Zephyr I

by Warren Hately

  “This is fucking ridiculous, Twilight,” I gasp at last.

  “You’re telling me.” He motions mock-serenely at the damage. “Is all this really necessary?”

  “I think you need to remind yourself about why I’m angry.”

  I manage to say this with a barely-suppressed rage that seethes through my gritted teeth like venom.

  “What, the Cusp thing?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Jesus, Zephyr. You’re hot. Who cares? You know that.”

  “I spend all this time introspecting on whether I’m the gay one in this relationship and then it turns out you’ve been, what . . . possessing this poor dumb Holland chick and using her to . . . fuck me?”

  “I don’t see what’s gay about that,” Twilight replies with a straight face. “Like you say, Holland’s a chick. A hot one at that. I really only fancy you when I’m her, if that makes you feel any safer, Zeph.”

  He says that last line sarcastically, as if I need it explained to me, poor little me with my ass against the wall because of the big bad pervert.

  “Twilight, did I give you permission to cast me in your own little version of Being John fucking Malkovich or something?” I try not to bawl the next line, but fail miserably. “That was you in there! You, Twilight! You, in the driver’s seat.”

  “I don’t think that makes me gay. I was a chick.”

  “You’re missing the point.”

  “No, maybe you are,” he replies. “It’s a bit of harmless fun.”

  “You’re my friend, you clown.”

  “You need to get some perspective on this, pal. You should spend some time as a disincarnated soul, like I have, Zephyr. It might do you a world of good.”

  “I’m not even going to ask what that is,” I say.

  “It’s the form we exist in within the afterlife,” he casually replies. “Sexless, genderless, without a past, no memories. . . .”

  “That doesn’t stop what you did,” I tell him. “You . . . violated me.”

  “Sheesh, Zeph.” The big guy makes a pained face. “Save it for Oprah.”

  While I am tempted to agree – the strength of my own revulsion raises questions about my tolerance I never thought I’d face, let alone wondering where the depth of feeling I might be unconsciously tapping into at this moment actually comes from – on a whole other level this is a pretty clear-cut instance for me being right and the pervert millionaire in the tattered bathrobe being wrong.

  My natural inclinations kick back in and I growl, the whole electrical thing flooding out of me like a mini-stormfront, the irony, this shitty reversal, our dying friendship tasting like sewage in my mouth. I clench my fists and fly right at Twilight, fists blazing, accelerating so hard in the tight space that he can’t do much more than express his surprise as I cross his jaw and pile into him. We go straight down the center of the room this time and into the painted oak door in the middle of the far wall, into a hallway, smashing through the plaster and boards, the dry wall, a layer of bricks, topple over a heavy stainless steel twin-door refrigerator and an ethnic woman in a 1960s-style cook’s livery, and continue on through forty pounds of kitchenware and about seven thousand dollars of artisan carpentry before hitting a tiled wall with a supporting steel beam. We rebound, Twilight’s arms around me now like he never dared before, anger turning the erotics pale, my elbow under his weeping chin, our foreheads colliding, his knee in my thigh and my hand, the only one really free, karate-chopping at the side of his neck that may as well be made of oak itself, and me a greased-up, naked lumberjack for all the good it does me.

  If Twilight wanted to force me over and ride me around the room at this point, he probably could, but I believe him when he suggests his attraction is somehow only a function or an extension of whatever kink he derives from astral possession of the poor dumb woman I can hear somewhere close by screaming her box off as Twilight flings me free. And as I fly, agile as a fucking mannequin, I carom off another wall, yet another steel girder concealed within, and pinball into and then through the servants’ door to the formal dining room on the other side. Twenty years ago if I’d woken up, shaking to clear my head beneath a three-hundred-year-old chestnut dining table inside some squillionaire’s manor, I’d have probably shouted “Awesome” in my best Bill and Ted voice and looked around for one of my buddies to high-five.

  But this is a very different scenario.

  *

  WITH MINUTE GROGGINESS, I clamber to my feet, dazed enough for a moment to stand there running my fingertips over the smooth grain of the deeply oiled wood.

  The moment Twilight’s shadow appears in the ruined doorway, I grasp the furniture with two hands and sling it sideways toward him, though it busts into a thousand pieces either side of the gaping entrance rather than crashing into Twilight himself. Seeing the ancient table destroyed sends the big man into a fit of pique the likes the world has never seen, and he throws himself at me, all reticence gone, and those big bare mitts come down on my leather costume like the Harpies of Greek legend, hauling me from the floor and tossing me with embarrassing helplessness across the room and through a double-glazed window. Just like that, I am out of the house, the sound of footsteps running down paths in the dark barely audible over the thumping pulse in my head, and I hardly look as I turn and send a crackling wave of compressed air pressure behind me, at moments of heightened awareness like these practically able to read my surroundings through super-sense and air displacement alone, the Uzi-toting guards just interruptions of blankness in the expanding waves of barometric sensitivity all around me.

  Twilight comes through the window ready to repeat his trick, but I roll aside, getting in a karate kick at his ribs that hurls him across the virginal lawn, and after collecting a statue of a nymph doing something unsightly, he comes down hard on the stone edge of a decorative pool and topples into the murky water. I follow his progress with hardened eyes, and sensing vulnerability, unleash crackling hell on him and his watery surrounds. Twilight lights up like a Christmas tree and does the whole Lion King thing, arms in the air as his blonde wig stands on end and he fades slowly back into the water as his own harsh cries cease.

  He disappears beneath the lily pads riled by the wavelets of his own demise. I exhale hoarsely, bent double with my hands on my thighs, my hands smoking and my left sleeve pretty much gone, aware but incoherent to the sound of more of Twilight’s goons moving in. Only at the last moment do I manage to crouch slightly and expel myself up, just as the harsh language of automatic gunfire punctuates the night, one of the fools mowing down a colleague just as stupid as to present himself on the other side.

  I swoop around, collect two of them like a giant bat sweeping out of the dark, and by the time I’ve turned back from the cliff’s edge and the nearby ocean, I see Holland running like a woodland nymph around the side of the mansion and toward the slurping-edged pond where Twilight, completely naked now – him and her almost a matching pair, but for her towel – hauls himself weakly up onto the edge of the masonry.

  I alight on the lanced turf where I stood before, figuring I had such success last time perhaps it’s a lucky patch. Twilight looks like he’s been eat-up and shat out by one of those weird star gods he seems to think so highly of, though its ordinary run-of-the-mill and innocent pond scum clinging to his ardent musculature and not the mucus of some cosmic entity for a change. Holland kneels at his brawny shoulder like she can help, shooting me displeasured looks mixed with equal parts clandestine panic and confusion. I can’t help grunting my amusement, but my tongue is a balled-up pair of socks in my mouth, and the words, the anger, the poisoning of her against him, whatever it is, it just won’t come.

  “You fucking . . . Nancy,” I gasp.

  “What are you doing this for?” the woman who I knew as Cusp yells at me.

  Tears slide down her cheeks, but I’m sensitive to her confusion, the doe-ish look in her eyes, the doubt, and what might even be the submerged unconscious memory of the time s
he took me in her mouth while another mind kept her repressed within the cavern of her own thoughts.

  I shake my head. Twilight gives one more baleful look and then struggles free the rest of the way and steps a few paces from Holland and the pool and actually coughs, almost retches more like it, and then looks again at me more like a man who sees a nuisance than one who has just trounced him on home ground.

  And that’s the moment when I realize I’m really in trouble.

  When he starts to speak, I don’t immediately recognize the ancient language of his addled sorcery coming out of him. My ear strains and my mind wants to make sense of it, which is the only excuse I can offer to explain why I stand there like a punch-drunk tequila-swigging hooker and let him get into his whole magic act. At about the point where the manifesting syllables start popping and sizzling in the air like retarded fireworks, the sorcerous glyphs hissing into oblivion as fast as they ever existed, the earth starts to lurch and I’m not as heavily surprised as I might be when the lawn lifts up as the broad, impossibly fucking wide shoulders of some sleeping goliath of the ancient order Twilight has just unshackled from a centuries-long dream.

  And it must’ve been a good dream, because he looks plenty angry.

  Zephyr 3.3 “The Earth That One Day Must Entomb Us All”

  I THINK THE metaphor “wall of earth” probably gets overused a bit in this memoir, but here I go again because I’m screwed if I can think of any other way to describe how the world just blanks out like an enormous etch-a-sketch as the avalanche of the demon’s fist collides into me, not so much actually striking me as just forcing me along at incredible speed into the wall of the house.

  Now, I’m tough. I’ve said that before, or intimated as much. I have a super-charged metabolism, incredible density to my bones, and I know from past experience that the bottom teeth I am soon to spit out will regrow over the course of the next month if I just let them, provided I live that long. However, a collision with quarried sandstone a good yard-and-a-half thick is more than even I can handle. If the fucking thing gave way I might’ve had a chance, but instead I’m all broken ribs and tooth decay as I crumple in the wake of the beast’s withdrawal, the grains of pulverized stone clattering around me as I drop onto the ornamental flagstones bordering the house. Of course, I attempt to right myself. I catch a glimpse of Twilight easing himself into another dressing gown as his surviving flunkies rally around, the green-haired, half-naked lass in their midst with her pretty eyes bulging out at the sight of such maleficent sorcery unveiled seemingly an oversight. Then the elemental – think of it as a giant faceless ape about yay big and yay wide, a rug of inch-high green grass across its shoulders and back rather than silver streaks, and you have half the picture – it grasps me with both its crunching, pebble-filled paws and rams me back into the concavity I’ve just made.

  This time the wall gives. I roll away. Almost lazily, the pain’s so intense. The heavy blocks slip apart from higher up and threaten to tumble down on me. Twilight’s creature isn’t so lucky, though any hope I have that such a simple consequence might do more than just slow him down proves short-lived. It seems to shrug off the tons-heavy stone like a child inconvenienced by a tangle of wool, the weak electrical sting I manage to give it likewise utterly ineffectual.

  Getting the hell out of there seems to be a pretty sound strategy. I have no idea if it’s now Twilight’s intention to kill me for this ultimate insult, though I recall a line I read somewhere that had a lot of resonance, saying most people would rather commit murder in their own home than face disrespect. I imagine that’s how our city’s favorite anti-hero lawman feels right now, so I stumble back through the cavernous dining room, overturning the display cases like they might somehow slow the thing as it lurches inexpertly in through the chasm it’s made in the side of its conjurer’s house. I’m rebounding off the walls in my haste to get back through the shortcuts I’ve created in what’s otherwise a maze within the house, and on the other side of the kitchen I slip on whatever putrid messes have escaped the tumbled refrigerator and I’m just about to dive through the gap made earlier when suddenly Twilight’s monster, dropping bits of lawn and clods of dirt and leaving a black trail back through the house that – even with me being dragged backwards and clawing at the tiles – I can’t help wonder how the fuck they are going to clean, and then the thing lifts me up by my ankle and swings me around in the confined space.

  I collect the scullery cupboard with my head and momentarily black out. It’s like the joke from that old British TV show where the hippie wakes up from a dream of skinheads bashing him to realize he’s just fallen asleep on the toilet, only to then wake up realizing the reprieve was the dream. I couldn’t tell you what stupid fantasy I have for those three-odd seconds, but I am screaming like a gutted fish when I come to amid a whorl of plaster and cutlery and shattered glass and kettles and frying pans and electric beaters and cake ingredients. It’s only by electrocuting my own foot and basically vaporizing a few pounds of solid earth that I manage to get free, released like from a Herculean discus throw to go careening off yet another kitchen wall and tumble to a standstill huddled like an advert for abuse survivors in the corner of the room. With surprisingly little hesitation, I scuttle through what passes for the creature’s legs and jet on into my host’s entertainment quarters, tripping over debris and slipping on fallen books and quite accurately named DVD slipcases in my transit.

  Barely thinking as I continue on into the room, I whirl and see the thing on my tail, the damage and inevitable erosion destroying any semblance it once had to a giant humanoid, and now just a diseased, decaying, terrifying embodiment of mulch and entropy, a living slab of the earth that must one day entomb us all, an incarnation of that soil come to claim me for its own. I’ll have nightmares about this for frigging weeks, but as Johnny-on-the-spot I barely hesitate in grabbing the shiny bauble I glimpsed hours, weeks, years previous, and turn and hurl it straight at the bowel-watering abomination.

  On reflex, if you can call it that from a ten-foot compost golem, the creature bats one giant mangled paw at the crystal ball as it flies across the room. The object promptly shatters. A golden swirl of gaseous matter erupts from the collision and pretty much instantly vanishes. I turn back, something that doesn’t quite yet register as a coherent thought driving my instincts, like my fingers have received the message before my brain, and they fix around the metallic artefact and my tongue gets in on the act and I’m turning, feet still fairly pointed in completely the wrong direction as I heft Twilight’s troublesome red lens up and bawl the same words I heard him chant once earlier, or close enough it seems, something about get-you-the-hell-outta-here, the words imparted in my brain like only magick can, because my earthy friend starts emitting a terrific, high-pitched whistling noise that is three parts shit-straining horror, wild disbelief and complete and starkly total comprehension as the lightest and weakest grains of its body start emigrating to the land of their forefathers via a very unique shortcut. If I wasn’t nursing so many injuries I might even be indebted to my old pal Twilight, though at the moment I would settle for seeing the dawn – along with my wife and daughter again – as I hold up the ensorcelled amulet and kind of avert my eyes from the whipping black sandstorm that ensues as the demon demanifests itself through the tiny narrow aperture Twilight created.

  For a long while it’s all shrill screaming, howling winds and raining grime, with perhaps my own chattering teeth and unconscious mewling thrown in for good measure. Then the wind drops like a switch was flicked and I look up to see Twilight having the inelegance to limp into the room with a wild-eyed and furious look on his face.

  “What the fuck have you done?”

  “Given your creature . . . a taste of its own medicine,” I manage back.

  Twilight scans around, only briefly taking in the amulet in my clawed grasp.

  “Where’s the stone?”

  “Huh?”

  He clicks his fingers and points to the
despoiled shelves where the milk-white pearl of the crystal ball once sat.

  “That wasn’t a stone.”

  “Yes it was,” he says.

  “Uh-uh,” I reply. “It broke like a motherfucker.”

  Twilight’s voice is strained. “You . . . broke . . . it?”

  “I fed it to your pal there.”

  I motion, though of course there’s nothing left of the gruesome creation except a hefty dark patch on the rug. I imagine multi-millionaires like Twilight keep pretty groovy vacuum cleaners. Should be enough. I’m not sure why I was worried.

  “That was my . . . heart-stone, Zephyr.”

  “Jeez,” I shrug. “I hope I haven’t like killed you or anything, pal.”

  “No.” Twilight shakes his head slowly. “No, you’ve probably just killed yourself.”

  It’s at about this moment – the same moment enormous horns begin curling out of Twilight’s forehead and he lets out a scream like a monster in childbirth – that I look down at my palm and realize the swirling red-filled amulet is sizzling white-hot upon in the palm of my hand.

  I immediately drop the thing on the carpet, but it’s taken on a life of its own, the heat warping and distorting and erupting in weird liquid molten blotches I soon realize are more than just expanding metals.

  It’s an eruption of space-time – and I get about three-feet clear before it blows.

  *

  I’M NOT EXACTLY sure what follows is real. I’ve been in a lot of crazy situations in my life, not all of them thanks to my adventures as Zephyr, but yeah, mostly, and I think maybe this one takes the cake.

  I am not sure what has happened with Twilight. He’s screaming, roaring somewhere close by, but everything for the moment is in merciful darkness. I say merciful because, when the darkness fades, a nightmare is revealed.

  To be precise, it’s my nightmare.

  My costume is in strips. Shards of exploded stone are embedded in my arms and up my sides. Something wet, scaled and slithery has my arms twisted above my head, but such is my exhaustion and disorientation it’s a while before I’ll even come to question how and why I got here.