by T. A. Pratt
Pelham sighed. “I thought perhaps you could simply show her the video, Rondeau. That way we could avoid any... miscommunications.”
He snapped his fingers. “Yeah, that’s right. Then she can just get mad at the TV!”
“You filmed it? I sent you a ghostly apparition from the underworld and you took a video? Is this shit up on YouTube?”
“Well, nobody uses film anymore, but yeah, I recorded the whole thing. Pelham suggested it, so we’d have a record, and wouldn’t have to rely on remembering what you said. And, no, no YouTube, though that’s a good idea.”
“Huh. I thought supernatural stuff didn’t tend to show up on film. Video. Whatever.”
Rondeau shrugged. “This did. Maybe back in the old days supernatural creatures didn’t let themselves be captured on film because of, whatever, magical self-preservation. But these days you can fake anything in a video. A high school kid with the right software can make a totally realistic movie about ghosts or demons. So what’s the harm? Nobody’d believe it was real magic. If I showed the video I’ve got here to anybody, they’d assume it was from a low-budget horror movie, the fake-documentary kind. You know how adaptive magic can be.”
He fumbled around for a while and then found a remote control buried under some magazines on the table. He pressed a button and the doors of a cabinet across the room slid open, revealing a television screen that had to be at least 70 inches from corner to corner. Pelham, meanwhile, carried a laptop across the room and hooked it up to a cord near the television. “To the couch!” Rondeau cried. He shoved the sleeping man’s legs out of the way and flopped down facing the TV.
I took an armchair. “What if the Prince of Denmark there wakes up?”
“I’ll tell him I’m producing a low-budget horror movie,” Rondeau said. “And he won’t understand a word I’m saying on account of Danish-ness. Now watch the show. You won’t believe the shit you made us do.”
TWO HEADS
I’m getting sick of writing “I I I me me me my my my” so I’m just going to tell you what was on the tape.
•
Rondeau, wearing a yellow silk robe, dimmed the lights in the suite’s gargantuan bathroom, leaving the room to be illuminated by what seemed like a hundred candles – though maybe it was fewer, their light doubled and tripled and quadrupled by the bathroom’s many mirrors. Rondeau glanced back through the door, toward the camera. “Are you rolling?”
The cameraman – presumably Pelham – must have given some non-verbal sign of assent, because Rondeau. “Good. Probably best if you stay outside the room. Oracles can be... twitchy.” He knelt down on the furry rug beside the shower (which was easily big enough for three people, or four if they got cozy), his back to the camera. “Okay, Marla, I’m here, at the appointed hour, in a room of fire and mirrors – being queen of the dead sure has brought out a poetic streak in you – and I’m opening up the doors of perception as wide as I can without recourse to chemical accelerants –”
An apparition began with a shimmer in the air, like an orange-red ribbon fluttering above Rondeau’s head. Within a moment that flicker had solidified into the skull of a small dog, white bone with flames flickering in its eye sockets and nose holes and inside its toothy jaws.
Rondeau grunted and lifted up his head, seemingly with great effort. “A pale dog burning in the flames of hell. Well, okay. What’s the word?”
The dog’s voice was full of terrible echoes and clashing asynchronies, but I could understand its words. “My mistress has chosen a mission to fill her mortal days. She will seek to right wrongs and –”
“Help the helpless, right. Walking the Earth, going from place to place and uplifting the downtrodden. Sure. She mentioned something about that before she took the express elevator downstairs.” Rondeau’s voice was strained, like he was trying to stay casual and conversational in the middle of a firefight. “She’s seeking some kind of redem–”
“We do not say the ‘R’ word,” the skull said, managing to make its piping, shrieking voice sound stern. “She merely seeks to keep herself occupied and entertained during those regrettable intervals when she is not serving as co-regent of the underworld.”
“Right,” Rondeau said. “Me, I’d just watch porn and eat ice cream sundaes, but me and Marla have always had our differences. So what does she need us to do? Your mistress?” (He snickered, and I couldn’t blame him. “Mistress.” Gods.)
“My mis – the queen of the dead requires a guide to the dark places of the world. A seeker after chaos and disorder. A tracker to lead her to evil.”
Rondeau’s shoulders began to tremble. Summoning up oracles was always hard on him. “Apparently she also requires a ghost dog who says the same thing three times and still fails to provide any information. What is she asking me to do?”
“My mistress has withdrawn death from chaos witch Nicolette. She has decided that a fitting punishment for Nicolette will be to live on, instead, and serve Marla’s mortal vessel as a guide.”
Rondeau laughed and slapped his hand against the floor. “Oh. Okay. Wow. And you say she’s not seeking redem – I mean, the R word? She’s voluntarily going to travel with the zombified version of her worst surviving enemy. How is that not penance?”
“My mistress has nothing to atone for, she is a goddess, she is above –”
“Okay, okay, I get it. Boy, becoming a fundamental power of the universe sure went to her head. I’m still waiting for the call to action, though, Lassie. What. Do. I. Do.”
“You must retrieve Nicolette’s head, and bring it here, to await my mistress’s return.”
No laughter this time. “Um. When you said Marla was withdrawing death from Nicolette, I figured that meant she was going to be... re-capitated, or whatever. She’s still a headless horseman in need of a horse?”
“Our mistress has no need for Nicolette’s body, which has at any rate been eaten by creatures of the sea. Why retroactively deny such creatures their sustenance? Nicolette’s head alone will be sufficient. It remains at the bottom of the fish pond in Maui, where it was tossed by her murderer. You will retrieve the head and bring it back here.”
“Marla, if you’re listening, you so owe me for this, I just left Maui, some of us can’t travel instantaneously through magical doors that aren’t really there –”
The head flared with a sudden flash of red light, so bright it overwhelmed the camera’s ability to compensate, flashing the screen to pure white for a moment. When the light faded, the head was gone.
Rondeau turned his head and looked back over his shoulder, making it appear that he looked directly out of the screen, into my eyes. “Psychopomp and circumstance,” he said, and fell over on the rug, beginning to convules. The camera wavered wildly, fell over on its side, and then went black as Pelham rushed to help Rondeau.
•
As the TV screen went black, the pretty half-naked Danish guy on the couch said, “Det er bare forkert,” and then went back to sleep.
“What do you think that meant?” Pelham said.
“Probably ‘that’s fucked up,”’ Rondeau said. “If I had to guess.”
“No,” I said. “No no no no no. Nicolette? Why would I want Nicolette’s head to for a traveling companion? For that matter, where the hell am I meant to be traveling?”
“I thought that much was pretty clear,” Rondeau said. “You needed a psychic bloodhound, and you’re going to walk the earth do-gooding. I was more curious about why you sent a talking dog skull that was also on fire to deliver the message. The underworld has some pretty fucked-up pets.”
I covered my face with both hands. “You didn’t get her head. Tell me you didn’t.”
“Of course we did,” Rondeau said. “The queen of the dead told us to. Via screaming-dog-o-gram. We took my private jet to Maui. Pelham and I put on snorkel gear and got a big fishing net. We went in the middle of the night, so the beach would be deserted. Nothing like mucking around in black water in the dark. Nicolette wa
s awake and aware down there in the mud. By the time we got her out into the dry air she’d nearly bitten through the net. She’s been here in Vegas for a week, and she’s even bitchier as a talking severed head than she was as a whole person. She keeps demanding to know what she’s doing here, but I figured you could tell her yourself.”
Nicolette. She’d once been a gadfly, and had grown into something perilously close to an arch-enemy, though I’d never admit that to her in a million years – she didn’t deserve the validation of her ambitions. And anyway, she fucked things up more often than bona fide supervillains usually do. “Why. Why would I do this to myself? It’s like infesting myself with bedbugs. I don’t get it.”
“Rondeau’s suggestion of penance has the ring of truth,” Pelham said. “Perhaps, while in the land of the dead, you began to feel guilty for, ah, certain mistakes you made recently...”
Look, I’m not a monster. Sure, I feel guilt sometimes, and shame. I’ve done some bad things. Killed some people when there were maybe non-lethal ways to deal with the situation instead. I’ve often been willing to commit small evils in the service of greater goods. And, yes, I’ve done a couple of selfish things that threatened the basic integrity of the multiverse, nobody’s perfect, and anyway, I fixed it all, more or less. But my intentions were always good – or at least neutral – so I refuse to accept that I need to do penance. I sure as hell don’t need redemption.
But the goddess version of me – who seems more and more to me like an annoying older sister who thinks she knows better – obviously thought otherwise. Was I suppose to believe her, just because she possessed cosmic wisdom my puny human brain couldn’t even process? The hell I was.
“Okay,” I said. “Fine. At least Nicolette will be as miserable as I am. She hates me more than I hate her. Will she actually do the job, though? Lead me to... wherever the Bride of Death, that asshole, thinks I need to go?”
“You’d have to ask her,” Rondeau said. “I try not to talk to Nicolette.”
“Likewise,” Pelham admitted.
“Where is she?”
“Closet in the second bedroom,” Rondeau said. “In an aquarium, because she bites.”
“Technically a terrarium, since there’s no water in it,” Pelham said.
“Det er bare forkert,” the Danish guy said again, and then ran into the bathroom, where he noisily threw up.
TIME SUCKS
I had this crazy idea that I’d stay up late that second night back on Earth, write it all down, catch up to the present moment, and then find a little time to update this journal or diary or whatever every day or two after that as I went about my business.
But it didn’t work out that way. I got busy. So here I am opening up this notebook again days later, and I’m way behind, and there’s all kinds of crap brewing. I think I started a supernatural gang war, I’ve discovered some shit about my new situation that’s either disturbing or awesome or both, and I’ve come to the attention of something or someone called the Eater. I think I need to kill him or her or it, if I can figure out what it is, but I’ll get to all that.
For the sake of continuity I’m going to marathon through the night here and try to bring everything up to date, right up through stomping that monster to death. And if I make it through the days to come with my brain and writing hand intact, well, I’ll write down what happens next after it’s done.
So where was I? Right. I was about to see Nicolette again. Yeah. I can see why I stopped writing when I did last time.
PALE HORSE
I went into the spare bedroom, took a deep breath, and pulled open the closet door.
Nicolette grinned at me. “Hey, the bitch is back. It’s about time. Give us a kiss.” Her head – which is all of her, now – rested inside a smallish glass box, the kind of thing where you’d keep a pet turtle. Being dead and submerged in a fish pond for a month hadn’t done her much harm in the looks department, actually – I assume “withdrawing death” worked some magical rejuvenation on her. She was still sharp-featured and pale, and still had white-blonde duck-fuzz for hair, her signature dreadlocks having been shorn off during her stay in a mental hospital not that long ago. I wondered if the hair would grow back. She might look a little less stupid then, anyway. She had just enough neck left to act as a pedestal for her skull.
“You look well,” I said. “From the neck up, anyway.”
“You look like crap in a bucket. And not even a nice bucket. What’s the point of this, Marla? Why make me do an Orpheus impression?” She wiggled her tongue at me suggestively. I considered barfing in her terrarium. Maybe I should’ve. It might have set a better tone.
“I need a guide to help me track down problems I can solve, preferably by doing violent things to bad people.” I shrugged. “You get to be my GPS for evil. We’re going on the road together. You’ll use your connection to chaos to sniff out bad magic, and I’ll kick the shit out of whatever we find. What, you had better plans to pass the time?”
“Being dead passed the time, just fine. I don’t remember what it was like, but it was better than being with you. Why would you recruit your nemesis to be your partner?”
“Less my partner, and more my bloodhound.” I leaned against the doorframe. “And anyway, you were never my nemesis. Once or twice you worked for people I might have called that, before I kicked their asses into fragments, but you were never more than irritating. Which you still are, so points for consistency.”
“If I could shake my head at you right now, I would. Send me back to hell, Marla. I’m not helping you. You’re wasting my time.”
I sighed. “I’d get rid of you if I could, believe me. This wasn’t actually my idea, not exactly – it’s hard to explain. But suffice to say, it’s not in my power to kill you. Re-kill you. Whatever. I could chuck you in the ocean, but you’d just sink, and be conscious forever while fish nibbled your eyeballs, and that’s pretty cruel even by my standards. Wouldn’t you rather have some kind of useful occupation?”
Nicolette sighed. I wondered how the sighing and talking worked, considering her total lack of lungs pushing air through her throat. I mean, yes, it worked by magic, obviously, but I wasn’t sure how I’d go about creating a spell to produce that effect – which was funny, since I obviously had cast such a spell, in my goddess form.
“You want me to find trouble for you?” Nicolette rolled her eyes up, as if trying to gaze at the ceiling. “Huh. I could do that. I can do that easily.”
I nodded. “You’re hoping to lead me into a situation where I’ll get killed.” Nicolette wasn’t aware of my special relationship with Death – not the full extent of it, anyway. She knew I’d kicked the god of death out of my city once, but not that we’d gotten married afterward. It’s not like we had an announcement in the newspaper.
“Ding ding ding. You got it in one.” She gave me her usual stupid grin, the one like a dog baring its teeth, and I wondered if she’d ever actually been happy. I’d seen her be merry, and certainly manic, but actually happy? I thought happiness was probably beyond her.
To be fair, most of the time I think it’s beyond me, too.
“Good luck with that.” I sighed. “Is there any way we can make this arrangement less horrible than it seems likely to be based on current projections?”
I could tell Nicolette wanted to cock her head. That was one of her birdlike mannerisms, back when she had a body, but it was tricky with no shoulders and precious little neck to work with. “You could feed me regularly. Those assholes who work for you haven’t given me anything to eat. That might make me a little less furiously horrible at you. Not enough to make any difference, probably, but it’s worth a try. “
I made a face. “I’m not sure I want to watch chewed-up cheeseburgers ooze out of the bottom of your neck stump. Sure you don’t want to take up smoking instead, deal with your oral fixation that way? It’s not like you’ve got to worry about cancer.”
“Idiot,” she said, not at all fondly. “I don’t
need food. Don’t even crave it. Now, more than ever, what I want to eat is chaos.”
“Ah. Somehow I don’t think we’re going to have a shortage of chaos if we go traveling together.”
“Good. Just increase entropy in my immediate vicinity ten or twelve times a day, let me slurp up some of that disastrous energy, and we’ll get along fine. Oh, and get me the fuck out of this fish tank, I feel claustrophobic. I need to feel air on my skin. What little bit I have left.”
“Right. Reasonable requests. See? I can be reasonable if you can be. We leave in the morning.” I closed the closet doors. She started squawking and shouting immediately, but I ignored her. I figured it was good to start practicing ignoring her right away, so I could hurry up and get good at it.
•
“Nicolette’s as charming as always. Rondeau, I’m going to need a birdcage. Big enough for her head to fit in, small enough for me to carry easily. And some kind of tight-fitting cover so I can hide her from prying eyes, at least until I have a minute to whip up a semi-permanent illusion. Can you manage that?”
He already had a phone in his hand. “That’s why Vegas invented 24-hour concierge service, boss. And since I pay the concierge’s salary, he’s willing to go above and beyond.”
“Good. I’m going to need wheels, too, since apparently I’m going on a self-mandated road trip through the dark heart of America –”
“Ah,” Pelham said from the couch. “If you’ll come downstairs, we have something to show you.”
Rondeau hung up the phone. “Birdcage is incoming. Wait up, I don’t want to miss the unveiling.”
“Unveiling?” They just grinned. “Never mind, I can see you’re into suspense.” I pointed at Rondeau’s bare legs poking out of the bottom of his robe. “Put on pants. I’m not leaving this room with you doing a Hugh Hefner impression.”
I know I said “Never mind,” but once we started walking down the hallway I badgered them anyway about what they had to show me. They wouldn’t give me any details, saying they’d been sworn to secrecy, and when I demanded to know who’d sworn them to secrecy, they said that was a secret, too. I like secrets, but in the same way an obsessive gun collector likes firearms: I want to own them, and keep them, and caress them in the night. Other people having secrets I don’t either bores or annoys me.