by T. A. Pratt
I drove up and down the lanes to make sure there were no other customers lurking, but I was lucky, so I found the car crusher and parked near it.
Ernesto had taught me how to use the big junkyard machines, and even though this one wasn’t identical to the one I’d learned on, the general idea was the same. This was a hydraulic vertical press – a “pancake” crusher – basically a big-ass metal box the size of a garage, with a heavy plate that would descend and crush anything you put inside. The press was striped in yellow and black danger lines, and there was a shimmery scatter of shattered safety glass all around it, but no car inside at the moment. This kind of press was designed to flatten junked cars so they could be stacked more easily on trucks and hauled off for disposal. I was glad it was a pancaker. A baling press – the kind that first squashes a car flat, then squashes in from the sides, and reduces a car to an astonishingly compact cube – would have been too fucking scary for what I had in mind.
I moved stuff out of the van and got everything set up. Some of it was hard to move solo, but I’ve always been pretty good at inertial magics, so I managed to manhandle everything into place, though it turned me into a sweaty, sore-muscled wreck in the process.
Once I was satisfied with the set-up, I removed Nicolette from the cab of the truck, set her cage on the hood with a good view of the crusher, and removed her drop cloth. “Ta da!” I said.
I stood beside her and took in the scene. The car crusher looked like a diorama of a pleasant living room. An antique Persian rug covered most of the crusher’s floor, and there was a leather armchair, a beautiful carved-wood end table holding a Tiffany lamp, a dark mahogany sideboard bearing several old and lovely vases and an old-school phonograph, complete with the big horn. A curio cabinet stuffed with awful porcelain figurines, and a pie safe with a mismatched bunch of wedding china, depression glass, and Fiesta plates and bowls. The piece de resistance was an upright player piano, maybe a little too honky-tonk for the vibe as a whole, but in amazingly good shape for its age.
Nicolette made a little noise, almost just an exhale, but it was something.
“Pretty nice, huh?” I said. “I know you always got a kick out of destroying beautiful things. I feel bad your enjoyment of the giant massacre in Tolerance was spoiled. I realize you couldn’t really savor the chaos in the street because of, ah, all the... stuff... going on with Sarlat. So I thought –”
“Smashing up some antiques isn’t going to make me feel better, Marla,” she said, voice dull and monotone. “Not noticeably.”
“Ah, but the antiques, they’re really just the garnish,” I said. “You just watch and see.”
The controls were an issue I’d puzzled over a bit. It would have been useful to have an accomplice, again – it made me wish I had Rondeau with me, but I didn’t, for two good reasons: he wouldn’t want to do all this shit, and having him with me would make all this too much like fun, and I wasn’t convinced I was supposed to be having much fun. Maybe I should have brought an annoying-as-shit death cultist to act as general dogsbody. Or told Squat to come along on this errand. That was a pretty good solution, actually. His presence was guaranteed to be kind of unpleasant – the curse required it – so he’d contribute to my general misery. (Maybe it’s stupid to punish myself this way. But the thing is – I’m a part-time goddess. I’m unkillable. I deserve to be punished, to suffer a little for the suffering I’ve caused, but there’s no one else qualified to punish me – or capable of making it stick. Like always, if I want something done, I have to do it myself. I’ve never been good at forgiveness. Apparently not even when it comes to myself.)
Shit, introspective digression there, those are getting more frequent. Anyway, the controls: the crusher was run via levers and buttons on a panel at one end of the machine, and I didn’t have anyone to operate it. I realized I should have used a pebble of compulsion on the shop owner after all – then he could have pulled the levers and pushed the buttons, transformed from autonomous being with his own hopes and dreams into my own little remote control. Instead I had to do something far creepier.
I still had one of the polaroids from Tolerance, so I scrawled a rune across my own face, using blood from my index finger – a bit of my flesh to lend the simulacrum solidity – and then lit the photo on fire. (The telepresence illusions were re-usable, minimal magic, just bent light to create an image and displaced air waves for sound, but for something more substantial I had to let the components be consumed.)
After I tossed the burning image to the ground, smoke rose up, thick tendrils of gray, far more than a burning bit of plastic could have supplied through ordinary combustion. The smoke seemed to fill an invisible mold, forming a life-sized but not even remotely human-looking copy of me, wearing the leather coat and boots I’d left in the truck, all rendered in shades of dark gray. The edges of the figure swirled and eddied, but there was enough solidity at the core to run some heavy machinery –
And to run its mouth, apparently. “Are you sure you want to do this?” my smoke-golem said.
I frowned. “What the fuck? Since when do things like you talk?”
“You invested me with a piece of yourself,” it said, smoke flowing out and up as its mouth opened and closed.
“I’ve done this sort of thing before, and I never got any chatter in the old days.”
“You’re more full of life than you used to be. Your blood is more potent.”
Was this more goddess shit? Or a bizarre consequence of being unkillable? It made me wonder if all my blood-based magics would be more powerful now. “You’re just temporary though, right?”
“How should I know? You created me.”
I glanced at Nicolette, hoping the sight of two Marlas would sufficiently enrage her to prompt a comment, but she barely seemed to notice. “Huh. This is a little bit new to me, too. So are you, like, an independent entity, or a reflection of me, or...”
The smoke-creature looked amused, I thought, but it was hard to tell with its shifting face. “Whatever I am, I’ll run the controls, if you’re sure you want to go through with this.”
“Why not?” I said. “It’s worth a try.”
I climbed up into the car crusher, the part of my brain that had not yet internalized the fact of my immortality screaming at me that this was a bad bad bad idea, a transgression against good sense and self interest. But I fought those feelings down, walked across the rug, and sat down in the armchair. I glanced up at the immense, rust-pocked metal plate above my head. “Here goes,” I said. “You might want to watch this, Nicolette.”
“Wait, what?” Nicolette’s flickered from me to the plate above my head, her face alive with interest and confusion at last.
Then the squealing roar of the hydraulics started up.
•
Look, I got crushed. I don’t know how much detail I really want to go into here. I was terrified, deep in my backbrain, despite my intellectual knowledge that I’d be fine. I was terrified in my forebrain, too, when I thought about the pain, because I knew being crushed was going to hurt, a sort of hurt almost no one has ever experienced and lived through.
I thought of stories I’d heard of thieves and mobsters hiding out in the trunks of cars, waiting for the heat to die down, only for the cars to be crushed with them inside. At least those poor bastards hadn’t seen it coming. I had to deal with the suspense. I hunched down as the plate descended, tried to pull in my neck like a turtle, a totally involuntary action, but it happened, inevitably, the rusty plate touching the top of my head, the pressure, the slowly mounting pressure –
I heard the jangling sound of the piano being crushed, its strings snapping and setting off a last discordant symphony, the kind of chaotic, irreproducible music that Nicolette most enjoyed. I heard the vases shatter and pop and the curio cabinet crunch. The chair I was sitting in broke and squeezed to splinters and fragments around me, adding stabbing and scratching to the crushing.
The last thing I heard before I lost consciou
sness was Nicolette’s howling laughter.
•
I opened my eyes and then wiped the blood out of them. The enormity of the pain – I mean the classic sense of “enormity” here, of something bad on a vast scale – was already fading from my mind. I stood up, looking around at the pulped and smashed remains of the antiques, and at all my blood – drying puddles of apparently very magically potent blood. My clothes were torn to pieces, ground and scraped into shreds by the armchair I’d been sitting in, but basically I felt fine. I stepped out, wobbly, and nodded to my smoke ghost twin standing by the controls.
“How in the fuck,” Nicolette said. “You could do this trick on stage in Vegas. You were sitting there, I know it was you, I can sense your reality, throbbing like a rotten tooth in my jaw. I saw you get squashed, I thought you’d lost your mind and decided to end it all in the crazy painfulest way ever, I was so happy – and now here you are, looking like you really did get crushed, clothes ripped to shit, but not a mark on your body. How?”
I coughed, shrugged, cracked my neck. “A magician never reveals her secrets. You know I’m good with illusions.”
“And that chatty smoke golem over there, how’d you manage – Wait, that’s it, isn’t it? You disguised yourself as the golem and switched places, so it was the golem who got squished and you who ran the controls, then you swapped back. That has to be it. All smoke and mirrors.”
“Exactly,” I said. “I figured seeing me in agony might perk you up, so I wanted to make it convincing.”
“The screams were very authentic,” Nicolette said. “And knowing it was all bullshit, that you didn’t get crushed at all, sort of spoils the thrill, retroactively – but I admit, in the moment, seeing you get pulped, gods, yeah, that made me happy. And all those nice antiques getting smashed, too, like the olive in a martini or a cherry on a sundae, not necessary really, but a nice addition. Good trick. Feel free to stage shows like that for me nightly.”
Nicolette would never know how I had suffered in my attempt to do penance. It crossed my mind that this atonement stuff was arguably a little crazy – I was basically a monk whipping himself to ribbons with a thorny branch and then putting on the old hairshirt for good measure – but I felt a little better, too. I’d fucked up by handing Nicolette over to Sarlat, and I’d paid a price for that mistake. The only books being balanced were the ones in my head, but it still mattered.
The crusher kind of put things in perspective, too. I wasn’t likely to moan over a stubbed toe any time soon, not after experiencing that kind of pain.
My smoke ghost started to walk toward me. “Marla,” it said, producing ribbons of gas like a fog machine at a metal show. “Your heart’s in the right place, but it’s not a competition, this whole self-improvement thing. Don’t get obsessive or become an overachiever, you know how we can be –”
Then a gust of wind blew through, spinning my ghost into shreds of nothingness, leaving behind a smell of burned chemicals and blood.
I looked at the car crusher. Shit, yeah, blood. The manager of the yard would wake up soon, and he’d find a crusher full of weird stuff and lots of blood, and there would be panic and cops and even though it was unlikely any of it would trace back to me, it’d be better if this place looked like less of a crime scene.
Without thinking about it, I gestured, and flames appeared in the crusher, casting an invisible shadow of heat so powerful I stumbled back a few steps. The flames burned blue and white, seeming brighter for a moment than the sun, and when they abruptly winked out of existence there was nothing in the crusher at all but ash. Even the bits of metal were gone, flashed to toxic steam.
“Since when did you become a master pyromancer?” Nicolette demanded.
“I’ve been taking night classes at the community college.” I kept my voice light. I’m capable of making big fires, but I do it in the usual ways: pull heat from the atmosphere, or strike a match and use amplification and sympathetic magic, or splash some gasoline around and flip open a Zippo. I don’t just wave my hand and summon... hellfire.
Covering up mass graves and calling up flames that burned with the contained heat of stars. Okay. It seemed I’d learned a few tricks during my month in the underworld. A shame I couldn’t make this stuff happen at will. The battle in Tolerance would have been over a lot faster if I’d been able to intentionally summon a fire so intense it turned metal into gas. Then again, I was known to lose my temper and do destructive things without sufficient forethought, and the idea of having that kind of power at my command was a little worrisome even for me –
Suddenly it seemed a lot more plausible that my goddess-self would decide to limit access to my memories, if they included the knowledge of how to wield power like that. I could recognize my own thought processes at work: never trust anybody else to do anything right. Even when that “anybody else” encompasses another, arguably lesser, version of yourself.
“I guess you’re stuffed with chaos, but I could use something to eat, and some sleep,” I said. “I’m going to change clothes, then let’s ditch the truck and find a place to hole up for the night.”
“And tomorrow we going looking for this Eater thing?” Nicolette said.
“That’s the idea.”
“Good. Maybe he can kill you for real.”
“Hope springs eternal, with feathers on,” I said.
GETTING CLEAN
We were in yet another crappy motel – there were no shortage of those in the Southwest – but the water pressure was good and hot and I spent a long time filling the bathroom with steam while Nicolette watched TV in the other room.
I’d killed a bunch of monsters, and caused a bunch of other monsters to be killed. Filthy work – literally, not figuratively – and getting squished in a hydraulic press hadn’t helped my cleanliness. Hence the endless hot scouring torrents of water. The curtain was a flimsy thing, and I knew someone else was in the bathroom with me the moment he appeared. I knew who, too.
“Peeping Tom,” I said.
“I look upon mortal bodies with disinterest,” Death replied, sitting down on the closed toilet next to the shower. “All flesh is grass. Though admittedly yours is very tender and delectable grass.”
“Are you planning to check up on me every week?”
“Just on days you cheat death,” he said mildly. I peeked around the edge of the shower, though I could barely see him in the swirling steam. “I assumed some enemy of yours loaded you into a car crusher, but, no, it was self-inflicted. May I ask why?”
“I screwed up, and something unpleasant happened to Nicolette – something I didn’t mean to happen. She was pretty upset about it, and I felt bad, so I figured I’d make her feel better. There’s nothing she likes more than the idea of me dying horribly, so.”
Death clucked his tongue. “You couldn’t have taken her out for an ice cream cone or something less violent instead?”
“She says eating real food isn’t satisfying anymore, since it just falls out of her neck-hole. Don’t worry. I’m fine. Unless, what, do I only have nine lives or something?”
“No, death is withdrawn from you during the time you dwell on the Earth, until you’ve achieved a reasonable human old age, or until you decide you don’t want to bother with being alive anymore. You could drown yourself for breakfast every morning and you’d be spitting up water and breathing fine mere moments later. Granted, if you were incinerated utterly by the blast of a hydrogen bomb, putting you back together again would prove difficult and time-consuming, so try to use some discretion in your choice of deaths, all right?”
“So you’re saying, don’t piss off anybody with access to nukes. That’s pretty good advice in general.”
“If you’d let me, I could take away the pain when you –”
“Life is pain,” I said. Then winced. “Sorry. That came out way too emo. But pain is an important part of life, and I want to be alive, really alive, during the six months of the year I’m here on Earth.”
; “Dying is also an important part of life,” he said, his tone only a little bit insufferable. “Or at least, awareness of the possibility of death. You don’t seem too bothered about giving that part up.”
“I make exceptions when it comes to survival. I’m pragmatic that way.”
“I just worry that you’re hurting yourself because you think you deserve to be hurt.”
“Maybe I do. More than most people do, anyway. Sure, there could be a streak of mortification-of-the-flesh going on here. I won’t deny it. But crushing myself... that sucked. I think I’m going to get out of the physically masochistic self-punishment business.”
“And the psychological punishment? Like traveling with that horrible head-in-a-cage woman?”
I adjusted the water temperature a little, inching it a bit closer to boiling. “Part of that’s self-punishment, sure. But part of it’s also, like, a test. I want to be a better person than I used to be – more thoughtful, more compassionate, less selfish. Except, it’s easy to be a good person when your life doesn’t have any obstacles or complications. So I stack the deck against myself a little – travel with a companion who hates me, instead of Rondeau, who loves me, or Pelham, who almost worships me. Go to territory I don’t know and pick fights with nasty bastards who are bigger than me. Eat shitty food, and sleep rough. Save people who’ll never know I saved them, who’ll never be grateful or owe me a favor. If I can be a better person under those circumstances, then, damn – that means something. Maybe I really can change.”
“You do like to make things more difficult for yourself than they need to be,” Death said.
“What’s life without a challenge? Hard mode or go home, motherfucker.”
“I suppose this enforced misery means you would refuse the comfort of your husband’s touch.”