by Kit Hallows
The door clattered shut before I could respond. And there I was, all alone in the cold dark passage.
20
I emerged from a manhole cover into a short, steam-wreathed alley. A couple of men in chef whites stood nearby, smoking near the back door of a Thai restaurant. They glanced my way as I shoved the manhole cover back into place, causing it to fall with a heavy scrape and clang. Smatterings of their conversation hung in the air as I strode past them.
“Yeah right, of course it was a gas explosion. That’s what they tell people like you to stop ‘em from freaking out,” a wiry man with quick, nervous eyes said to the harassed-looking man beside him.
“I’m just telling you what was on the news,” the other said.
“Well, don’t. The news is full of shit. That was no gas explosion.”
The last part caught my attention. “Gas explosion?” I asked.
“There was a huge blast downtown. Green flames shot out the vents and all sorts of shit. It blew a manhole right up into the sky and took out a couple of cars on its way. Thankfully, no one was in ‘em.” The wiry man took another drag. “No doubt some kind of new bullshit’s going on, underground tests or something like that.” His eyes flitted to the manhole cover and then back to me, and his colleague gave me a short, wary glance. I grabbed a crystal and absorbed its power as I met their gazes. They looked away, instantly forgetting the troubling, niggling concern they’d just pondered, i.e. me.
“Good evening fellas.” I strode on, leaving them to their nicotine and gossip. It felt good to be above ground again, even though my head was still swimming from the effects of the spice. Not to mention the lingering madness of the journey into Crispig’s mind. I hurried on, eager to get home. Hoping maybe Astrid and Samuel would be there. It would be good to hear how their mission was progressing, plus, I welcomed their company. They made the place seem less forsaken and glum.
I was halfway across the small park that led to my neighborhood when I heard the scream. A group of teenagers were huddled around a tree. One pointed to the sky, her face illuminated by the silvery glow of the moon, her eyes wild and full of horror. I followed her gaze just in time to see the moon blink. Like an eye.
“What the hell?” I stared up into the night sky, willing it to occur again, to prove I wasn’t going stark raving mad. Nothing happened.
“I saw it,” said a boy who couldn’t have been much older than fourteen. “I fucking saw it. Jesus!”
I’d seen it too. A shared hallucination. As I scanned the group and park, I spotted the woman standing a few feet away, watching, her hands thrust deep into the pockets of her long winter coat. Her face seemed old, but I put her at around forty. It was a face that had seen hardship, and her cold eyes suggested she’d dealt out her fair share of misery too. She held my gaze for a moment then strode away. I decided to follow her and as she turned back and saw me, she ran.
“Wait!” I called as she raced out the park and across the street, setting off a chorus of car horns and squealing brakes. I ran after her, dodging through the traffic, my eyes locked onto her fleeing figure as she made her way toward a street of rundown houses. She turned near a driveway and vanished into shadows.
I ran to the end of the street and stopped before the place where she’d disappeared. It was a squat, dilapidated house, its roof almost caving in on itself. Yellow warning posters with Condemned printed in bold black ink were posted to its rickety fence. I made my way past the boarded windows to the front door, which hung ajar. The stench inside was almost as bad as the sewers and it was mixed with a sharp bitter scent of burning wood and plastic.
Figures lay strewn around a makeshift fire that blazed upon a bare concrete floor. They were strung out, gone. Broken people bedding down for a night of narcotic excesses and quiet desperation.
I glanced up as the floorboards overhead creaked, and made my way to a rickety flight of stairs. I pulled my gun and ascended, my steps slow and measured.
The second floor was bathed in shadows, with only a few candles providing illumination. Someone coughed and spluttered in a room to my left. I ignored them, they weren’t my quarry.
I soaked up a crystal and studied the floor. It was covered in footprints, but the most recent led to a backroom. They winked out as I leaned down to examine them.
She was erasing them, covering her tracks. Too late.
I pushed the door to the backroom with my foot and swept my gun to the corners. Nothing. The room was grim, with a stained mattress along one wall and a collection of dented beer cans littering the floor. A threadbare sheet covered the broken windows, admitting a pool of moonlight.
There was no one here, and yet I felt eyes upon me.
A glint in the beige wallpaper caught my notice. A hastily cast invisibility spell.
I trained my gun on the wall. “Uncloak yourself. Now.”
She stepped out from the wall, her transparent form made her look like a life-size glass figurine, as the distorted wallpaper rippled behind her back.
“Morgan Rook,” she said as she held a hand out to me. Then turned it over, revealing her wrist. Slowly, a dot of silver light appeared. It moved and began to describe a spiral upon her glass-like flesh.
“Put your hands above your head!” I strode toward her
As she raised her arm, the tattoo glowed brighter. Thick grey smoke issued from the spiral and within moments it completely obscured her. I moved in closer, but I couldn’t see a thing.
I reached out, sweeping my arm through the leaden haze as I tried to dispel it. The smoke grew denser, filling the room with a scent of rot. I scanned the fog for the spiral’s silver glow, but it was almost impossible to see anything.
My fingers found the wall, and as I stepped toward it I kicked over a beer can. She was near. I could feel her presence. Close. I pulled a crystal from my pocket but a phantom-like hand reached out and smacked it from my grasp. The floorboard creaked at my side, and I felt her brush against me.
And then, with a light giggle, she was gone.
I scrambled along the wall until I found the windows, then the mattress, and finally the door. A wretched-looking girl loomed in the hall, wiping her face, while strands of vomit hung from her filthy chin. “What the fuck are you staring at?” she demanded, unfazed by the thick grey smoke that filled the room behind me. I pushed her aside and took the steps two at a time, gripping the shaking handrail as I made my way down.
The squatters in the living room had roused from their slumber. One, an old guy with a debilitating limp, shuffled across the floor and pulled a handful of tattered dollar bills from his pocket. “You got the goods?” he asked. “You with her?”
“Her?”
“That spooky bitch you came in with. Where’s she at?” He gazed around, his eyes dim with milky-blue cataracts.
“We need the spice,” said a stick-thin guy lying spread-eagled across the floor. “You got it?” He forced himself to his knees and gave me a long, plaintive look.
“She brought you spice?” I asked, pulling the hem of my coat over my scabbard. If they’d noticed the sword they showed no sign of caring.
“Yeah. Gave it out free like it was Halloween candy!” the old man’s eyes grew wide. “Didn’t ask for a single penny. But I’ll pay you for it.” He thrust the cash at me. “I ain’t no beggar.”
“You say she gave it to you, for free?” I asked. It wasn’t a new tactic, I knew of blinkered dealers that would give out a sample or two to get their marks hooked. Was the Silver Spiral doing the same?
“Yeah,” a woman in the corner said. She sat up in a seat that looked like it had been salvaged out of an old minivan. “She just asked if she could stand in the corner so she could watch us while we took it. Staring all the while like we were animals in a zoo.”
“When was the last time that happened?” I asked.
“About a week ago. She hadn't been back here since.” the old man said. “I saw her in the park the other night though. Asked her for a l
ittle bag or two to tide us over but she said there’d be no more. Not till the thirty-first.”
“Halloween?”
“That’s what she said. Control freak bitch.” He spat on the floor and shuffled back to his corner.
“Thanks for your help.” I began to leave the room.
“You come here any time, honey,” the woman in the car seat called.
I closed the door behind me and scanned the yard for any signs of the witch but any trace she might have left had long been swept up.
Ragged clouds rolled along the sky, throwing shadows across the city. I needed to get some sleep, badly, but first I had to get back to relieve Dauple and to see if De Quincey’s pinch-nose glasses could help me pull the artist from his inner world. If they did, I might be able to get some insight into whatever the hell was going on.
I headed across town with questions churning through my mind. Chief amongst them was the puzzle of why the witch had stood down. She could easily have attacked me while I was blinded and vulnerable. But I had no answer. Just the memory of her giggle echoing in the smoke.
21
I took a cab back to the textile district and stepped out onto the cracked sidewalk as a late night train rattled overhead. The doorway the homeless guy had been huddled in was empty, and apart from his discarded blanket there was no sign of him. I hoped he’d found a haven and was warm and safe wherever he was. Things were about to get strange here, to say the least.
The row of shipping containers was dark as I entered the yard, but a dim light still glowed in Miles’s studio. I knocked on the door and stepped inside.
Dauple sat in the corner reading a dogeared novel called The King in Yellow. I’d heard of it; a collection of stories, with many centered around a play said to have driven its audience to madness and despair. By the look on Dauple’s face, it was working. He set the book down and gazed my way. “Can I go now?” he asked. “I need to get back to my pets.”
Pets? I took it he meant his flies. “Can you wait a little while? I need someone to watch my back. It shouldn’t take long.”
Dauple yawned. “I suppose, but I have to say this job’s been the most boring thing I’ve ever done except for the time I worked in the pickle factory. Frigging pickles. Frigging people.” He nodded to Miles, who was still sat before his canvas gazing into the mirror. Nothing had changed. Asides from the cone of rolled up paper perched atop his head with the large D scrawled upon it.
“D for dunce, or Dauple?” I asked as he stood and ambled over.
“Neither. Dull. He’s very, very dull. Doesn’t talk, doesn’t want to play cards. Doesn’t want to have a good old singalong. Just sits there staring at himself. The narcotic narcissist, as I’ve taken to calling him. So what do you want me to do?”
“Just keep an eye on me while I get into his mind.” I pulled the pinch-nose glasses from my pocket.
“Where in the blue blazes did you get those?” Dauple stooped over, his hooked nose descending like a dagger as he gazed at the glasses.
“From a lunatic in the sewers.” And if ever you had a soulmate, I just may have found him.
“Is that code?” Dauple pointed with a curled nail to the tiny green symbols flickering over the lenses.
“Kind of.” I grabbed Dauple’s chair, placed it behind the artist and sat so that I could see into his mirror. Then I took the bag of spice from my pocket, dabbed a fingertip onto my tongue, and put the spectacles on.
The world turned blue and glassy and I had to force myself to sit still while the drug kicked in, sending a rush surging through my chest. I grabbed two crystals from my bag and clasped them hard as a second wave of power bolted through me.
“Are you sure that’s a good idea?” Dauple’s voice was as slow as tar. He leaned toward me like a strange, coppery headed bird.
I nodded and closed my eyes, as my astral form detached from its flesh and blood mooring. The world spun around me, swirls of colors blazing with time as magical energy surged, danced and merged. I let go of everything and locked my projected gaze upon the artist's, and let it draw me in.
Light and matter vanished and my surroundings turned to deepest black.
And then the lights came, and I opened my eyes a second time.
“Oh!”
22
I found myself standing at the edge of a pier, the worn brown boards below me as crooked and warped as one of Dauple’s simpering grins.
The lake around me reflected a staggering abundance of colors, with sea-green and robin-egg blue twisting and shimmering through a great swirling twinkle of reflected pastel shades. The breeze smelled of paint. Everything smelled of paint. The sky above was a heavenly blended turquoise, the clouds a dappled white and grey. Tiny gold and crimson butterflies flitted through the air leaving traces in their wake, their colors so bright and vivid it was almost unbearable. Along the horizon a range of rolling purple and grey hills reared up. They looked like new additions to the landscape, their textures still slick and wet.
Miles stood, waiting at the end of the ramshackle pier. Clad in black and hunched over as he painted with great furious strokes. “Hey!” I called.
If he heard me, he showed no sign.
As I walked along the pier the boards began to creak and groan. Through the gaps, something stirred in the shimmering green-blue water. I glanced over my shoulder and found a world of pure, empty white. As if the scene behind me hadn’t been rendered. I reached into the void-like space and my fingers brushed a solid substance that felt like rough fabric.
When I looked back toward the lake, the scene had changed. The sky was now overrun with clumps of battleship grey, and Miles had gone. In his place was a towering, derelict structure. It looked like an apartment building, and was as beige and brittle as a rotten tooth. A single light flickered in an upper window and I saw Miles gazing down. He glanced my way before turning and vanishing from view.
As I rushed down the pier it creaked, shifted, and then it began to wobble, as if it were about to come loose from its moorings. Ripples broke upon the lake and I caught a glimpse of something pointed and grey slicing through the painted water. Bubbles broke in a frenzy upon the surface as bright and red as freshly shed blood, and the stench that filled the air quickly overpowered the fumes from the paint. It reeked of warm trash, rotting fish, and long curdled milk.
The pier shook violently. I ran, and was halfway to the building when something surged through the churning blue waters at my side.
A shark.
Its wide eyes were as cold and black as onyx while endless rows of jagged teeth vanished into the cavernous depths of its great gaping maw.
It broke free of the water and soared up toward me.
I threw myself down. It arced overhead, the gnashing of teeth almost deafening. Drops of watery paint fell like thick spatters of blood, as the blue and green spray rained down on the marred brown boards.
A huge wrenching sound rang out, eclipsing the din of the shark as it splashed back into the water.
The pier was coming apart. The slapdash structure was slowly but surely dissolving and dripping down into the lake like watery paint.
I jumped to my feet as the shark’s fins listed along the surface. It was circling back toward me. I ran, desperate to reach the building before the decaying, shaking pier vanished beneath my feet.
23
A great, roiling din came up from below me as the shark’s enormous dorsal fin shot through the water, splintering the boards and smashing the painted pier apart.
The beast’s lifeless black eyes locked onto mine as it rocketed toward me.
I ran as the pier disintegrated into puddles and smears and with each step the boardwalk ahead started sloughing off into the lake. The building was maddeningly close but my path to it was melting away. An acrid spray soaked the small of my back as the shark plowed through the churning monochromatic water. It was closing in fast…
A gaping chasm between the pier and the building yawned up at m
e. I knew I couldn’t fall into the swirling waters. Shark or no shark, to do so would lead to my complete dissolution. “Shit.” I backed up despite the din of the beast on my heels, and ran, propelling myself over the gap and landing hard on the other side.
I spun round as the shark leaped up, jaw stretching wide. It struck the edge of the pier with an almighty crash, its teeth snapping before me. The fermented chemical stench from its throat hit me like a brick and I scurried back. Then the beast broke apart and a gushing splash of white and grey paint drenched both me and the creaking wooden deck.
“Fuck this place.”
I needed to find the artist and get both of us out of here. Fast. I grabbed the weathered old door at the front of the building and a deep foreboding creak echoed across the cove as I wrenched it open and stepped into the darkness of an impossibly long corridor. The walls to either side were close and tight. No doors, no rooms, no windows, nothing but a long endless hallway.
Someone howled in the distance, their cry hoarse and tormented. A glow appeared along the edges of the walls. Dim strings of white Christmas lights. Their scant illumination flickered, crackled and spat. The smell of frayed wiring pricked my nostrils as the bulbs winked, inviting me into the depths…
A splash trickled down the back of my neck. Drops of sooty brown water pooled and dripped from the ceiling, cementing the aura of despair.
“So this is what the inside of a blinkered artist’s mind looks like,” I muttered. “And I thought I was screwed up.” I walked on, searching for a door or access to a stairwell but there seemed to be no way of reaching the upper floor where I’d seen Miles.
I shivered as a thin scraping sound sprang up behind me.
A figure stood in the middle of the corridor. The surrounding lights flickered, slowly revealing a knobby round head, which looked like a huge, grey pitted pebble. A ragged black blazer cloaked its long thin arms and the tall lanky creature stooped under the high ceiling. When it raised its hand to the light, I saw its fingers were little more than naked, jagged blades and tiny, almost imperceptible silver spirals shimmered on the cuffs of its sleeves. It inclined its pebble head toward me and stabbed its sharp pointed finger into the murk at its feet, producing a wet, tearing sound. Then the creature cocked its head and two black sockets appeared as eyes. Candles burst into life within the cavities, and two pools of light fell to the floor, revealing the thing it was twisting its razor-like fingers into. It looked like a side of raw beef.