by Chuck Wendig
A man Alison Cole does not know, but for whom, even now, in thinking of him fleetingly, she feels such a hot surge of hate and fury and kill kill kill that she has to tamp it down; it’s like covering a boiling pot with your bare hands.
Cason Cole. (kill)
She does not know him.
And yet, she does. Somehow. She must.
He shares her last name.
He looks like Barney.
She does not know him and yet she feels that she must to have such hatred toward him (kill gut stab burn him cut his heels crush his throat)—the signs are clear. He’s either her brother or her husband. Both impossible, because wouldn’t she remember? How could she not? And yet here she is, bearing the yoke of a madwoman named Psyche.
In times like this, when she has control, she goes upstairs. Creeping quietly on the balls of her feet, stepping where the boards don’t squeak.
She eases past the symbols scrawled everywhere with Barney’s markers—hundreds of them line the walls and halls. Upstairs. Downstairs. Symbols of circles and stars and strange baroque lines. Greek letters merging with words in languages she’s never before seen. Sometimes, out of the corner of her eye, Alison is convinced that the symbols move, twitching and shifting as if they were made of snakes instead of scrawled in ink. Psyche said, “We need these sigils. Just as our enemies hide from us, we must hide from other enemies.” Someone she refers to as the ‘driver.’ Whatever that means.
For now, she continues forth.
She goes into Barney’s room—usually to watch him sleep, but now, for another reason.
He’s been asleep for weeks now. He has not thinned or lost any weight at all, as Psyche said. He appears to be in some kind of coma. His face is a mask of peace.
But it’s also ashen. Gray like old rotten cloth. His hair, too, seems to be losing its luster—in fact, all the color seems to be draining out of him.
Normally, when she comes up here, she sneaks weapons. Knives from the kitchen that won’t be missed. Barbecue skewers. A corkscrew. She kisses her son’s cheek and strokes his face and then hides the weapons between the mattress and the box spring.
Today, she is not hiding weapons.
She is reclaiming them.
Or one, at least.
She reaches under the mattress and pulls out the revolver.
Psyche is still sobbing softly.
Then: the squeak of faucets. Splash of water.
A sign that today’s time of sorrow draws to a close.
Have to move fast.
Alison kisses Barney on the forehead. Whispers to him that she loves him, that Mommy will be back in just a moment.
She quietly slides along the margins of the hallway. Toward the bathroom door.
Hand on the knob. Gently turning.
When it opens, Psyche is startled. Face puffy and red from crying. She’s doing like she does every night—leaning forward on the sink, staring into the mirror.
She jerks her head toward Alison. Her face is a conflicted mess of rage and confusion. The leash snakes out, winds around Alison’s mind. A python, swiftly tightening.
“What are you doing?” Psyche asks.
Only.
One.
Shot.
Alison cries out, muscling past the psychic lockdown, and raises the gun and fires.
Psyche’s head snaps back and she staggers. Alison keeps firing. One, two, three—the gunshots are everything, noise and wrath and stink. The hammer suddenly falls dry as the cylinder empties—click click click click. The madwoman lays over the toilet, back arched like a bridge, hands scrabbling on the linoleum but finding no purchase.
The psychic leash unspools—a thread pulled from a sweater until it unravels.
Alison is free.
She knows she doesn’t have long.
Move fast, then. Gun on the floor with a clatter. Into Barney’s room. Scoop up his comatose frame—he’s still not waking, she hoped he would wake, damnit—and hurry down the hall, down the steps.
Psyche makes a sound from the bathroom, a kind of “Gggggh!”—a garbled, pissed-off gargle that precedes her screaming Alison’s name.
But by the time Alison hears it, she’s snatching the car keys off the hook by the front door and then she’s outside.
Air. And the sound of birds. And traffic, somewhere.
Everything feels crisp, like hotel linens. Hyper-alert like she’s just had a whole pot of coffee. She smells herself: a whiff of sweat. Has she showered? She doesn’t even know.
People are coming out of their houses, now—a gunshot in Philly means everyone turtles, ducking into their homes and turning up their televisions, but here in Doylestown it’s a different affair. Faces poke out of windows. Doors open. Half a dozen people will already be on the phone. Good. Fine. It doesn’t matter.
To the car. The red Toyota. Its inside scrawled with symbols like those in the house. Inked on the windows, carved into the dash. Psyche put them there. For protection against her ‘enemies.’
Alison fumbles with the keys.
Psyche screams.
She’s at the front door.
Unbloodied. Untouched by bullets.
She’s out. Running across the lawn. Alison feels her fingers sinking deep into her mind like jagged spears—but then she slips into the car, falling forward over Barney, and it’s like a big iron door slams down, cutting off Psyche’s invisible fingers.
The symbols.
It has to be the symbols.
No time to think about that now. Psyche slams up against the glass as Alison locks the door. The madwoman begins punching the glass. First hit: nothing. Second hit: the glass of the driver side window spider-webs with a crunch.
Alison turns the key, and the engine starts.
She guns it forward. Clips another car’s bumper—whatever.
She sobs and screams as she leaves Psyche in a cloud of exhaust.
NO NO NO no you stupid woman no no no—
Psyche stands in the middle of the street. The car speeds away, tires shrieking as it rounds a tight corner and then is gone.
She reaches out with everything she has to find Alison’s mind, but the very sigils of protection she placed inside the car to keep the Driver from finding them work on her, too, when she’s out of the car.
Her body is electric with anger, and with a deep and vibrant channel of potent self-loathing. Faces peer out of windows and doors open; Psyche plants her feet on the earth and screams to the heavens, and the faces snap backward, noses squirting blood. Doors slam on bodies and fingers.
She needs her. Needs Alison. She’s a channel to her husband’s killer. And better—she’s the perfect instrument of revenge. To have the man murdered by his own wife would be exquisite—such an eloquent orchestration of justice. It must happen that way. It must.
But now—sirens.
Not that kind, but the human kind. The ‘authorities’ will be here, soon.
And now that she’s outside of the house, one of the inhuman authorities will be here, soon, too. Psyche’s done so well at staying hidden, and now here she is—ripping off scabs and letting her mindsblood flow. The shark will have her scent.
She’s lost everything.
She hates herself.
She goes inside the house to wait. And weep. And break mirrors.
She could run. But what’s the point?
Eventually they come. The police. In their crisp blue uniforms. Two at the door, another two at the sidewalk talking to neighbors—neighbors with bruised faces and broken noses, by now trying to explain to these very nice officers exactly what happened (Psyche can hear their confusion like a scratchy radio frequency: looked out the window crazy woman on the street car driving away and then next thing I know it was like someone hit me in the face and Merle was knocked out cold and—).
The cop’s knocking gets louder and louder. More insistent. Eventually he kicks down the door, and Psyche is there.
It takes little effort, really—just a
twinge of her own mind and the cop takes his own gun, shoots his red-haired partner in the throat, then steps out onto the lawn to the screams and whoops of neighbors. He shoots the other two cops—one doughy man, one mannish woman. Then he starts shooting at neighbors as they flee.
It doesn’t take long. A minute, maybe. The lawn and street are littered with the dead.
When the cop is done he turns the pistol on himself and blows out the ceiling of his own skull. He pops like a bottle of champagne and that’s it.
THE DRIVER DOES not drive. The stakes are too high; the car, too slow. And driving is so... human. She despises humans. Weak, mewling, pealing little grubs. Pale and pink, and filled with blood that comes out so easily.
In fact, the Driver despises that she is named for such a human act.
Sometimes she pretends it’s for something else. Driving her prey beneath her. Driving mortal men to entreaties, blubbering, and eventually madness. The driving flap of her gristly wings.
For now, the Driver flies.
She’d been standing in the back as Sister was doing her thing—the warehouse of men and women, rising and falling together. Humans standing, kneeling, sitting, prostrating themselves, then back to standing, all moaning and singing hymns to Sister as they rose and sank, rose and sank, eyes blank and mouths open and tongues ululating lost paeans. Disgusting. Why some of their kind demanded such worship still was beyond her.
The Driver did not demand worship.
She was Erinyes. She was a Fury. She did not want worship—she sought its opposite. Fear. Disgust. Uncertainty. Nobody prayed to her for anything. They prayed to every other god that she—or one of her two sisters—would never come. A prayer never to meet the woman with the teeth of a dog, the eyes of blood, the hungry serpents coiled about her waist with fangs that ever drip with venom.
For Psyche, that prayer was a useful one. Because as the Driver stood in the shadows of the warehouse corner, she felt the signal flare of Psyche’s presence—red and fierce, sparking madly—rise in the deep of her mind.
Psyche was back on the tapestry. Her image seen.
Sister knew it, too. Her eyes opened, met the Driver’s.
A subtle nod told her all she needed.
Go.
She drops out of the morning sky and onto the street with nary a sound. All around her, bodies, still warm. Few flies. Sirens in the distance (but not that kind).
Psyche has been busy.
There. In the doorway of a small house, Psyche sits.
Weepy thing. Too human. Because she was once human.
The Driver represses a shudder, then approaches in long strides, her black wings tucked back and disappearing beneath her chauffeur’s suit with a flutter of fabric.
“You’ve come to take me back,” Psyche says. Voice small and sad.
“If it were up to me, I’d have my serpents bite you a thousand times over. The venom coursing through your body for not years, nor decades, but for centuries.”
“Tisiphone. If only you lived up to your name.”
Her name: avenging murder.
“Don’t taunt me. And stay out of my head.”
Psyche hisses: “I can’t get in your head, you foul thing. But I know your heart just the same. How low you are, these days. Once a creature of wrath and vengeance—punishing brothers who murder brothers, husbands who end the lives of their wives, mothers who drown their children in rivers. But now look at you: upholding meager oaths at the behest of your prettier sister.”
“Perspective. I do not find her beautiful. I and my two true sisters were born of blood. Venus was born of semen and sea-froth; Cronus’ foul ejaculate and the foam of dead fish. I find none of the beauty there that I find in blood.”
“And you’re still Aphrodite’s gopher. Fascinating.”
“Will you come? Or must I make you?”
Psyche stares at the bodies on the street. “No. I’ve done awful things here; because I am awful...” Her words trail. “I’ll come home.”
“Not home. Not this time. The Farm.”
“Ah. The Farm.”
The Driver extends a hand tipped with the milky talons of a diseased bird.
Psyche takes the claw. And away they go.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Welcome To The Death Factory
THE CAB SITS double-parked outside the hotel.
Frank raps on the Plexiglas divider separating the front and back seats. He opens the little drawer and yells through it to give his voice some volume.
“Hey! Cason. The hell are you doing up there?”
Tundu turns up the radio: classic rock, Led Zeppelin’s Whole Lotta Love. Then he changes the speaker balance so it plays louder in back, quieter up front.
“I no like this guy, man,” Tundu says, indicating the backseat with a dismissive jerk of his thumb.
“Is it because he looks like someone threw him in a wood chipper?”
“No!” Tundu’s face scrunches up. “Well. A little. But he has shifty eyes!”
“Anybody without eyelids ends up having shifty eyes.”
“I do not trust him. Something else is... off. Like a smell in the refrigerator, you know? You look and look but cannot find it until later and you one day see a tiny little nugget of spoiled food making a very bad, very big smell. That’s him.”
“He’s a nugget of spoiled food?”
“Right, man. Right.”
“He’s... okay. Frank’s been through some stuff.”
“You vouch?”
“I vouch.”
Again the little drawer pops. Frank’s voice: “We gonna go or what?”
Tundu drums prodigious fingers on the steering wheel.
Finally, he asks: “Where to, Mister Ugly?”
Frank grins a devil’s grin and gives him the address.
“WELCOME TO THE death factory,” Frank hisses, sweeping his arms across a derelict factory—a block-long complex of soot-black buildings and smoke stacks all ringed in a circumference of warped chain-link fence. Everything is broken windows, rusted pipes, and very long shadows.
They’re not far from the river. The road—Unruh—dead-ends here, with the waters of the Delaware just behind. A red light blinks and bobs out on the water.
Frank had Tundu drive 95 north, to Frankford Avenue, then into Tacony. Not a part of town Cason knows well. Like everywhere else, it’s a depressed area—the mighty thumb of economic erosion pushing down hard on the blue collar neighborhood. As they drove, it was hard not to see the many yellow Sheriff Sale signs on doorways—the symbols of a foreclosed home.
Frank had Tundu drive down toward the river. Past an all-nude strip club.
Then past a graveyard. A big one, too—big as a city block. None of the antiquity or historical value of some of the cemeteries toward the Philly center; just a flat plain of scrubby grass, row upon row of unexceptional headstones. A graveyard of the common man. No founding fathers here. Just cops and plumbers and shopkeepers.
They drove past the graveyard and then—
There, the factory complex.
Longshore Wire Company.
Shut up and closed off for a long time.
“What the hell is this place, chief?” Tundu asks. “Why must we come here?”
Frank holds up a finger. “All will be revealed, my giant cab-driving friend.”
“We are not friends.”
“That hurts my feelings. I was just about to order you one of those bouquets where instead of flowers, it’s all those little pieces of fruit. So yummy.”
Tundu’s about to say something else, but Cason steps in, pulls Frank aside.
“What’s your game, here? T.’s not involved in any of this and wouldn’t believe it if he was.”
“Why not tell him? Hell, we can show him.”
“Like you showed me?”
“It worked, didn’t it? Listen, Case-a-dillas. I said the ants weigh more than the elephants and I meant it. And your cabbie friend over there is a very big ant. Let h
im decide what he wants to believe.” Frank pauses. “Oh, I get it. You’re afraid he won’t be your buddy anymore, that it? Listen. Come out of the closet. Put your balls on the table and slap them like bongos. Guy deserves to know what kind of crazy whackaloon shit you’re up to, just in case the cops come to knock on his door and ask him questions about you.”
“Not a fan of plausible deniability, are you?”
“Not so much, no.”
Cason leans in close. “Just keep the... gods and magic bullshit out of it, okay? I don’t care how. Just do it.”
Another demon smile from Frank.
He wanders back to Tundu. Sweeping his arms in a showman’s gesture, he says, “Welcome to the site of one of America’s first mass murders.”
“Ah, man,” Tundu says, shaking his head.
Frank continues. “Fella worked here by the name of Theodore Stapleton. Teddy. Oh, by the way, this is the late 1940s we’re talking, here. Old Teddy, he was a vet of World War II, but not a soldier—he was a, I dunno, a typist or something. And that’s what he did here. He typed. Kept books. He didn’t work the line. Didn’t make the wire, test the wire, fix the machines, none of that. White collar job in a blue collar environment.”
“Just get to the part where he kills people,” Cason says. “It’s late. Or early.”
“Not a fan of stories, are you?” Frank asks, following up with a quick wink.
Cason frowns, and mocks Frank: “Not so much, no.”
“Fine. Teddy was gay. Or people said he was gay, I dunno. Guys on the floor made fun of him night and day, merciless bullying. Called him names, played pranks, whatever. And this was an everyday thing. For Teddy to get to his desk, he had to cross the factory floor—the longest walk of poor Teddy’s life, I bet. Well, Teddy may not have been in the shit during the war, but he still had a few keepsakes. Like, say, a P38 pistol reclaimed from a factory in Spreewerke. Sides all pitted like acne scars from the explosion. Never used to kill a man—but looking like it’d been though hell, right? So Teddy takes this pistol. Loads it up with 9mm ammo. And goes to work one day; but he doesn’t head upstairs, and instead just marches down the line and starts shooting.” Frank mimics the movement, taking measured steps—one, two, three—then fake-shooting with a finger pistol. “Bang. Bang. Bang. Seventeen men dead. Another six wounded. First official mass murder in American history.” Frank lowers his voice: “Not counting those on behalf of our own government, of course.”