by Unknown
Leslie sat for a moment, quiet.
“So you only think there’s some connection between that switch and this one?”
“Well, the question is, what’s the connection? Are the McCallums around, after all these years? Or was it some kind of weird feedback from the magick we used on them?”
“So, wait. This happened before I was born?” Leslie asked.
“Of course. Even with magick, the cause tends to precede the effect.”
“That’s what gave you the idea, isn’t it? You saw them trying to have a… a destroyer, and you decided to do the opposite. You decided to have a good baby, one who’d join the Invisible Clergy and tilt the world that much further towards virtue and kindess?”
Fred looked embarrassed. “Well, we thought about it a little harder than that.”
“And now your perfect mystic child got raised by some small town, blue collar workman instead of being raised in the heart of the occult mysteries.”
“Yep. That’s about the size of it.”
They were all three silent for a moment.
“So the question is, then. What do we do about Joe Kimble?”
* * *
Seth Dobbs’ mind was not in a good place. It resembled a nightmare more than anything else, if for no other reasons than he was terrified and was trapped within his own unconscious. Unable to wake up, unable to focus the power of rational thought, he still knew intuitively that something was very wrong.
A normal nightmare rallies our hidden and denied fears against us. The traumas we face in them are terrifying because they are so personal. Imprisoned and unconscious while his body was possessed, Seth faced something different. With two souls twisted together in one physical frame, he was entangled in the night terrors of a stranger. He saw crushing metal, a man’s coarse mouth, the high breasts and long hair of a young woman… but all these things were alien, freighted with connotations that came from another experience entirely.
Trapped between his own mind and another, Seth Dobbs screamed and screamed and couldn’t wake up.
* * *
As for Dobbs’ body, it wasn’t doing very well either. To the spirit that possessed it, Dobbs’ flesh was a vehicle, only a little more important than the car that all of them—one body and two souls—were sitting in, barreling down a two-lane country road.
Trance possession rituals are common throughout the world. From Greek fire walkers who invoke saints, to the peyote rituals of the American southwest, to the famous voudoun ceremonies of Haiti—people all over the world believe that unseen spirits from other spaces can occupy their bodies.
Some believe they’re possessed by gods, or animal totems, or by honored ancestors. In fact, those people are generally ridden by nothing more than spirits who are accomplished liars. One such liar was the spirit possessing Seth Dobbs.
Once, the spirit had been a living woman named Pansy Henschele. She had died deeply troubled, and at the moment she crossed death’s threshold, her obsession and need were so strong that she pulled away from whatever fate awaited her and became a ghost. Or, as dukes like Fred or Kate Mundy would call her, a demon.
Even those adepts who knew the real source of those conjured spirits named them demons. It was a useful reminder that people who would never lie, steal or kill in life were often quite cheerful to do so afterwards.
Pansy the demon had lied to Fred Mundy. She’d told him she wanted to return to look in on her beloved daughter, who was in the custody of a drunk and no-good uncle. All that was untrue.
Living people are complex. Demons are simple. The living have many conflicting emotions. The dead have only one. The pull of death is strong, strong enough to vanquish all but the most fanatical desires. Lesser impulses—those that could keep a fixation in check—are cast aside with the body, leaving a creature of pure craving.
Those who knew Pansy in life would never have called her a creature of pure craving. She had two sisters and a brother, she got B and C grades in school, she looked very pretty at the senior prom. She went to trade school, got married to a guy named Scott and worked at a factory operating a die press.
The day she died was pretty bad, but not nearly as bad as the day before it. That was the day she walked in on Scott and his girlfriend Sally, who was younger and perkier than Pansy. Sally was a blonde, and she had the kind of sassy, flirty self-confidence that girls whose names sound like “panty” rarely achieve.
Scott had told her he wanted a divorce, and she’d cried and begged him to get out of the house. He’d gone off to Sally’s apartment, leaving her all alone in an empty home with a bed that still stank of sex. She’d tried to sleep on the couch, but had tossed and turned all night.
The next day at work she was groggy and distracted and unhappy, so when a misaligned piece of metal fell back into the die press, she leaned in after it. Most modern die presses won’t operate unless two buttons, one on either side of the unit, are pushed. That way they only go off when the operator is safely out of the crush zone. Pansy’s die press was an old one, however, and it had just a single button, on the front. She leaned against it. She had time to experience a terrible, blinding ache through her entire skull and to think, “That fuck Scott’s going to get the insurance money” before the hydraulics had crushed her brain into paste.
That brief flare of rage and indignation swallowed the rest of her personality whole. She still remembered her sisters and her prom dress and the rest of it, but Scott and Sally were the only things that signified. The rest of her memories were just there, possibly useful, probably not. Just like everything in Seth Dobbs’ mind, and everything in his car.
Pansy had to drive nine hours straight to get to her old home town. She didn’t turn on the radio. She didn’t hum to herself. Rather than pause in her mission, she let Seth’s bladder go in his pants, right about one in the morning.
By four, she was outside the house where she and Scott had lived. It was his family’s old farm house, out in the middle of Iowa. No one was around for miles.
She parked by an old machine shed and began to walk towards the house. The fields were trimmed down, just harvested stumps, and it was cold enough to see breath, but Pansy wasn’t bothered when the feet and hands of her stolen body went numb.
A hundred yards from the door, Scott’s dog started barking. Fifty yards, she heard Scott yell out, “King! Pipe down!” Then she reached the front door and started pounding on it.
“Who the hell is it? I’m warnin’ you, I got a gun!”
She kept pounding. The door had little windows set in it, and those windows had little white curtains Pansy had hung, during her living days. She saw one twitch to the side, then saw Scott’s eyes get wide.
“Holy fuck! What happened to you?” He unbolted the door and opened it, staring aghast. During the long drive, the blood from Seth’s hand had soaked through the towel and trickled down his forearm, where it had dried. The stab wound on his leg had soaked a ring around his thigh before it to had begun to crust over and brown.
“I was in an accident,” Pansy said in Seth’s hollow voice. “Please let me in. I… my wife…”
Scott set his shotgun off to the side and gingerly reached out a hand in support. Pansy saw Sally peering at her from the hallway up to the stairs. She was wearing a Bon Jovi t-shirt and sweatpants.
“Sally, get the man a chair!”
As Sally complied, Pansy shook the towel off her mangled hand and reached for Scott’s face. He recoiled, and with her left hand Pansy grabbed the shotgun. She knew he always kept it loaded.
“Hey! Buddy! What the…?”
“Sit down, Scott. Sally, get on his lap.”
“Listen, you’re…”
Pansy pulled back the hammer on one barrel, then the other. Scott and Sally sat.
Pansy didn’t explain. She made no dramatic proclamation. She didn’t taunt or toy with them. She knew what death was and wasted as little time as possible before giving it to both of them.
Right
barrel for Sally. Left barrel for Scott.
Pansy went away and Seth woke up.
Toil, then the grave
CHAPTER FOUR
The first thing Seth did was vomit. Then he stared around himself, wildly, trying to figure out where the hell he was. Then he realized that his fifty-six year old body had been run long past its normal endurance, compounding the bleeding and the shock. He stumbled to a chair and sank into it, heedless of the blood he smeared all over it.
Morbidly fascinated, he stared at the two corpses. The woman, on top, had a hole in her belly the size of both his fists. It looked like whoever did this (which, he dazedly realized, must mean himself) had shot her, then shot the man behind and beneath her through the original blast hole.
He shook his head, squeezing his eyes shut. When he opened them, his head was pointing down at the ugly carpet and it seemed like there was a dark tunnel closing in on either side of him.
He took a deep breath and willed himself not to pass out. It didn’t work.
When he came to, he was still slumped in the chair. His neck was stiff and painful, but nothing next to the dull throb in his leg and his hand. The sun was up outside, barely. The two corpses didn’t look any better by daylight. He took a deep breath.
“Okay,” he thought. “If the cops aren’t here yet, that means no one heard the gunshots.” He checked his watch and pinched a tiny button on the side. The digital numbers reformed into the word “SAT.”
“Good, good,” he thought. “It’s the weekend, so they’re less likely to be missed at work. Unless they work on the weekends. But I’ve still got time.”
It wasn’t until he was in their kitchen, opening the fridge, that he realized his stomach was rumbling fiercely and he was still light headed. He finished off a quart of milk and tossed the carton in the sink. Seeing a red and white bucket, he looked inside for leftover fried chicken. It was extra-crispy, his favorite, and he dazedly thought, “Well, at least one thing’s gone right.”
As he sat down at the table to eat left-handed, he mulled over his situation.
“Do I know where I am? No. Do I know who I just killed? No and no. Did I leave evidence all over the place? Hell yes. Is there any way I can know what my body did while I wasn’t using it? Who it might have talked to, or what dumb screwups it might have made that reveal my guilt? No, no and no again. Am I fucked? Yes. I am fucked good.”
Seth grabbed a couple dishtowels and wiped off everything he’d touched in the kitchen. He was wiping off the shotgun when he saw dirty smudges on the floor. They corresponded, of course, to his shoes.
He looked through the house and determined that his victims were Scott and Sally Henschele, residing on rural route 2 near Dubuque, Iowa. No sign of any kids, he noticed with acute relief.
After some long, hard thought, he pulled a card out of his wallet. It had three letters and nine numbers on it. The numbers were to a phone in a Chicago area code. The three letters were “TNI”.
The voice that answered was cool, female and only marginally polite.
“Hello?”
“Hi. This is Dobbs. Seth Dobbs.”
“Should that mean something to me?”
“Yeah, really it should.”
“Right. Please hold while I punch up your file.”
While he waited, Seth poked his leg wound idly with his injured fingers. The hold music was Vivaldi.
“Unbelievable,” he thought. “The biggest, baddest, scariest occult conspiracy in the freakin’ world, and they act like an insurance company. I suppose I’m lucky they don’t have a voice mail thingie. ‘If you’re calling about demonic possession, press one.’”
The music stopped and the woman spoke.
“Mr. Dobbs. I’ll be transferring you through to my supervisor.”
Another few bars of Vivaldi, then a man’s voice, clear, deep and professional.
“Mr. Dobbs?”
“Uh huh.”
“I see from your file you discussed employment with one of our recruiters and… conditionally declined.” His voice sounded disapproving. “At that time, you established a password with that recruiter to verify your identity?”
“That’s right. ‘Pigeon.’”
“‘Pigeon’ is correct. May I assume from this call that you’ve reconsidered working with us?”
“You could say that.”
“May I ask why you’ve changed your mind?”
Seth sighed.
“Well… the thing is… I’m in kind of a jam.”
“Ah.”
“I hear you guys are real good at getting people out of this kind of jam.”
“I should warn you: Our phone lines are secure, but I can’t speak to the line you’re calling from. Do you understand me?”
“Uh, yeah, I get it.”
“So don’t say anything you might later regret.”
“I said I get it.”
“With that warning in mind, can you tell me the kind of problem you’re having?”
Seth glanced through a doorway into the crime scene.
“I guess you’d call it an OJ kind of problem.”
“I see.”
“So I’ve reconsidered your previous offer. I’m ready to come aboard. I get a new identity and all that, right?”
“Well Mr. Dobbs, it’s not quite that simple.”
“‘Not quite that simple’?”
“Right. We offered you a job, you said no, all well and good. But now your circumstances have changed. Surely you don’t expect to enter our employ under the same terms?”
“What, as soon as I’m in trouble you don’t want anything to do with me?”
“You’re misrepresenting me, Mr. Dobbs.”
“Oh, well I’m very fucking sorry.”
“Mr. Dobbs, there’s no need for such language. I understand you’re under a lot of stress and pressure. But you should understand this. If you annoy me enough, my next call is to the Dubuque police.”
“You traced this call?”
“Oh Mr. Dobbs.” The voice sounded positively paternal, dammit. “We trace every call.”
“Okay, fine. You want me to sweeten the deal? I’ll sweeten the gosh darned deal. I understand you people have had a few problems with the Freak. Like, Jeffrey Dahmer style problems. How would you like to know the source of the Freak’s power?”
“We already have an extensive dossier on… that particular individual. You’ll have to raise the ante, Dobbs.”
“All right. Did you know the Freak’s not just a cut nut, it’s a godwalker? Not only do I know which archetype, I know the name and location of a kid who was literally born to replace it. A godwalker waiting to happen, and no one even knows it. Somehow, I suspect you’d like to yank the rug out from under the Freak by replacing it with another avatar, now wouldn’t you?”
There was a pause on the other side of the line.
“How did you find out about this child?”
“I got hired to find him. Hired by someone who knows what I’m really worth.”
“I see. And why should we trust you to come to us when you’re selling out your previous employer?”
“Hey, he sold me out. Way I see it, turnabout is fair play.”
“You’re starting to interest me. But what’s to stop us from checking your credit card records, seeing where you’ve been recently, and then finding this ‘golden child’ ourselves? I appreciate the tip, but you still haven’t made the risk of consorting with an ‘OJ style problem’ worth my while.”
“Shit, you are a hardass, aren’t you?”
“Language, Mr. Dobbs.”
“All right, I’ll go you one better. I got me a gadget that locates avatars of a certain stripe—the Mystic Hermaphrodite, which means the Freak and this kid. The Freak can hide itself from just about anybody, but it can’t hide from this thing. How’d you like to track it down? Learn where it lives? Find out all its secrets? I can hand you the Freak on a silver platter, dammit! How much more do you want?”
/>
“Can I put you on hold for a moment?”
Dobbs dropped his face into his hands as the Vivaldi came back on. It played through to the end of the song and started again before the man spoke to him again.
“We’ll have a team at your location soon. Call us back in exactly one half hour. Until that time, don’t answer the phone. Welcome aboard, Seth. Anything you’re going to need?”
“Yeah, be sure to send a doctor.”
“A doctor? Are you all right?”
“No, I’m really pretty damn far from being all right. Send a doctor. An’ another thing. The guy who did this to me? I want him to have a problem. Like… a Lee Harvey Oswald kind of problem.”
There was another pause.
“That can be arranged.”
The voice was cool and patronizing.
* * *
While Seth was waiting for his TNI rescue squad, the Mundy family was just waking up. After a long night of debating, in which nothing was decided, Leslie and Kate had gone back to their room on another floor of the same hotel.
Leslie woke up and showered first, thinking long and hard about whether to shave or not. Not shaving would leave him a short but discernable stubble—a male sign. If he was going to have a female day, he’d need to carefully shave, and do his legs too.
He didn’t particularly want to. He wondered if his parents—or, he reminded himself, “the Mundys”—would give him a hard time about skipping another female day. He figured they would. He was almost tempted to do it just to give them something in common, something they could agree on. If they weren’t fighting with him, he figured they’d fight with each other. But in the end he lathered up his legs and reached for the razor.
Growing up, Leslie’s parents had stressed obedience. That and mercy and justice and peace, but they’d always seemed to have an easier time teaching obedience. Obediently, their son got out of the shower with smooth legs and armpits, and lathered his face while waiting for the mirror to clear off. Leslie shaved with total intensity, knowing that a single nick could shatter the illusion.