for snacks downstairs. I didn’t dare touch magic, even though I could hear it calling to me nonstop, even though it was the only thing I’d ever been good at. The only thing I knew how to do, really.
Benedict had said there were others like us—thousands of them. Maybe they’d have answers for me, and maybe they’d just stare at me through glazed eyes while they shot up or drowned themselves in whiskey, tempering the one addiction with another, knowing we’re all fucked in the end, no matter what precautions we take, no matter how we try to stave off the inevitable. It was time for me to find out—it wasn’t like I had any other straws left to grasp.
I left the cathedral, and the smell of burned flesh hit me as I open the door. The burned man stood at the bottom of the steps, glaring his baleful yellow glare. In full sunlight, he looked even more horrible than in the half-shadows of my dreams and memories, and I could see every detail, from the blackened skin of his skull to the thin rivulets of grease that glistened in the furrows of his neck and the cracks in his visage.
A woman pushing a stroller walked by, paying the burned man no mind. I didn’t know if he was really there or not, a hallucination or simply a terrible magical entity that only I could see, owing to our, uh, unique relationship.
I just knew he wasn’t going away.
I walked down the stairs, keeping my body pressed to the metal rail so as to stay as far from him as possible.
My right foot hit the sidewalk, and I could already feel my muscles bunching to propel me away from that thing. I could stay ahead of it, I knew, if I could just run fast enough.
Somehow, I made myself turn, to meet those runny yellow eyes. Were they leaking from the memory of smoke, or was he weeping?
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I . . . I screwed up. I never meant for you to have to pay the price for it.”
He only stared. The woman with the stroller, now thirty feet past the cathedral, glanced back at me and walked a little faster.
The burned man and I studied each other as cars passed and the wind picked up.
Eventually, I turned and walked away.
End.
About the author:
Joseph Garraty has worked as a construction worker, technical writer, rocket test engineer, environmental consultant, and deadbeat musician, among other things. He lives in Dallas, Texas.
For more information, visit http://www.josephgarraty.com.
Keep reading for an excerpt of Voice, by the same author.
Prologue
The recording from the last Ragman concert is one song long. Half that, actually, since the song never reaches completion. The recording should have disappeared, should have been cleaned up by the police in the aftermath and filed away as evidence and never been heard again. It leaked out into the world, though, the way these things do, and the diligent and the curious can still dig up a copy if they want. Many do. Dumb kids at slumber parties, playing it like a game of Bloody Mary, trying to see who chickens out first. College kids, drunk or stoned at 3 a.m. Fans who followed the band from the early days and one day can’t shake the need to know.
Most listen to it one time, and they turn it off before the end. Well before the end. Then they burn it, bury it, delete it from their hard drives or their iPods and go to sleep troubled and trying to forget that any such thing ever existed.
You can hear the crowd first. Rumblings, and a few shouts. It sounds like a good-sized crowd, maybe a couple thousand people. One voice—a woman’s voice, high and clear—starts the chant: “Johnny! Johnny! Johnny!” In a matter of moments, everyone is chanting. There’s a faint sound, maybe the drumsticks brushing the snare, and then a huge cheer goes up, dissolving the chant in a rush of noise.
Four clicks and then the rhythm section comes in—Danny T layin’ it down on the skins, and Allen Sorenson on bass. It’s a fast chromatic riff, low and rolling, and more than a little disorienting. You don’t get a clear sense of whether the song is in a major or minor key, just a seasick feeling of rumbling motion. You can hear Danny’s metal snare drum, a little too hot and with too much biting treble, cutting through the mix like steel teeth, and the scrape and rattle of the strings on Allen’s big old Fender P-Bass are driving like a runaway eighteen-wheeler. It’s impossible not to get caught up in the motion of the thing, even with no idea of where it’s going.
Case comes in after a couple of bars. In the studio version of the song, the guitar tracks were doubled, but she’s doing solo duty live. It doesn’t matter. Her guitar sounds huge, even with just the one track—a Les Paul through a hundred watts of Marshall amplification, like the fist of God coming through a speaker cabinet. The sound is mean, distorted, heavy on the mids and snarling like a wild beast. She follows the bass part for an eight-count with the drums driving the tension up higher and higher, moves the figure up into an ugly harmony to make the tension even worse, and then there’s a sleazy little run down into a slow, bone-crushing riff that comes from nowhere, like one of those grinding Black Sabbath steamroller riffs that destroys everything in its
path. The transition is shocking, like plunging into a lake of cold, cold water or the sun being suddenly masked by brewing black thunderclouds. It raises gooseflesh on you when you hear it on the recording, and it must have had the same effect on the crowd experiencing it at the time. If you listen closely, you can even hear Danny say “Fuck yeah,” just loud enough for his vocal mic to pick up.
The guitar drops out, and there’s a lull. Then, just before where you’d expect the vocals to come in, there’s this awful sound. A quiet, plaintive voice, desperate, and half-whispering, half-pleading: “Oh, God, please no.”
Johnny Tango’s voice. It cracks on the “e” in “please.”
Then a quick inhalation and the vocals come in, and that’s when you realize something is not right here, not right at all. The voice that comes out is nothing like a human voice, singing nothing like human words. It’s vast and deep, oily and ravenous, and it pounds into your brain like a meat hammer. The pressure is crushing, mounting, thunderous, and you forget that this is a recording and you can turn it off at any time, you forget everything except that your brain is being pulped by a godawful, godless sound that shouldn’t even exist, a sound like tectonic plates grinding corpses into fields of broken glass, and then, incredibly, the sound gets worse, and you open your mouth to scream, and—
Suddenly the noise stops and there’s screaming everywhere. You haven’t made a sound yet, but the air is thick with screams. The music on the recording has stopped, but the screams have only just started, and you listen in horror with your mouth gaping stupidly. These, too, are sounds that shouldn’t ever come from human throats, but you can imagine all too well how they might. There’s the sound of something exploding—for some reason you picture racks of lighting blowing apart—and a distant voice screams, “My eyes! Ah, my fucking eyes!” It’s impossible to tell who it is, or even if it’s a man or a woman, the voice is so distorted by pain and fear.
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