by Brian Hodge
The silence fell on the alley like a funeral shroud, and Eva stood there for a moment, listening to her own heartbeat thudding in her ears. What was she going to do now? The ratchet was tightening. She pulled the first miniature out of her pocket — the one that had materialized within the Wendigo — and took a closer look.
It was another replica of Eva Strange herself, this one even more detailed and anatomically correct than the other. She was posed in a tripod position, both hands clutching a miniature elemental — just as she had been in real life only moments ago — the doll’s tiny oval face carved into one of Eva’s trademark expressions of controlled rage. What was going on? Was Eva being woven into some elaborate, byzantine tapestry of events? Was she being used in some obscure ritual? She had seen magic miniaturism like this before — most often in onyx labs and underground shrines and temples — but never a doll carved in her own image. It was exceedingly unnerving, like hearing a monstrous voice in the dark, whispering her name.
She let out a pained sigh, put the figurine back in her pocket, and walked away, leaving the junkie to slumber fitfully in the dark.
It took her ten minutes to walk back to the Mongoose; another half an hour to get home.
By the time she got to the Quadrangle, it was dark. Eva’s place was in a tightly packed warren of middle class apartment buildings, their chokablok towers rising up against the night sky like carbon-black adobes, their windowless bulwarks reflecting the salmon glow of pulsing sulfa-light and neon signs advertising spiritual security systems, extra strength smudge sticks and discounted off-world fares. The city was closing down for the night like a poisonous flower, encapsulating itself in lead canisters and womb-like tunnels filled with amniotic holy water.
Eva’s underground garage was lucky number thirteen.
She rode the lift in sullen, thoughtful silence, ruminating on the dolls.
Her apartment was a modest one-bedroom job with nightshade- impregnated walls the color of turning leaves, soft light from mission-style lamps, and antique Stickley furniture. Eva loved antiques — especially old-paper books — and had collected quite a few of them. There were volumes by Bettleheim, Bly, C.S. Lewis, Machen, Borges, Bloch, even H.P. Lovecraft. All tucked into handmade cases. Nineteenth and Twentieth Century visionaries were illuminating these days; there was no such thing as magical realism anymore, it was all real.
Eva ate alone in her narrow, stainless steel kitchen, sitting at the service bar in a pool of colored halogen, chewing but not tasting her food, thinking about the miniatures, and the Rip in the fabric of reason, and the scrambling of the physical universe, and her own destiny swimming beneath her days and nights like a shark. And she was thinking about Razorfield Road terminating at the ancient sea walls down by the bay.
The dolls were sitting there on the gleaming metal counter in front of Eva, next to the artificial salt and genetic honey, their tiny faces staring emptily. Eva needed to cry. She needed to laugh. Most of all, she needed to relax. But once again, her job was consuming her, devouring her, and she found herself fixating on the dolls. She picked one up. She looked underneath the base for any sign of a maker’s mark. She took out a magnifying lens, clipped it over her eye.
There was a tiny band of words etched in the clay pedestal of the doll. “Tetragrammaton,” Eva recited softly, under her breath, the word seeming to ripple across the still air of the apartment. “Sothoth, Elohim….”
Litanies. Incantations. Obscure blackstuff meant to scare Eva into submission. None of it frightened Eva any more. She was impervious to most of it— emotionally, at least. Perhaps it was the rage, perhaps the loneliness. She had formed a sort of spiritual shell around herself, at once both a shield and a prison.
She put the doll down and walked over to the window, gazing out at the toxic night. The blue-green flames were blooming on the dark horizon, the smudges of yellow vehicle lamps moving down in the dark canyons like diseased cells coursing through a dying bloodstream. Eva let out a long, weary sigh. She had been alone most of her life, and she had grown accustomed to it. But like the man says, familiarity is by no means tranquility. Eva harbored secret wishes. Desires that she could tell no one. For most of her adult life, for instance, she had longed for a child. But she also knew it was too dangerous. Eva was a target for every crackpot blackstuffer from here to the Warlock Range, and she refused to put a child through that kind of jeopardy. No matter how lonely she became…
She lowered the visors, went into her bedroom, took a Restrex and went to bed.
Sometime later, she dreamed of her own birth. Maybe it was due to all the thoughts of having a baby, or the pangs of loneliness, or the leftovers she had had for dinner. But whatever the source, the dream was vivid, poignant and disturbing. Up until now, in fact, she had never dreamt — or even thought of, for that matter — her own birth. But there she was: Naked and bloody and shrieking, and pushing her way into the world. It was back at her mother’s cottage in the pine barrens outside Painesville, Ohio, and through the membrane of the blood-soaked placenta, Eva could see the weathered log walls, the ratty braided rugs and the Amish furniture. She couldn’t breathe, the thick, transparent tissue covering her face. Folk legends claim that babies born “in the caul” are “touched” with second sight. Now Eva could see the blurry shapes of the midwife, her grey hair pulled away from her sweaty face, and her mother’s legs spread open like a pathway into the light. Eva pushed and pushed and pushed, and she began to chew through the caul, and the blood and water were flowing across her face, and gushing across the hardwood beneath the bed, and then Eva gazed up at the lantern hovering above the midwife, and she saw something so horrifying it took her young, unformed breath away: Six decrepit figures gathered around the foot of her mother’s bed, their hoods drawn over their wrinkled faces, their toothless mouths uttering esoteric prayers. The six old men! Presiding at Eva’s own birth! And then the water engulfed her and smothered her and pressed down on her tiny lungs —
— and Eva woke up with a start.
Back pressed against the cold steel headboard, her heart hammering in her chest, her body covered with a sheen of clammy sweat, Eva sat there for a moment, gasping for breath. She was tangled in blankets, and her legs were cramping from the tension. Her mind was swimming with a vague sort of panic. But there was something else reverberating in her brain like a metronome clicking under all the noise.
— water —
She glanced at the clock on the bedside table, the amethyst liquid crystal vibrating: 3:49 a.m. She had only been asleep for a couple of hours, but it felt like an eternity. She got out of bed and got dressed. Her hands were trembling as she slipped a benzine flak vest over her bra, then buttoned the scorpion snaps. Trembling, trembling, trembling, not because of fear, but because of the realization pounding like a migraine behind her temple.
— water! — water! — water! —
Her weapons and equipment were out in the front closet. She lit a pastel cigarette, grabbed a cup of vitamax, and drank it while she suited up, all the while marveling at how stupid she had been, how absent minded. When Lydon had given her the address, she had naturally assumed it was a fake, but now, her head spinning from the nightmare, her belly burning with rage, she realized it was the answer.
(WATER)
She tossed the butt in a vacu-can, threw on her duster and strode out the door.
The outer corridor was cold and tomb-like, the halogens buzzing softly, and Eva padded as lightly as possible down the hall. She took the elevator down to the garage, fists clenching and clenching, nostrils flaring, deep-breathing exercises, tantric movements, anything to control the anger. She was a heat-seeking missile now.
She reached the lower level, crossed the garage and found the Mongoose. She got in, fired it up, and cranked out of her spot in a flurry of noise and noxious exhaust. A minute later the car emerged from the building, then turned south and plunged into the dark, flickering, cancerous city. Roaring toward the bay. Toward the old piers
.
Toward the place where the water wasn’t water anymore.
5.
Steel Blue Purgatory
To make a Hand of Glory: Sever the right hand of a murderer during an eclipse of the moon, wrap it in part of a funeral shroud and squeeze it well. Electroplate it with silver nitrate and cobra venom, then put it in a centrifuge and separate its subatomic structure until the alloy turns black. Its possessor will have the power of telepathy and communicating with the dead.
A potent mixture of fury and sorrow coursed through Eva as she pulled the Mongoose off the highway, then started down the narrow corridor of shadows called Razorfield Road. Her hands were fused to the steering wheel, knuckles the color of milkstone as the scanner light refracted off her gaunt, sculpted face. Her weapons were heavy inside the duster linings, tugging at her, her collar tight around her neck. Her eyes were burning with nervous tension. She was about to take an enormous gamble, and she never ever gambled. But beneath all the seething rage, there was a hunch stirring inside her. A hunch that Kenneth Anger was involved in something apocalyptic, and it was up to Eva to stop it. And wasn’t that just like Kenneth? Always the high-maintenance boyfriend.
It had been five years since Eva and Kenneth Anger had been a couple. Eva had been lonely and vulnerable back then, walking around like a zombie, lost in her detective work, when the young sculptor had stumbled into her life. Thin as a scarecrow, with deep-set dark eyes and a luxurious thatch of black hair, Anger was just what Eva needed at the time. A mad romantic, a passionate lover, and a worthy foil. He reawakened her body and her spirit, and for a while they were good together. But the world around them continued to rot, and before long they were evolving in opposite directions: Eva toward her police work, Anger toward oblivion. His theories got stranger and stranger, and he started snorting onyx, and soon he was mixed up in the cults and ranting about the end of the world.
Then, one day, Kenneth Anger simply ceased to exist. Vanished as abruptly as he had come into Eva’s life. Since then, Eva had heard rumors that he was involved with the Destroyer cult, but she had never paid them much mind.
Until tonight.
Until all this ancient history started clicking together like pieces of a cubic puzzle.
By the time Eva reached the old commercial pier, it was nearing dawn. The sky was still a canopy of black gloom, but there was a suggestion of luminance in the air, a vague hint of the coming day in the dirty sheen on the water, and the dull moon-glow of the pavement. Eva pulled over next to a dry-dock barge and parked. She checked her elemental, made sure the gourd was stocked with rounds, then got out.
The wind tossed her duster tails, the air smelling of burning salt and mercury.
She walked along the docks, the sound of her footsteps like a clock ticking in the eerie silence, a counterpoint rhythm against the huge, breathy darkness. In the distance to the north, the city slumbered, scattered green-fires dotting the dark skyline. Somewhere nearby: the sound of polluted water lapping against a breakfront. Eva glanced at a faded number on the pavement, stenciled against the charm-line. She was reaching the end of the twelve hundred block.
Ahead of her the road terminated at a decaying row of pilings. There was once a dock here, but age and weather had eaten away at the timbers, leaving only a skeleton of rusted iron between the pilings like prison bars. The ground was an outcropping of jagged granite, just a couple of meters from the water’s edge. It was deathly silent except for the rhythmic snoring of currents against the rocks, and an occasional errant wave crashing against the boulders.
Eva drew her elemental, thumbed the safety off, aimed at the water and fired —
— and there was a thunderous boom, as blood red flame leapt out of the muzzle, striking an invisible membrane around the pilings.
The elemental flame mushroomed into a vertical wall, turning a brilliant shade of yellow and climbing forty feet into the night sky, as the water itself seemed to curl away from the towering maelstrom, an invisible Moses parting the sea, the sound of white magic crackling and popping like a fireworks display. Eva shielded her eyes for a moment as the light seemed to implode in on itself.
Then the noise dwindled, and Eva gazed up at the ancient pilings.
In a veil of sparks and luminous smoke, the beachfront facade had transformed. The timbers were gone, as were the fossilized iron struts, and the granite boulder field, and a huge section of the water. In its place rose an old, crumbling, sand-blasted, three-story brick building covered with cult graffiti scrawled in goat’s blood. Its doors and windows were boarded with makeshift lead shields, and it sat on a concrete platform that jutted out over the real water fifty meters away.
Kenneth Anger’s studio.
“You son of a bitch,” Eva murmured, slamming another round into the elemental without even looking. She was buzzing with rage. Ethan’s Cup was strapped to the back of her belt for easy access, the Sword riding one thigh, the Rod sheathed on the other. She took a breath, steadying herself, focusing, then started toward the building.
It was a pile of bricks from the late twentieth century that had been re-habbed in the 2050s, its doors retro-fitted with charm panels, esoteric symbols carved in the brick, magical litanies written across the lintels. Tangles of conduits and antennae cascading off the roof. Eva approached the side door, her heart beating, her mouth dry. She could feel the blackstuff radiating off the edifice. She found a side entrance — an unmarked iron door.
She raised the elemental, kicked the door in, and staggered inside a dark foyer.
The first thing that struck her was the smell. Back when she was working homicide, she had encountered odors that were comparable. Usually the stench of a victim turned over to the maggots. The police called them “lunchers,” and they gave off a stench that was indescribable, a smell like a punch in the face. Morgue attendants were compelled to stick cotton balls soaked in after shave into their nostrils. But this. This was worse. This was a black, infectious, acrid stench, rising out of the shadows like the innards of a sick animal festering in this horrible stewpot for years.
There was a faint, electronic beeping noise coming from inside Eva’s duster, but she didn’t even bother to look. She knew exactly what it was. Her tiny, matchbook-sized ionization counter was going berserk, reading all the malevolence as though Eva were standing inside a black mass.
Eva tried to breathe through her mouth as she swung the weapon across the darkness. Why was it so dark in here? Was there no power? Eva blinked at the shadows, trying to register something in her field of vision. He knows I’m here, she thought, he’s watching me.
“Kenneth?!”
No answer. Eva reached for her flashlight, a tiny halogen unit tucked behind her belt. She brought it up, then flipped it on.
The narrow beam of light fell on a chandelier of bones. It hung from the center of the twenty-foot high ceiling, a massive bleached bundle of femurs, tibias, clavicles, carpals, and phalanges — all of them gleaming dully in the light-beam. There were other artifacts dangling from the obscene cluster, long braids of human hair, exotic animal paws stitched together like sausages, and luminous threads of fiber-optics like liquid light falling to the floor. Something extraordinary and awful was being fomented here. Eva dragged the light-beam down the walls, across the blood-smeared magic words: Jod, Tetragrammaton, Yog-Sothoth, Elohim…
Eva’s gut went cold.
“GODDAMN YOU KENNETH!!”
Her voice echoed, swallowed by the tomb-like silence of the foyer.
She started toward the center of the room when her foot stubbed against something soft, and she nearly fell down. She shone the flashlight down at the floor, and her breath stuck in her throat for a second, and her heart seemed to seize up inside her.
Kenneth Anger’s mutilated corpse was partially visible in the narrow beam of light. Slumped against the wall, dressed in bloody tatters, he looked as though he had been dead for quite a long time. And this was no shanking. This was a much less mercifu
l demise: The result of a ritual flaying, most likely at the hands of his fellow cultists. Half his face was gone — his hair torn from his head in bloody tufts, his eyes gouged out, his nose ripped off like a piece of gristle. Someone — or some thing — had removed his lips, and it wasn’t exactly done with surgical precision. His gaping mouth was a ragged, pulpy divot.
Repulsed, shaking, breathing quickly, Eva decided to head for the exit. She had to get some air, and catch her breath, and maybe call in the body to the precinct house, maybe even get some back-up.
She was half way across the foyer when her foot crunched on something brittle.
Again she shone her flashlight at the floor.
At first she thought it was a toy, a part of a doll house or antique train set, a few of the tiny lamp posts crushed by her foot-fall, but then she realized it was a fairly detailed rendering of a Hundred and Eleventh Street and Avenue X. The intersection appeared to be fashioned out of toadstone and vulture’s clay, the tiny streetlamps made from the delicate bones of rats. The tiny police vehicles were made from wax. The little crossroads were so familiar: The place where they found the Disciple’s body.
Icy current jolted through Eva as she shone the flashlight across the bloodstained checkerboard of the massive parquet-tiled floor.
The beam of light played across a miniature city, across intricate railways made of snakeskin and bear claws, across meticulously modeled housing blocks made of obsidian bricks. There were office buildings carved out of volcanic pumice, and cars whittled out of hangman’s wood, and tiny parking meters made of hemlock stalks, and even high-tension wires constructed out of dried human veins. The whole star-shaped metro area was there— from the monolithic central district, to the residential communities, to the druid span across the east bay area, to the ruins of the three outlying ghettos. But the worst parts weren’t the frightening details, or the perfect positioning of every last grain of miniature rubble. The worst parts were the tiny figurines scattered here and there across the miniature