Beast of Wonder

by Lilith Saintcrow

  In the end, she chewed until it was a frayed, fibrous wad, and swallowed it whole.

  Chapter 4

  Their destination was a tall concrete block, cookie-cutter windows in neat rows marching along its block-long face. Evan pressed a red intercom button next to a wrought-iron gate with razor wire festooning its ancient bones. A boxy security camera, pointed at the gate’s paved bib, held a small red blinking light, and Cara stood out of its likely range. Maybe it was a fake? Evan kept his head down and muttered something she was sure was an obscenity, trapping another cough in that folded red bandanna. Pressed the button again with a blunt, nicotine-stained fingertip.

  Cars beetled down each side of the street behind them, waiting patiently for their owners. There were no trees here, just a slim ribbon of cracked sidewalk, the parked vehicles, and a narrow strip of unlined road.

  The intercom crackled. “Yes?” A sexless, rasping word.

  Evan pressed the button again. “Black hair, blue eyes, short red skirt, long…” He paused, and his eyebrows went up again, amused for some reason. “…brown jacket.”

  “Between six and six-fifteen?” Static turned every consonant sandpaper-sharp.

  Evan glanced at her. “Yeah.”

  “You’re late.” Faceless authority hovered behind the camera, and Cara was glad she was outside its field of vision.

  Then again, would a nameless woman even be visible to electronic eyes?

  “I stopped to take a piss. Sue me.” Evan coughed into the bandanna again.

  A short humming silence. “You didn’t touch the merchandise, did you?”

  “Not a finger, Mama. Don’t be insulting.”

  There was another, deeper buzz, and the iron gate clicked open. Evan glanced at Cara. “Come on.”

  “Merchandise?” Cara glanced over her shoulder, nervously.

  “You want to walk away, I won’t chase you.” He pushed at the gate, gingerly, avoiding the razor wire. “I might even recommend it. She’s a bitch.”

  The intercom fuzzed-chirped again. “I can hear you,” the voice said. “Come up, and don’t be foolish.”

  Evan shouldered through the gate. Cara peered after him.

  Inside, a small courtyard paved with interlocking stones glowed with green. How on earth did a garden get any sun with the concrete rising on all sides? Blank windows marched along in rising rows, full of shadows since dusk had slid into every crack and corner. None of them were lit; maybe nobody was home from work yet. Leaves rustled and slid, and Cara realized there were no naked branches. Was it all evergreens? A shade garden?

  The itching under her skin returned. She hesitated on the doorstep, and Evan’s dark hair melded with the dimness. He became part of the undergrowth, shouldering aside long weeping birch-fingers. A breath of clean air filtered onto the smog-choked street, and her lungs filled. Funny, she hadn’t noticed the metallic breath of engines burning before now.

  Of course she followed. There was nowhere else to go. As soon as she stepped over the threshold it was warmer, the cold wind, knife-cut, falling off. A blank metal door opened, a long wood-walled hallway stuffed with shadows and a faint smell of burning swallowed them both. At the end was a cage of steel, brass, woodwork, and faded red carpet, a semicircle overhead with blank marks.

  The antique elevator shuddered, wheezing theatrically as it lifted its cargo. Evan stood slightly in front of her, sometimes glancing back—odd, sipping looks, dark eyes unfathomable. When the contraption shuddered to a stop, warm electric light bathed its open structure. He heaved aside both rattling, groaning doors and stepped out, scanning the hallway before beckoning her forward. A mezzanine stretched in either direction, the central well of the building full of yet more ink-rustling shadows. Old wood glowed and a parquet floor unreeled. Heavy paneling was broken by doors with brass handles, their brass number plates bearing only rubbed-over scratches. Frosted glass sconces held soft-glowing lights, and even inside, the air was fresher. Richer, somehow.

  Evan set off, and Cara once again followed. As long as she kept moving in the right direction, the itching, nasty buzz under her skin abated. Her legs ached a little, but not badly. That was strange—spending this long in heels should have turned her lower back into a mess.

  Was that something she remembered, or only logic?

  The plane. A burst of wine-red terror filled her head, and she stopped, staring blindly. The plane, what was the flight number?

  “Here we are. Mama Lodi’s House.” Evan knocked twice at a door like all the rest. Except its number plate wasn’t scratched out, and Cara, her head cocked, stared at it as he knocked again. Shave-and-a-haircut, maybe a signal, maybe a personal joke.

  “277,” Cara breathed.

  “Yep, that’s the magic number.” Evan frowned, and pitched his voice higher. “Come on, Mama. Open up.”

  Locks clicked, chunked, and slid aside. The door moved, and more of that golden light spilled out around its borders. Cara’s eyelashes fluttered, chopping the image into strobing bits, light and dark revolving before the final impact.

  Flight 277 is now boarding…Ladies and gentlemen, we’re about to have some turbulence…

  “Finally,” that gravelly voice said, stripped of electronic edges but still harsh. An old woman in a violently floral housedress and large dark knitted slippers with white fur lining, her nose rising knifelike from a map of parchment skin folded and creased more times than a used napkin, peered through bleached eyes and licked her strong, horselike yellow teeth. “Come in.”

  Chapter 5

  It seemed impossible anyone could be this old and still ambulatory. Mama Lodi was bent into a C, and her liver-spotted hands trembled slightly. For all that, she was surprisingly strong, as Cara found out when one of those hands shot out and clamped around her wrist. The woman tugged, and Cara bent. Her face was patted at, and the old woman even examined her mouth, running a papery wrinkled fingertip over Cara’s teeth as Evan shut the door. He didn’t throw any of the locks.

  The urge to bite down, hard, passed through Cara and away. Finally, the old woman huffed out a sigh. “Good enough,” she said, and pawed through Cara’s pockets, finding nothing, not even lint. She wasn’t particularly gentle, either, but the search was impersonal in the extreme.

  I could have told you they were empty. Clear, strong instinct warned Cara not to say it, to stare blankly instead of focusing. The nasty, uncomfortable itching had gone away, certainty left in its wake.

  “Good enough,” the woman repeated, and sucked in a damp breath. A tang of violets clung to her housedress. “Look at her. A real beauty, huh?”

  “Yeah.” Evan patted at his own pockets, dropped his hands. “Christ. I could use a cigarette.”

  “Better if you don’t.” The old woman laughed, a surprisingly soft, mellifluous sound. Her navy slippers had leathery soles, and they made a faint whispering as she stepped back. “Come in, come in, little girl. Oh, she’s very good indeed.”

  Evan’s eyebrows lowered, and he glared at her. “You’re forgetting something.”

  “What would that be?” Her faded gaze, irises muddied but pupils dark wells, lingered on Cara’s face. A long, dark hair grew from a mole on the underside of her chin, lustrous and silky. Still, under the ruin of wrinkles, her bones were pretty. You could see a shadow of beauty buried.

  Entombed.

  “Your end of the deal.” Evan folded his arms, legs spread a bit to take up more space. The hallway contained all three of them, and Cara longed to crane her neck, examine her surroundings.

  Don’t, the instinct warned her, and she listened.

  Now the old woman straightened as far as her bent spine would allow and peered up at him, skinny, bony fingers still braceleting Cara’s wrist. “You don’t want to brace yourself?”

  “What the fuck for?” He dug in his pocket and brought out the bandanna. Under the warm golden light of the kitchen, dried clots of deeper red caught in its folds twitched as the fabric moved. They dried slowly,
pasty-fresh atop crusted ones. “I don’t got a lot of time left.”

  “Are all your affairs in order?” The old woman’s colorless tongue touched thin lips. “You can’t go back.”

  “You stalling me?” He crumpled the bandanna in his fist. His wrists were too large for his forearms. “It’s a really bad idea to stall me, Mama.”

  She shook her head. Her wild mop of thistledown hair, grey shading into white at the roots, barely swayed, caught in a frozen wind. “Not stalling. Just don’t want you bitching afterward about unfinished business. Once you do this, you can’t go back.”

  “I’m already dead, for fucksake.” Evan’s scowl deepened. Stubble roughened his olive cheeks, turned sallow in the warm electric light. “Just do it.”

  For some reason, that made Mama Lodi laugh. “Come on, then.” She shuffled down the hall.

  On the left, a living room glowing with beeswax and lemon polish opened up, brass floor lamps with flowering Tiffany stained-glass shades hovering over two thick sofas, a leather armchair with a matching ottoman, a fireplace with an umber glow in its depths. Mahogany shelves held curios—bone, bright feathers, chunks of rock in fantastical quartz-veined colors or deep gemlike glitter. A sideboard-sized, ancient radio crouched between two of the bookcases; a white-painted radiator ticked under an uncurtained window starred with moving lights. Traffic, or stars, wheeled past in steady progression.

  Mama Lodi kept going. Past the living room was a doorway opening onto a darkened kitchen with worn blue linoleum and enamel appliances, but she turned hard left and another hallway held one door on the right, one at the end, and an open one on the left showing white pebble-tiles and the clear white glare that said bathroom. She pushed the door wide and motioned Evan in, followed him, and beckoned Cara almost as an afterthought.

  Four high-intensity bulbs over a sink and a water-clear mirror in a white-pained wooden frame drenched each edge in crisp light. A shell-shaped sink, a tiled countertop, and the two sliding doors of a medicine cabinet sat primly under the mirror. Thick red and white knitted socks vanished into Mama Lodi’s slippers and the hem of her housedress. “Strip.” Polyester flowers glowed under her skirt, and her bony hands rubbed at each other.

  “I hardly know you.” Evan’s scowl faded.

  “You think you’ve got anything I haven’t seen before?”

  “What about her?” He tipped his stubbled chin at his shoulder, indicating the younger woman.

  “She’s a blank wall right now, Detective. Couldn’t you tell?”

  Did even blank walls observe like Cara did, silently weighing each moment? She stayed at the threshold, her diamanté toes glittering sharply.

  “Fine.” Evan reached for his tie. Suit jacket, belt, buttondown, trousers—he laid his gun in its holster neatly aside, and a golden badge in a black leather case on top of it.

  The old woman snatched up the badge; it vanished into a pocket of her voluminous skirt. Next she picked up the trousers, thrusting them at Cara. “Fold those.”

  So Cara did, slowly, her hands moving all on their own, like they’d done this before. Layers of cloth peeled away, each discarded skin tossed contemptuously at her. The old woman sniffed at Evan’s thick-soled shoes and set those next to the gun on the well-scrubbed countertop. Cara folded his boxer briefs neatly and added them to the pile. Bruises marched up and down Evan’s ribs, yellow-green ones under fresh redblack ones, and his knuckles were skinned. Muscle had wasted away, and his skin hung a little loosely, used to a much bigger man. He was wasting away.

  Cancer, Cara’s sure instinct whispered clearly. In his lungs, and now everywhere else. You can see it.

  If she half-lidded her eyes and let her gaze unfocus, she could. A stain spreading through veins, arteries, internal organs, butterfly wings on an X-ray, shadows wrapping their tentacles through a human body. Quick metastasizing, or he’d let it go too long. A silent killer, bred in breath and blood and bone, fueled by smoke and tar in neat, easy to consume sticks.

  The old woman ripped the shower curtain aside and twisted the cold water knob. The bathtub was enameled cast iron, scrubbed and spotless, a pink rubber plug hanging on a chain looped over the old, strong faucet with its two porcelain wagon-wheel eyes, its spout shining. The water sparkled; she dropped the rubber plug over the drain-mouth and chuckled, another surprisingly deep, rich sound. “You know, when you get through this, you’ll be able to smoke all you want.”

  “Can’t wait.” Evan didn’t quite cup his hands over his genitals, but his shoulders hunched like he wanted to. Black hair furred up his chest over much-bruised skin, ran down his flanks. Maybe he’d been stolid before, but the wasting poked his ribs and hipbones out, laying bare angles and bones.

  “Oh yes,” Mama Lodi crooned into the deepening water. “Stronger, better, faster. That was the deal.”

  Even Evan’s toes held wisps of black fur. His buttocks were nearly flat. “Can we get on with it? This tile’s cold.”

  “If you want to get in before it’s finished filling, be my guest.” She cackled again when he didn’t move. “Better to do it all at once.”

  “A cold bath is supposed to help me?” Evan half-turned, regarding Cara in the mirror, working the ring off his left middle finger..

  The old woman sucked on her strong yellow teeth again, clicking her tongue for good measure. She watched the water’s surface. “You chickening out?”

  “No.” He glanced at the mirror, again, his coffee-colored gaze meeting hers. “What do you think?”

  “She won’t start thinking for a while.” The old woman snort-chuckled. “Not until she has a name.”

  Evan opened his mouth. Cara held his gaze.

  “Huh.” He shook his head fractionally, and handed her the ring. “I know a lot of people with names who don’t do any damn thinking at all.”

  Mama Lodi muttered, flicking her fingers in the water. Words dropped from her thin lips, one after another, droplets melding into a single stream of something slow and viscous. Cara’s head hurt, a swift piercing pain, and she stepped back, her hip hitting the countertop. Evan’s hand moved as if to catch her wrist and she blundered back further, her fist knotting around the lump of metal and its bright blue stone.

  “Hurts, does it?” A deep, resonant cackle. “Oh, you brought me a good one for sure.” Mama Lodi twisted the water off. Somehow, the tub was almost full, and the fluid’s surface ran with a thick opalescent slugtrail sheen. “Come on, Detective. In you go.”

  Chapter 6

  The fluid didn’t splash. It simply accepted his weight, moving thickly aside and closing over Evan’s wasted legs as he stretched, gingerly. “It’s…warm.” For a moment, he looked much younger, a boy in a bathtub too big for him.

  “Feel silly for bitching?”

  “You’re an asshole, Mama.”

  “Takes one to know one.” She mumbled again, poking at his hand on the bathtub’s rim. “In the water, all of you, or it won’t work.”

  He didn’t look at her. Instead, his gaze turned to Cara. “All?”

  “Every inch, Detective.” Mama Lodi snickered again, peeling his fingers away from the rim. The ring burned in Cara’s palm, metal still skin-warm.

  Evan’s shoulders hunched further. “Does this stuff rinse off?”

  “Quit being a baby.”

  Cara watched as he settled, slipping the ring into her own jacket pocket. His knees dipped below the surface and rose, coated with that thick sheen.

  “It’s gonna get in my nose.”

  Mama Lodi, crouched at the tubside, settled back on her thin haunches. “Do you want this, or not?”

  “Fine.” He shifted again. “I’m gonna have to turn onto my side.”

  “Then do it.”

  One shoulder slid below the fluid. Displacement made the slug-sheen rise over him. Tiny fringed fingers of the stuff crawled up, thickening on skin and hair it had already touched. Chewed bits of apple rose in her throat, now seasoned with bile, but she swallowed and her fac
e was safely blank again when Mama Lodi glanced over her shoulder, checking.

  Playing dumb was often the safest bet.

  “Get everything underneath,” the old woman said, softly. “You’re almost there, Evan.”

  “Okay.” He took a deep breath, and slid down further.

  Mama Lodi’s fingers curled over the inky cap of his buzzcut, and she shoved his head under the surface, scooping up more of the thickening stuff and slathering it on the very top of his other shoulder, still bare and innocent. A crackling filled the bathroom, and the old woman laughed. The slug-stuff slopped, and Evan kicked, heels and knees softly thwapping the sides of the tub.

  It’s holding him down, Cara realized, dreamily.

  “Now,” Mama Lodi breathed. “Now we make you perfect.” She raised one dripping hand, using her pointed chin to pull at her shoulder-sleeve a little, like a woman at a soapy sink. Her hand dove again, and Cara took a step forward, exhaling in wonder.

  The slug-stuff resisted, but flesh underneath did not. Snakelike, liver-spotted fingers plunged through yielding skin, curled and brought out a chunk of tarlike black bubbling. The old woman hissed balefully, tipping her head at the toilet. Cara understood, and lunged to whisk away Evan’s folded clothes, opening the lid. The black stuff went into the bowl with a sickening splash-plop.

  Can he breathe? Cara clutched at Evan’s clothes. The body under the slug-fluid spasmed again, and the surface of the stuff stretched like plastic wrap.

  Another handful of black tar, yanked out and rolled in Mama Lodi’s palm like taffy, splashed into the toilet bowl and sank.

  “Ohhhh yes.” She laughed again. “Perfect, perfect, perfect. Tell me, girl.” Another amused, impartial glance. “Are you hungry? You must be starving.”

  “Yes,” Cara agreed, even though the nausea threatened to spew half-digested apple all over white tile and enamel.