Panting heavily, Nemo allowed his eyes to close, bringing the coursing thoughtstream into greater clarity. He attempted to filter the thoughts by origin, focusing on the congregation.
“We have recovered Phi and Tau,” Kaj continued, “and what remained of Theta. But Chi, Psi, and Lambda are still firmly in control of the others. Even now, their masters are panicking, plotting. Soon they will move against us once more. Do you deny it, Nemo?”
Nemo croaked a feeble negation, but his vocal cords were raw from the screams that had accompanied his rebirth into the shell of the Conduit, blessed messenger of the Yellow King and the Overspider.
“You understand. You have always understood, even when you were Dwyre. The others are parasites that have turned the sacred teachings and projects into their personal playground. Politicians, sycophants who have forgotten the blessings granted them. They have seen the power of the Yellow King, and they want more. And yet they worship only themselves, bending knee to none. Do you deny it?”
Another grunt in negation.
Kaj smiled a grisly rictus. “Then it is time to reclaim the order from these parasites.” One spindly hand reached out and seized him by the hair. Nemo howled in pain as Kaj wrenched him upward. His scalp felt like the roots were about to rip. Through the tears blurring Nemo’s vision, Kaj’s functional eyes all glistened with mad hatred. “Now is the time, Nemo. Assert control of their Nothem—your Nothem. Take hold of these hollow pretenders of NIDUS, these figures of clay, and break them. Kill them. All of them. Leave none remaining to challenge us in the twilight of the Coronation.”
Nemo wanted to resist the command, but the pulsing network birthed by the Nothem in his brain began to seethe of its own accord. It blazed to life, reminding him that he was no longer Simon Dwyre, whom the thoughtstream served—he was now Nemo, who served the thoughtstream. And the Vant’tharax’s orders were gospel. Despite his reservations, he began to mold and twist the shimmering strands of thoughts, following each one to the cell at the end. Each strand was a life, a sworn member of NIDUS. Each was now an enemy. And so he took each of them into his mental tendrils in turn, and one by one he beckoned the Nothem to move, to devour, to rupture and violate their brain matter. And one by one, those cells burst, lives extinguished.
He felt each of their death throes, heard each death rattle, saw each final sight, thought each final thought. He saw a scholar alone in a study, tome open before him. He saw a politician from Mount Hedera huddled over his desk, his paperwork now signed by expanding droplets of blood. A businessman behind the wheel of an SUV, and then the sight of a concrete wall plowing through the glass as his contortions threw the wheel into chaos. He saw a pair of sisters, each witnessing the other’s cries as blood poured from their eye sockets. He saw elite and commoner, man and woman, elder and child, devout and agnostic—he saw each of their cells flash with pain and horror, and then vanish from the network.
After a what seemed an eternity, the screams ringing through his neurons faded. And at last, all was silent.
The forty-something members of NIDUS, all save for him and the Vant’therax, were dead.
Each breath burned Nemo’s raw lungs with icy friction. He gasped, sweat rolling down his cheeks and neck. Echoes of the slaughtered lambs’ dying thoughts rebounded off the walls of his skull and tunneled toward the center of his soul. “It. Is. Done.”
The Vant’therax Kaj smiled his demonic grin. “Well done, Nemo. Now, for your next task.”
“Next?” He tried to read the Vant’therax’s mind through the thoughtstream, but couldn’t summon the mental strength.
“Now that we have cleansed ourselves of the parasitic faithless, it is time to take control of our fate. Too long has fear kept us taciturn and weak. Today, we will seize this town by the throat and take what is ours.” The False One smirked and grabbed Nemo’s hair by the roots once more. “Take control of one of the Hives. Make it walk. Make it move. Make it think. Make it obey your will. And with it, we will sweep Grantwood as a plague, the likes of which would make Yahweh tremble in terror!”
Nemo cringed, and a helpless, shriveled cry crept from between his filed teeth. His mind, racing to outrun the pain of the False One’s grip, worked backward from the results of Dwyre and Griffith’s lives, rushing to decipher the phrases. Hive, noun: imprisoned subjects—often Websworn—whose bodies were used to breed the Nothem. He traced the line back toward the origin that glistened in blue flames. His mind churned. The essence of that memory came alive, sparking neural connections that had never before been used.
“That’s right,” Kaj said. “Bring it to life. Take control of it.” He pulled harder on Nemo’s mess of hair and jerked his head from left to right, eliciting a squeal of pain.
Nemo smashed his teeth together and groaned. His eyes had begun to sizzle with a searing heat that radiated from within. Strands of electric fire spiraled out in all directions within his mental universe. One of those strands led to the repulsive thing Kaj indicated. His thoughts flowed along that strand of the tapestry, interfacing with the embedded Nothem until his senses erupted into a vicarious new existence.
He was in a chamber, somewhere deeper within the facility. “I see,” he said through his teeth. It was a glimmer of darkness, beyond which flashed a wall of red lights. He felt a new set of limbs. His raw, blurry nerves linked with those of the subject. The putrid smell came next, and then the vacant sound of the holding chamber. The taste of rot was on his tongue, and the flavor made him gag. Deep caverns in his body began to itch, and the twitching of innumerable concealed legs demanded that he carve away at their source with cracked and decayed fingernails.
“Have you made contact?”
Nemo was disoriented from the sensation of existing in two bodies, but he found the coordination to nod to the False One.
The thing grabbing his hair smiled in answer. “Good.” A thought echoed through Nemo’s mind—a thought meant for another of the Vant’therax. “Silt,” the thought rang, “open the chamber.”
Through the eyes of the languid creature in the cell, Nemo beheld a yellow figure stirring in the darkness beyond the glass wall. Silt’s mind rumbled a reluctant affirmation as he fiddled at an array of blinking lights. There came an abrasive hissing sound. Before Nemo’s flickering eyes, the glass wall receded, and the cell opened.
“Now walk,” Kaj said, pulling harder on Nemo’s hair.
The pain shot from Nemo’s scalp to his ears and behind his eyes. To escape that pain, he put more of his consciousness into the puppet at the end of his mental wires, numbing his own nervous system’s response. Atrophied muscles went to work. The thing wobbled and then began to walk. The muscle memory returned; under his influence, the Hive stumbled out of the cell and into the dark metal corridor beyond. Glancing down the hall in that body, he saw that there were more than a dozen holding cells with other withered bodies within.
Silt brushed against the Hive’s body, and Nemo reacted by stumbling backward away from him. The Vant’therax’s two eyes, soft and seemingly sympathetic, communicated an apology unspoken even through the thoughtstream. Without so much as a growl, Silt held out a yellow garment in one hand. It was a robe—the yellow vestment of the Vant’therax.
“Put it on,” Kaj said through the neural network, “and get moving.”
The sun had touched down over the mountains when the yellow-robed man walked through the door of the Grantwood Police Department. From behind the desk, the receptionist had looked up with a mix of bewilderment and horror. The video of the yellow-robed specter, which had hit the news the previous evening, was still fresh in her mind. She yelled for the officers in the next room, and it was only moments before three men rushed the lobby, guns drawn.
It was over in a matter of seconds. One barked an order to freeze. The other two dove toward the robe and tackled it to the ground. One began to recite the Miranda rights out of habit. Though the film had, of course, been retracted and announced a forgery, none of them were tak
ing any chances. The handcuffs came out and an arrest was made on the spot.
Detective Ross never believed in God. The closest he’d ever come was during his childhood when he’d been obsessed with the stage magician Carlos Fantastico, before he learned how boring the world truly was. That made his current assignment all the more unbelievable. From what angle was he even supposed to approach the man suspected of appearing in that weird-ass video from the previous night?
Amanda Lark, the girl who had submitted the footage, had led them right to the scene of the carnage. Three dead bodies, a mountain of forensic evidence, and no clues about the identity of the thing in the video itself. Even if Ross was inclined to believe it a hoax, the fact was that three men had died in that house. It didn’t rule out some of the more outlandish theories of trickery, but every one of those theories was more logical than the alternative. And what was stranger, right after the media showed the footage for the first time, the department had received an order from Mount Hedera to halt the investigation. After that, the video hadn’t been shown or mentioned on the news, and rumors were starting to swirl.
Were it not for the harsh scent of conspiracy, he’d have been more comfortable accepting the obvious conclusion: it was a viral marketing stunt, like the dragon whelp in a jar that had taken the internet by storm some years earlier. But between the dead bodies and the interference from Mount Hedera, it was hard to believe. The resources dedicated to the case had dwindled, and nobody seemed eager to investigate it now. How much of that was because of morale and how much because of meddling was hard to say. Nobody seemed too eager to question why they were letting Mount Hedera choose how they ran things in Grantwood, either. And worse, if someone matching the killer in the video hadn’t come waltzing into the station, they may have never made any progress. It all felt wrong. Not to mention the fact that Grantwood Telecom had stonewalled him when he attempted to get the contact information of the homeowner, a man named Ralph Warren. No. This was no hoax. Something very strange was going on, and it was nothing so innocuous as pulling a dove out of a deck of cards.
Speaking of which, Ross thought, glancing up at the clock. It was just about time for the interview. He sighed and stood from his desk, giving his arms a good stretch above his head. He’d worry about fantasies and conspiracies later, after he’d dealt with suspect number one.
As Ross walked down the hallway toward the interview room where the weirdo in the yellow robe was being kept, Officer Bentley flagged him down with a wave of his hand. “Yo, Ross,” he said. “Excited?”
It was all he could do not to roll his eyes. “Not particularly. It’s an open-and-shut waste of my time.”
“Figured you’d say that.” He smirked, tapping his fingers against a manila folder. “Might change your mind after you see this, though.”
“What you got there? Scientific proof of fairies?”
“Better. Perp’s fingerprints came back.” Bentley pulled a small stack of papers from the folder and handed them over. “Apparently, the Wizard of Oz’s name is Zachary Hayner. He’s got a record. Arrested in 1976.”
“Well I’ll be damned,” Ross said in as unenthusiastic a tone as he could muster. “What for?”
“Now where would be the fun in spoiling the surprise? Let’s just say killing three dudes wouldn’t be the guy’s first rodeo.”
Ross glanced at the documents and nodded a little. “Thanks for thinking of me. Has he said anything at all since he got here?”
“Not a word. It’s not like he’s invoking his right to silence, either. Hasn’t even requested a lawyer. Might be a blessing or a curse, depending on how you look at it. Want me to keep you company in there?”
“Nah, I think I can handle it. Wish me luck, I guess.” With a nod meant to convey catch you on the flip side, asshole, Ross opened the door to the interview room and slipped inside.
The man in the robe was shivering in his seat behind the wide metal table. Ross gave him a once-over and sat down across from him. He placed a tape recorder in the center of the table and depressed the record button with a soft click. “This interview is being recorded at Interview Room One at the Grantwood Police Department,” he said. “I am Detective Steven Ross, and there are no other officers present in the room. Could you please state your name and date of birth?”
The man in the robe continued to writhe where he sat, but he otherwise made no sound. A long moment passed. Ross studied the wrinkled face of the man. His gray eyes were tainted with splotches of greasy yellow, and the deep lines in his face quivered as his lips shook.
“The suspect is choosing to exercise his right to remain silent,” Ross said, “so I will fill in the listener. The suspect’s fingerprints were found in our records. The suspect’s name is, evidently, Zachary Hayner, born August seventeenth, 1951. Does that sound correct, Mr. Hayner? Or would you like to correct any of those details?”
Again the man just sat, scratching at his neck, a glassy look in his eyes.
“Alright, now that we’ve got our introductions out of the way, let’s talk about why you’re here. The murder of Roy Walters.” He stared at the man in the robe, who just blinked back at him. “To be honest,” Ross said, “I don’t even need to be here right now. Turns out the video evidence is proof positive of your guilt. It’s as good as over for you, Zack. Only reason I’m here is because the chief wants something to take to the District Attorney. This is going to be your only chance. We’ve got all the evidence we need to put you away for a long time. If you confess to it, you might get off a bit easier. Saves us the trouble of jumping through the district’s hoops.” A pause. “Well, anything you want to tell me, Zack?”
Across the table, Zachary just kept staring. It was like talking to a wall. Ross sighed, unable to believe his life had come to this kind of tale-spinning. He turned his attention to the papers Officer Bentley had handed him. He tapped the table with his fingernails and glanced back up after reading the words aggravated assault and first-degree murder on the second page. “You know, it’s funny. I don’t see witchcraft listed on here.” He laughed, but Zachary either wasn’t listening or didn’t find it humorous. “Pretty cool trick you pulled in that video, appearing and disappearing. Smoke bombs, or something like that?”
The thing in the robe just kept staring, its lips quivering with an erratic rhythm.
Ross sighed. “Alright, you don’t seem too eager to talk. And that’s fine. I’m in no rush. Can just wait for forensics to get their report to the district. Just burning daylight until then.” He kicked his feet up on the table and reclined a little in his chair. “We can just hang out all day. Might be fun. Maybe you could teach me your hoodoo techniques. Not sure how you did it in that video, but it’s mighty impressive.”
Despite his best efforts, his thoughts wandered back to that phone call from Mount Hedera. Who stood to gain by murdering a bunch of ex-cons, hoaxing a magical killer, and then covering it up? And what about the Lark girl? Was she just in the wrong place at the wrong time? All the questions made his head hurt. It was the most fucked up jigsaw puzzle he’d seen since curiosity drove him to look over the old Norwegian Killer case files.
“Perhaps you’d like to tell me about why you’re wearing that thing,” Ross said, trying to clear his mind of those thoughts. He flipped the page over and skimmed the information. “Or, uhh, perhaps you’d like to talk about your time in San Solano. What was that like?” Ross paused, looking more closely at the man’s criminal record. “That’s funny, you shouldn’t have been . . . ” He blinked and reread the numbers from the top. They didn’t add up. This man, if he was indeed Zachary Hayner, should have still been in prison. Wait a minute, he thought, if San Solano was shut down all those years ago, then shouldn’t he have been . . . ?
His thoughts were interrupted as the man slipped the robe off his shoulders. Ross would have interjected and demanded he refrain from undressing, but what he saw halted his tongue. Beneath the robe, the man’s pale body was covered in deep holes. I
n the crease between his collarbone and shoulder, an impossibly deep crevice plunged inside of him. The holes had no signs of blood nor scabbing; smooth, unbroken skin lined the valleys and pits and gaps. Thin bridges of flesh were suspended through those voids, as though the veins and bones of his body flowed within those tunnels of malleable flesh. As Ross’s mouth fell open at the sight, a far more gruesome one unfolded. From those holes and pits in the man’s body, something began to emerge.
It looked to be no more than a shadow at first. But then Ross realized it was a horde of skittering spiders. Pouring out from the man’s shoulder-pit, from the holes in his chest and arms—and even from his mouth and eye sockets—those spiders appeared in a wave of putrid aggression. Ross’s stomach twisted into a horrified knot. He fell backward, kicking his own chair across the room in his panic, and pushed himself away from the table with his legs. But the spiders fell upon the floor and advanced on him like a specter of death. He flipped himself over and tried to stand, but the urge to expel the volatile bile in his stomach forced him into a heap.
By the time he reached his feet, a carpet of flickering legs and marching bodies had covered the room. Looking down, he was again overcome by panic. Crawling things had darkened his pant legs, and they were now climbing higher. He screamed, thrashing to and fro and sweeping his arms at his legs. He threw himself against the wall in reflex and crumpled to the floor. As the innumerable creatures invaded his mouth and eyes and ears, there was nothing he could do but scream. Pain ripped through the membranes in his ear canals and sinuses. The world began to blur, and all went dark. A pounding came to the door. Officer Bentley’s voice called out to him. The pain burrowed deeper, worse than any migraine he’d ever experienced. It threatened to split his skull from left to right and top to bottom as the things ate their way through to his brain.
Helixweaver (The Warren Brood Book 2) Page 20