Bride of Death (Marla Mason)

by T. A. Pratt

  I did not answer that, though I was a trifle offended. Of course there was a shovel in the trunk. I would no more set out on such a journey without a shovel than I would without a tire iron and jack, jumper cables, toolbox, rope, pickaxe, burlap sacking, sewing kit, or any other item that a reasonable person might expect to be of use. Working with sorcerers has taught me the value of being prepared, and all of our cars are amply provisioned. (I was very saddened by the limited storage space available on your motorcycle, Mrs. Mason, but even then I found space in your “saddlebags” for a collapsible portable shovel and other essentials.)

  After several miles of sitting slumped and staring out the window, Rondeau finally lifted his head and said, “There, take that road.”

  The “road” in question was clearly suited more to rugged off-road vehicles than to a luxury vehicle like the Bentley, but the tires and suspension had been suitably enchanted to make travel over such a rutted and potholed ruin of a track relatively easy, so I complied without complaint. (I confess I winced a bit, if only inwardly, at the thought of how dusty and filthy the Bentley would become. I know our business can be a dirty one, but must the dirt so often be literal?) Rondeau did not look well – his skin was pale, droplets of sweat forming on his forehead and running down his cheeks, and he developed a twitch in the muscle of his cheek. “Holy fuck, this is a big one,” he said.

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “Sometimes you can conjure up a little oracle, something small, and it doesn’t take too much of a toll. But if the revelation you’re after is a particularly momentous one, it takes a... larger summoning. Usually a steeper price, too.”

  “I’m afraid I don’t entirely understand the nature of your power,” I told him, as we slid smoothly across the battered ground, deeper into the desert. “When you summon these creatures, are you genuinely locating supernatural creatures and pulling them into our mundane physical reality, as in the old tales of sorcerers summoning demons to do their bidding? Or are the things you summon more like... hand-puppets, merely a way for you to directly interrogate and interact with your own psychic powers, which are actually responsible for uncovering the information you receive from the oracles?”

  “Better minds than mine have debated that question, Pelly,” he replied. “Whichever it is, I get a bastard of a headache most times, and sometimes nose bleeds, and often bad dreams. Marla thinks it’s just my brain, plucking the information out of the cosmos or whatever, and that when I summon an oracle I’m pretty much talking to myself. But there’s this transactional element, you know? The oracle always demands a price, and you have to pay it, and if you don’t, there are consequences – strictly psychic ones, your mind starts to crumble and fold in on itself, but still. The fact that there’s a bargain struck, a price paid, a deal made – that makes me think the creatures I encounter are real, even if they maybe weren’t real in the moments before I called them up. If that makes any sense – you know I’m not a major philosophical thinker. Marla herself has summoned minor oracles, is the thing. It’s not as easy for her as it is for me, she doesn’t have the natural knack, but there are rituals you can do, and she’s done them. Marla’s about as psychic as a block of wood – there are times I think she doesn’t even have a good understanding of what’s going on deep down in her own mind, let alone anybody else’s – so I find it hard to believe that she was just focusing her own energy and unlocking her own psychic perceptions when she, like, called the demon Murmurus into existence in an alleyway to ask it for directions.” He paused. “The world is a lot scarier to contemplate if you believe the things I’m calling up have real, independent existences, isn’t it?”

  “I suppose so,” I said, considering his words, which cast a shadow of apprehension across my mind.

  “And there’s some monstrous big desert spirit here for me to call up,” Rondeau said. “Pull over here. About that shovel –”

  “I have one.”

  “How about a pickaxe?” he said, and I nodded.

  We spent the next half an hour or so toiling, some hundred yards from the place where we’d parked the Bentley. The desert has a certain beauty, I will admit, but there are times when it seems quite alien to me, and as I looked around the bleak and, to all appearances, lifeless expanse around us, I felt as if we had been transported to some distant planet, one inimical not just to human life but to any sort of life at all. I used the pick to break up the stony Earth, and Rondeau the shovel to remove the stones, and in this way we dug a hole some three feet deep. (“It’s about a half a grave down,” Rondeau told me.)

  Eventually the shovel revealed something quite different from the beige and gray sand and rocks: something black and reflective as volcanic rock, probably spherical (it was actually an ellipsoid, as we found when we dug it up entirely later), the size of a soccer ball, its revealed hemisphere cratered and pitted but nevertheless lustrous. We stood at the bottom of the hole, barely large enough for the two of us together, and looked at the incongruous rock. Even I could sense within it some power – perhaps even malevolence, or worse, a cold curiosity.

  Rondeau knelt down, grunting, expression that of a man trying to bear up under considerable pain. “This thing, Pelly... it came from beyond the back of the stars.”

  It could have been a meteorite – and I believe, based on what happened next, that it was, at least of a sort – but I found the phrase “beyond the back of the stars” to be a strangely chilling one.

  “You be ready to ask the question, Pelly. Sometimes it takes all my attention just to keep a hold on whatever I’ve called up, and this might be one of those times.” I nodded my assent, and he reached out with both hands and clasped the sides of the stone, like a faith healer grasping the head of a worshiper.

  He screamed, then, or keened, a sound uncannily like the howling of a boiling teapot, but his face remained bizarrely expressionless.

  After that, Mrs. Mason... this may be hard to credit. I am painfully aware that I can convey to you only what my senses conveyed to my mind, and we both know that senses can be fooled, both by illusions created by others and by our own human tendency to seek patterns and order and reasonable forms of cause-and-effect. But I will report what I remember seeing, acknowledging that memory, by its very nature, is hardly reliable.

  The sky turned black. Above us, stars burned, but they were not cool distant pinpoints of whiteness, as they are in our Earthly sky. They were red, and sometimes green, and I call them stars only because it seems that’s what they must have been. In truth they looked like nothing so much as welts, wounds, festering sores on the utterly black skin of the sky. They were so numerous that, despite the fact that they glowed only faintly, I could see my surroundings easily.

  We remained in our respective positions – Rondeau kneeling, hands on the stone, and I standing beside him – but everything around us was changed. We were no longer in a hole, but standing on a plain, the surface identical to the lustrous black stone we’d unearthed. The place should have been cold, but it was actually warm, and moist, like being in the jungle again. The plain stretched in all directions as far as I could see, but the horizon... the horizon was wrong. Have you stood on the beach, Mrs. Mason, and looked out over the water, and perceived the roundness of the earth, a subtle curve on the horizon? I could perceive the curvature of this world, too, but the horizon curved up at the ends, you see, turning up at the edges like a faint smile, and as I scanned the distance in all directions I perceived that same distortion everywhere I looked.

  It makes no sense, of course. Unless we were on the inside of a sphere. Unless the sky above was just more interior surface. But if that’s true, what were we inside?

  It is more likely that my eyes were deceived, or that the place had no literal existence at all.

  Before I could worry overmuch about our altered surroundings, Rondeau threw his head back, and his mouth began to work in a terrible fashion. His jaw fell open, mouth distending so widely I was
afraid the bones in his face would crack, or the muscles tear, and his tongue writhed in his mouth like a thrashing serpent. Nevertheless, a voice emerged, a voice both booming and viscous, the voice of the god of an ocean of blood:

  “Little things,” it said. “Why have you called to me?”

  Normally, I know, the oracles our friend summons manifest externally – they appear as ghosts, or gods, or monsters. But this one seemed to be using Rondeau as a medium instead, a conduit for its words. Or perhaps the thing he’d summoned was all around us – perhaps we were in its belly, or some other cavity – and we could only hear its voice if it spoke through Rondeau.

  I was sorely afraid, but I kept my wits about me as best I could. “We have a question,” I said. “We are trying to find someone – ah, someone on Earth – called the Eater.”

  A vast rumbling came from all directions, for just a moment, then ceased. “A piece of me is lodged on that distant lump,” the thing said from Rondeau’s mouth. “A splinter of me, spun away and fallen through a tear in reality, traveling through eons and vastnesses, to land on an unremarkable ball of mud and teeming life... And you touched that part of me. I see, I see. You wish me to turn my gaze upon this ball of mud and rot and find the one you seek?”

  “Ah. Yes. If it’s not too much trouble.”

  “Mmm. But there must be a price, yes? Will you pay the price?”

  “We will,” I said, having been briefed on the importance of transactions when dealing with oracles.

  “The Eater... ha. Yes, you had to find me, to come all this way, because no Earthly being could help you to find him at all. He can hide from them, you see – hide in among all the possibilities, picking and choosing and twitching unwelcome futures aside. But I stand above and outside and away, so I can see the whole... but even so, I cannot tell you precisely where he is, or when he will be there, because it shifts. I can give you a thread, though, a reliable thread you can find and seize and follow inward, to the center. Will that do? That will have to do.”

  “It... will be acceptable,” I said, unsure what else I could say.

  “Go to... West Texas. Tomorrow. Interstate 27, about halfway between Lubbock and Plainview – do these words mean anything to you? I am... translating, you might say... across several levels of comprehensibility.”

  “Ah, yes,” I said. “It makes perfect sense.”

  “Good. Go there. Search for a thread of chaos, and follow that thread where it leads.”

  “I understand,” I said.

  “Good. Now, the price. The piece of me that is lodged in your world: break it up, smash it to sand, and send some of that sand to distant places: sift some into the seas, drop some at the poles, some in the mountains, some in the caves. Do you understand?”

  “I do, but why –”

  “My reasons are not for you to know,” it roared, and Rondeau’s jaw did stretch too far, then, the skin on both sides of his mouth tearing and beginning to bleed, and I flinched back. “Obey!”

  “Of course, we will obey!” I shouted, and with that, we were back in the desert again. Rondeau fell backward, unconscious, and in kneeling to attend to him I happened to glance at the stone...

  For just a moment, Mrs. Mason, it seemed to be a monstrous human eye, the size of my own head, the white of the eye crawling with veins that were actually living worms, the iris a deep and mottled purple, the pupil a blackness pinpointed by red and green stars... but then the eye closed, the lid just lustrous stone again.

  Perhaps I have gone on too long. Rondeau was fine, after a few moments, waking up with no memory of the experience at all, though he did not doubt my interpretation of events. He did experience a profound compulsion to dig up and smash the stone, and so we fetched a tarp from the Bentley, set the stone upon it, and set to breaking it with pick and sledgehammer. I was terrified that we would crack the outer layer and discover an eye inside, soft and full of fluid and pulsing and warm and alive, but it was mere stone all the way through, and surprisingly brittle and easy to break up. Seeing the eye may have been a trick of my senses after all. I hope so.

  When we were done we had a few pounds of black sand, which we carefully tied up in the tarp. Rondeau says he will begin mailing packages of sand to people he knows throughout the world tomorrow, to fulfill the bargain. He does not seem eager to speculate about the nature of the oracle we consulted, or its motives in making the demands it did; I feel no particular eagerness to do so myself.

  You have said, Mrs. Mason, that there is nothing humankind was not meant to know, because that implies there is some reliable higher power doing the meaning, and you do not believe in such things, as you know from experience that even gods are limited creatures. But I think there are things humanity would find it unhealthy, or at least deeply unsettling, to know, and the true nature of the oracle we summoned strikes me as one of them.

  I hope the information we provided proves to be valuable, and worth the price; whatever that price truly turns out to be.

  I remain your humble and obedient servant,

  Pelham

  EAST OF NOWHERE

  That Pelly. He writes like he’s a time traveler from the Victorian era, though he was born and raised in Felport. (Admittedly, he was raised in captivity and trained to be an ideal omnicompetent servant for a family of snotty nobles with supernatural lineage, but still.) That story was pretty fucked-up, and I might not have asked Rondeau for the oracle intel if I’d realized it was going to be such a traumatic experience.

  It did make me think the Eater was bigger prey than I’d realized, if we’d needed to summon an oracle with that kind of mojo just to get a clue about how to find it. I’d been assuming he was some kind of anthropophagous magical crime boss... but maybe I was dealing with something more dangerous here.

  If so, good. Killing magical thugs is a public service, but it’s not a particularly interesting challenge.

  •

  After I read the message from Pelly on my smartphone, I looked up to find Squat staring at me expectantly. We’d eaten our nasty fast food at the picnic table beside a rest stop that otherwise consisted of two bathrooms and a knocked-over garbage can. Squat had a motorcycle of his own, a beat-up old Harley, parked beside mine. We were well on our way to being a biker gang. (Maybe “The Brides of Death.” I could picture the logo on the back of a leather jacket already. Though I wasn’t sure Squat would go for that.)

  “Ever been to West Texas?” I asked.

  Squat shrugged. “Sure. Looks a lot like East New Mexico.”

  I poked at my phone some more. “Hmm. If I really pushed it, I could get there in ten hours or so.”

  Squat whistled. “Ah. Okay. Will you be coming back, or...”

  “Not necessarily. It’s not like this is my home base – that’s Vegas, if it’s anywhere. I might just keep rolling on the roads.”

  “Huh. I have a place here, some stuff, some affairs to set in order, but... would you mind if I caught up with you?”

  “You’ve gotten a taste for the monster-killing life, huh?”

  “Let’s say I’m hearing the song of the open road. And you’ve gotten me kind of curious about this Eater guy. He burns down Sarlat’s place to cover his tracks? Must have something interesting to hide. Plus I have a lot of rage, on account of being cursed, and following you seems like a great way to find people I can beat up.”

  “Never people, Squat, just monsters. Unless they’re monstrous people. The lines get a little blurry sometimes, but I’ll be your guide. As for being my tagalong...” Like I mentioned before, having Squat around sort of appealed to me. A sidekick with opposable thumbs had obvious advantages. “I guess having a tough unkillable cursed guy could be a tactical advantage. Sure. Sort out your shit and then give me a call. But I have to get on the road – this lead I’ve got on the Eater has a time limit attached.”

  He saluted with his gnarled fingers. “I’ll be in touch.” He leaned over and spoke to the covered cage resting on the table between us. �
�See you, Nicolette.”

  She mumbled something not very nice, and Squat shrugged and went on his way.

  I went to throw my burger wrapper on the ground, in the existing pile of garbage from the spilled can, then sighed, righted the container, scooped up most of the garbage (using a bit of newspaper as a makeshift glove/dustpan), and only then threw my own trash away, in its proper place. “Doing better,” I muttered. “Dirty business.”

  •

  I stood in the broken remnants of a town somewhere in West Texas at twilight, motorcycle saddlebags slung over my shoulder and a birdcage in my hand. The cage rocked and swayed in my grip. She’d gotten restless on the long drive – not just the ten hours racing from Arizona to Texas, but the subsequent going up-and-down the freeway all night and through the next day, sniffing for chaos. “Be still in there,” I said, bumping the birdcage with my hip. A muffled snarl emerged from under the heavy cloth, but I ignored it.

  My motorcycle was parked some distance away, locked down with magic to keep it safe and make it less likely to be noticed. I didn’t want to ride it right up into town, because the bike stank of magics, and I didn’t want to tip off my prey. Bad enough I had a bag full of enchantments, and a living head in a cage, but both bag and cage were charmed to muffle the emanations, so maybe they’d go unnoticed.

  The town wasn’t much to look at, and if it had a name I never noticed. There was a stoplight, but it didn’t look like it got much use, even though we were just off the highway. The few shops, huddled together as if for warmth, looked ignored if not abandoned. A gas station with ancient red-faded-to-pink pumps that had never even heard of credit cards. Everything on this side of the highway looked desiccated, like flies after days in a web.

  The gleaming oasis of a modern truck stop shone a little ways off on the other side of the highway, and I figured it had sucked most of the life out of this place like a well-lit, colorfully-packaged vampire. There was a motel over here, though, with a couple of big rigs in the parking lot, for drivers who wanted more than a shower at the truck stop and a nap in their own cab.