by T. A. Pratt
I always get uncomfortable when people cry at me. “Okay. But what is it? You didn’t see it when you found the cavern, maybe it was small or intangible or something then, but you’ve seen it since, yeah?”
He shrugged, still weeping. “It’s hard to describe. Your eyes slide away from it, and it comes in the night, but.. it’s like stilts, bird legs, scissors, tent poles... sharp and pointy and long and bony, but made of shadows, always folding and unfolding. It goes from something compact, the size of a horse, to sprawled-out as big as a house, all claws and angles, coming at you from every direction...”
It didn’t sound like any kind of monster I’d ever heard of. But, hell, there are half a million different species of beetle on Earth. Biodiversity has never been a problem for our planet, and that applies to things that live partially in other dimensions or come from deep time or eat fear or have parasitic relationships with dreams or whatever, too. Shit gets weird. “I wonder if it really eats people. I mean the way we eat. Or if it feeds in some other way. Have you found any body parts? Or blood?”
He shook his head. “It comes, and reaches out, and wraps someone up, and drags them away. I’ve looked – we all looked, when there were more of us – but we couldn’t find any remains. We couldn’t find any... sort of a lair, or anything, either. Do you think the people who were taken might still be alive?”
I shrugged. There was Doing Better, and there was giving a grieving man false hope, and I wasn’t comfortable with the latter. “I wouldn’t expect it, no. I’m sorry. Even if it’s not literally eating their flesh, it could be feeding on them in some other way, using them up just as effectively. There are monsters that drink serotonin, monsters that feed on auras, monsters that eat memories, or suffering, or breath... none of them leave their victims better off than they were to start with.”
“That’s... almost worse than thinking they were just devoured.”
“No argument here. Okay. It comes at night, you say? And goes a couple of weeks between appearances? When is it due to come again?”
“Any time now.” He frowned. “You’re actually going to try and fight it? I told you, Pete –”
“My weapons aren’t the same ones Pete used. I’m not into guns. Hmm. I think you’ve got to wait it our, Andrew. You should hole up in here, I can set some protective wards.”
“You said you could break the spell, make it possible for us to escape, let’s just run –”
I shook my head. “Bad plan. Breaking the Mobius loop – the spatial distortion that’s trapping you here – is going to take some effort, and once I start trying, it’s going to notice, and attack me, probably – I won’t be able to finish breaking your jail cell open anyway. I’d rather save my energy for fighting. After I kill the thing, I’ll set you free. There’s a good chance its death will break the spell anyway, and spare me the effort.”
“But... what if you die first? How will I get away then?”
“I don’t expect to get killed, Andrew, but if I do, you’re no worse off than you were before. I don’t want it to know I’m more formidable than your average drifter wandering through the desert, anyway. Let it think I’m another helpless little morsel. The element of surprise will help.”
“You really think you can fight it?” He still read as anxious to me, not hopeful, or even curious. Maybe he was just a nervous guy.
I stood up. “I’ve killed gods, Andy. I’m not worried about a collapsible shadow monster. I’m going to scout around, though, while there’s still a little daylight. See about setting up some traps and wards around the houses, so I can at least get a warning if something nasty comes close. You hang out here.”
He nodded, staring at me like he didn’t quite know what to make of me, which is a look I’m pretty familiar with.
I carried Nicolette out with me, through the kitchen and its dwindling stockpile of canned goods, into the backyard. “What do you think?” I said.
“I think there’s a chance you might get eaten by a monster – so, hurray!”
“If I get eaten, you’ll be a head in a cage stuck in a Mobius loop with a grief-stricken bearded guy for very temporary company.”
“I never said there I didn’t see a downside,” Nicolette said.
The backyard had clearly been a sort of communal outdoor kitchen/dining area. There were a couple of barbecue grills, now very dusty, lots of lawn chairs, a patio table, a long redwood picnic table flanked by a couple of benches, and the remains of one of those squarish folding canopies you see at farmer’s markets and outdoor weddings, one of its four supports bent and the whole structure leaning.
“Huh,” Nicolette said. “Something bad happened out here.”
“Well, duh. We’re in a monster’s pantry.”
“No, I mean, right here – screaming, suffering. Not just once, and not quickly, something drawn-out... Shit, it’s pretty overpowering, it’s all a mishmash, I can’t get anything specific out of the general mess.”
“Hmm.” I put Nicolette’s cage down on the patio table, then walked around the grills and chairs, and toward the picnic table.
The wood was red, but there were splotches of darker color, deep stains, reddish-brown and crusty. I’ve seen enough old blood in my time to recognize it instantly. The table had holes drilled in it, too, each about the diameter of a quarter: a pair of holes spaced six inches apart in the middle plank at one end of the table, and at the other end, two sets, one close to the table’s left edge, one close to the right. I crouched down to look under the table, where the dirt was stained with various leakages, and saw three of those u-shaped bicycle locks tucked under one of the benches, all with keys sticking out of their holes.
The underside of the table was carved with designs. I didn’t recognize them, specifically, but I recognized them generally: magical runes and sigils. Messages – or, more likely, commands, or possibly pleadings – written in an inhuman language.
“Oh, fuck,” I said, but didn’t have time to elaborate on my revelation, because that’s when Andrew buried the blade of an axe right between my shoulder blades.
Then he wrenched it out, and as I fell, he brought the axe blade down on the back of my skull.
NO PICNIC
I can’t say it didn’t hurt. I’d never had an axe in the head before, obviously, and I don’t recommend the experience. I’m not sure what parts of my brain it chopped up – I’m not a neurosurgeon, in case you hadn’t noticed – but I can tell you I saw bright colors, tasted hot metal and chili peppers, smelled rubbing alcohol, and puked a bit.
Fortunately he wrenched the axe out, which saved me the trouble of trying to lever an axe out of my own skull. As soon as the blade left my brain, my devastated tissues began to heal.
That’s how I found out that not dying when you’re supposed to is one of the perks of being the Bride of Death. According to our deal I was supposed to spend half the year alive on Earth, and that meant I had to stay alive, and apparently my DH had chosen to just... cancel dying, in my case. As far as solutions go, it’s pretty elegant. Technically I was in my mortal body, I was flesh and blood and bone and lymph and so on... but just as death was withdrawn from Nicolette, it was also withdrawn from me.
So the axe-blow knocked me down, but not out. Still hurt like a bastard, though. Then again, pain is a great motivator.
I stared at my puddle of puke for a minute, my head resting against the edge of the table, letting Andrew assume I was dead. Nicolette, obligingly, started yelling from beneath her cover: “What the fuck was that? Who’s puking? What’s going on?”
Hearing a human voice emerge from a birdcage distracted Andrew – a parrot would have probably been just as effective – so I rolled to one side, drew my dagger from my pocket, and slashed out at his Achilles tendon. He dropped the bloody axe and fell over, screaming and clutching his ankle. I kicked the red-bladed fire axe aside – not very far, since I was still a little wobbly as my skull knit itself back together – and stood over Andrew.
&nbs
p; He stared at me, whimpering. “I killed you!”
“You’ve got lousy aim,” I said. Nicolette didn’t know I was married to Death, and I didn’t especially want her to know I was immune to axe-in-head syndrome either. She was my ally now, but she was also my enemy, and I don’t like giving enemies any more intelligence than I have to. Besides, knowing I wasn’t likely to die in an accident of Nicolette’s devising would only depress her, and she was hard enough to deal with when she was cheerful.
I tore the cover off the cage. “Will you stop squawking?” I moved the cage to the edge of the table so Nicolette could see Andrew. “He just tried to murder me, but he did a terrible job.”
Andrew looked up at the severed head in the cage grinning down at him, then shrieked like a little kid in a haunted house.
“Ahhh,” Nicolette said. “Delicious screaming. There’s a lot of blood on that axe. You sure he didn’t hit you, Marla?”
“He might have nicked me on the back,” I said, reaching around and touching the tear in my coat. Damn it. I liked that coat. I hoped the hole wasn’t too big. “Okay, big boy, up on the table.”
I grabbed him by the hair and one arm and dragged him upright. He hopped on his good foot as I shoved him onto the picnic table on his back. “Nice altar you’ve got here.” I knelt and picked up one of the bicycle locks, opening it up. Andrew tried to roll away, but I smacked him in the forehead with the heavy end of the lock and he groaned and lay still. I slid the prongs of the lock over his throat, and as I’d expected, the sides of the U-bold slid easily into the holes drilled into the table. “Guess you knocked them out before you put them on the table, huh? You don’t seem like you’re tough enough to lock down a victim who’s struggling.” I ducked under the table, fitted the bottom of the lock over the ends of the U protruding from the underside of the table, and turned the key. Now Andrew was fastened to the table by his neck, and he wouldn’t be going anywhere. I didn’t bother locking his legs, as he’d done with his victims – I wasn’t all that worried about getting kicked.
Andrew stared at me, eyes slit, the black bar of the lock pressing against his meaty throat, but not tight enough to cut off his air, unless he struggled. “So,” I said. “What’s the deal? Human sacrifice is fuel for big magic, especially if you sacrifice the ones you love – or was that stuff about your wife and kid bullshit? Somebody sure died on this table, though. What’s the sorcery you’re working? Immortality?”
He laughed, and it was a horrible sound. “Immortality? I’m just trying to say alive. There is a monster, and it did eat my family, and the others who lived here. Or... I don’t know if it ate them, it tore them apart, it seemed to get something out of that, from their pain, or maybe it sucked out their souls or something, I don’t know, but I had to bury the pieces, bury what was left of them – can you imagine how hard that was for me?”
“Harder than strapping your friends and family down on this table as sacrifices?”
He squeezed his eyes shut and shook his head, as well as he could with the lock pressing against his throat.
“Open your eyes, Andrew. We’re not done talking.” I sat on the redwood bench and put my dagger on the table, spinning it around. When it stopped, the point aimed at his cheek. “Did you really crack open a seal and let something out, or was that bullshit?”
“After we found the pit, I... started having these dreams. I saw shapes, the shapes I carved into the table later. And I dreamed about coming back here, to this place. I resisted, for a long time, but I came anyway, I’d go to sleep and wake up hours later in my car, parked here. So when I lost my job, I just... gave in. I listened. I came. And the thing, the taker, it, spoke to me, and told me it had marked me when I looked down into its pit, when I pointed a light into its darkness, and made it hide. The thing said it was going to consume me... unless I made myself useful, instead. It promised...” He closed his eyes, and tears leaked down his face.
“Fed his wife and kid to a monster to save himself,” Nicolette said. “That’s low.”
“It was in my mind,” Andrew whispered. “The... beast. And I was in its mind, sometimes, and I knew I couldn’t fight it. The beast is old, older than almost anything, it lived here when this was all underwater, when this desert was an ocean, and it hunted, and it fed. Some people managed to trap it, for a while in the cavern, under the stone, but... I don’t know what those people knew! I couldn’t stop it, I could only –”
“Collaborate?” I said. “Shit, Andrew. You sacrificed your family so you could live. But what the hell are you living for? You killed the reason you had to stay alive. I will say this, though. Meeting a piece of shit like you makes me feel better about my own horrible mistakes. I’ve done some bad things, but you’ve got me beat.”
“It will be dark soon,” Andrew said, winning the Stating the Obvious challenge. “There’s fresh blood on the table – my blood. That’s what calls it. The beast will come. For me.”
“Couldn’t happen to a nicer asshole.”
“Are you going to let this beast eat him, Marla?” Nicolette asked.
I sighed. “Of course not. I’ll kill the monster, then call the cops and let them know there’s a guy locked to a table, and they might want to inquire about what happened to his wife and kid, and maybe check the table for lots and lots of DNA.”
“He’d let you get eaten,” Nicolette said, joining the state-the-obvious party. “That was the whole point.”
“Yes, Nicolette, but my whole point is that I’m better than him.”
“Aw, I wouldn’t go that far,” Nicolette said. “You’re just horrible in a different way.”
“You have to let me go,” Andrew said. “You can’t possibly fight it, you have no idea what –”
A shadow passed over the sun. I looked up as Andrew whimpered. There were no clouds, no birds, no airplanes – the sky was just dimming, as if we’d been placed under a smoked glass dome.
I drew my dagger, and after some thought, reached into my coat for the silvery axe. The blade glimmered, like a fragment of moonlight, something I’d noticed it doing before, though I hadn’t yet figured out what it meant.
“Is that an eclipse?” Nicolette demanded. “Damn it, not having a neck sucks, I can’t even tilt my head back.”
I rolled my neck around on my shoulders. “No eclipse, but something’s coming. I guess the beast didn’t want to wait for natural nightfall, so it brought its own.”
Andrew was openly sobbing, but I didn’t have much sympathy for him. He’d made his bloody altar, and now he had to lie on it.
Something approached from the north. I squinted, but that didn’t help my vision much, especially with the still-diminishing brightness. The vestiges of bedbug-potion were no help, either, since it didn’t give off any heat I could detect. The thing seemed to be a bodiless ball of writhing wires or tentacles, limbs crossing and recrossing, the whole moving by some form of locomotion that defied analysis.
I grunted. “Your beast is only a little bit in this world, Andrew. It’s operating in dimensions we can’t see. That explains its ability to turn this neighborhood into a Mobius strip – it’s some kind of dimensional manipulator. Sure makes it hard to tell what we’re dealing with, though. We might as well be in Flatland here, perceiving a bouncing ball as an expanding and contracting circle.”
“Nerd,” Nicolette muttered.
Still, there were parts of the beast projecting into this reality, and I didn’t see any reason I couldn’t chop all those parts off and hope some of them were vital. I rushed around the table and ran toward the thing, silver hatchet in one hand, knife in the other. Within seconds one of the – tentacles? Bones? Appendages? – was in reach, so I lashed out with my dagger.
The supernatural blade sliced cleanly, and the limb – a glossy black thing segmented like a scorpion’s tail – snapped like a wire under tension, one end falling to the dirt, the other recoiling and vanishing into thin air. The creature did seem to have a central mass from which the wr
ithing appendages radiated, but that body shifted in and out of sight, as if obscured by a moving curtain.
I did catch a glimpse of its mouth, though. It had a six-foot-long tooth whorl, a lower jaw full of serrated teeth that spiraled inward like the head of a fiddlehead fern crossed with a circular saw. I’d seen tooth whorls in artists’ renditions of the prehistoric sea monster heliocoprion, the only creature known to possess such a weird-ass form of dentata, but this beast was no deep-sea prehistoric predator that had survived into the modern day. For one thing, heliocoprion didn’t have tentacles or the ability to shift through dimensions and manipulate space-time (presumably). But the beast’s curled-up jaw full of fangs did make me wonder if some of the fossilized teeth whorls attributed to heliocoprons had belonged to things like this instead. There really were giants in the earth in those days, is the thing.
I lashed out at every appendage that whipped or twisted its way into my sphere of destruction, and hissed when one wrapped around my wrist – it didn’t hurt or burn or anything, but its touch was foul, carrying some fundamental contagion that revolted me instantly, broadcasting horror right at my reptile backbrain. When I cut that tentacle loose, and the limb unwrapped from my arm, it left behind an ugly smear that stank like a skunk carcass.
Still the thing advanced, and its appendages didn’t seem to dwindle in number, fresh ones appearing faster than I could sever them. Soon I was slashing with axe and knife both, and managing to hold my own – until its tooth whorl unfurled out of thin air, a muscular curl of jaw studded with triangular fangs, lashing out for my face. I ducked and cursed and fell back behind the picnic table.
“Tactical error, huh, Marla?” Nicolette said.
Truer words. I’d assumed I could kill the thing – I have a lot of experience backing up that assumption – but for all I knew I was just trimming its fingernails and cutting its hair.